Minnesota Judge Orders Private Legal Calls for ICE Detainees (1)

A Minnesota federal ICE holding facility must provide noncitizens being detained with accurate instructions on contacting lawyers and their legal rights within an hour of arriving at the facility, and before they’re transferred out-of-state, a judge ordered Thursday.

Detainees must have access to private phone calls with lawyers free of charge, Judge Nancy Brasel of the US District Court for the District of Minnesota said, partially granting the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order. This order joins federal judges in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, who all made similar requirements of ICE holding facilities in their cities.

Policies and practices at Whipple “all but extinguish a detainee’s access to counsel,” Brasel said, finding the federal government likely violated detainees’ Fifth Amendment rights by shuffling detainees to facilities in other states quickly and without notice, and blocking their ability to speak with attorneys.

Her order, which will stay in effect until Feb. 26, also bars the federal government from moving detainees away from the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building during the first 72 hours of their detention.

“Defendants allocated substantial resources to sending thousands of agents to Minnesota, detaining thousands of people, and housing them in their facilities,” Brasel said. “Defendants cannot suddenly lack resources when it comes to protecting detainees’ constitutional rights.”

Crowded and Squalid

The Trump administration has made mandatory immigration detention a pillar of its efforts to deport noncitizens at a massive scale.

Immigration judges are clashing with federal district judges who have overwhelmingly found unsupported the administration’s position that all noncitizens arrested in the interior of the US are subject to mandatory detention. The conditions in these detentions are often crowded and squalid, causing some detainees to give up and self-deport, immigration lawyers say.

Attorneys who visited Whipple on Monday wrote in court declarations that detainees were sleeping on the floor with shackled ankles, as trash piled up.

Brasel highlighted a court declaration from a detainee identified as L.H.M., a single mother of three from Honduras who had brain surgery prior to being held at Whipple, and whose asylum application is pending. An officer slammed her head into a wall so hard that a doctor later told L.H.M. she likely had a concussion, Brasel said. Officers refused her pleas for medical attention to her head and surgical site.

“Without counsel, detainees—who are already in a vulnerable position—cannot effectively exercise their rights to challenge the constitutionality, legality, or conditions of their confinement,” Brasel said.

She also described the declaration of a 20-year-old refugee identified as J.J.B., who was packed alongside 100 people at a Whipple holding cell meant to fit 20. People slept in handcuffs standing up, and the room’s dirty toilet overflowed, the judge said. Calls from a detainee with epilepsy in J.J.B.'s cell for medication went unheeded.

J.J.B. only reached an attorney after begging for a phone call, and was released after signing a paper that said “OUT,” which he was told to sign without a lawyer, Brasel said.

The case is The Advocates for Human Rights v. US Department of Homeland Security, D. Minn., No. 0:26-cv-00749, 2/12/26.