A familiar pattern developed during the federal government’s massive deportation operation in Minnesota: Despite showing documents proving active immigration cases, pending visas, or even US citizenship, residents were arrested and detained for days or weeks.

But many who were later set free are now encountering a new challenge: ICE isn’t giving back their immigration documents.

Again and again, according to 10 immigration lawyers interviewed for this story, immigrants in Minnesota have been released from detention centers without the work permits, Social Security cards, licenses, and other documents that prove their status.

“I can’t think of a client I’ve had detained that did not have their documents taken,” says Maria Miller, chair of the Minnesota and Dakotas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. She estimates that 35 of her clients have come out of detention with missing documents.

“It’s more the rule than the exception that people generally are not given their stuff back,” says Graham Ojala-Barbour, a Minneapolis immigration attorney. “As far as I can tell, it’s the practice of ICE to throw everybody’s documents into a black box and then lose it.”

But when an agent at the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE operations in Minneapolis are based, brought Isabel a plastic bag with her belongings, she opened her wallet to find that her work permit and state ID were missing. Also missing were two checks that she hadn’t yet cashed, worth more than $700, and her daughter’s US passport, which she’d brought to the immigration check-in. When she asked about the missing items, she was told they were probably left behind at one of the jails where Isabel was detained. She eventually got back the checks, but to date, ICE has not returned the other documents.

In the meantime, without her work permit and license, she feels even more vulnerable than she was before her arrest. “When I leave work or go to work, I’m shaking because I’m afraid that I’ll get arrested,” she says.

Federal law requires noncitizens to carry proof of their lawful status. “The government not returning these documents to folks is essentially forcing them to walk around without this document that the government itself says these folks are supposed to carry with them,” says Julia Decker, policy director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Recourse for these immigrants is limited. In some cases, like Isabel’s, judges have ordered the return of an immigrant’s documents, but the government hasn’t complied. (Last month, a federal judge in Minnesota found that ICE had defied nearly 100 court orders during its immigration crackdown.) Some lawyers have shown up to Whipple themselves, only to be told that there was nothing else to be returned. Some have suggested suing for damages or pursuing a class-action lawsuit.

But last week, Judge Laura Provinzino, of the Federal District Court in Minnesota, found a Trump administration lawyer in civil contempt of court for failing to return the identity documents of Rigoberto Soto Jimenez, a detained immigrant from Mexico. The judge ordered Soto Jimenez’s release in Minnesota with his property. Instead, he was released in Texas without his license, permit, or Mexican consular ID card. Provinzino imposed a $500 fine on the Justice Department attorney, Matthew Isihara, for each day that the documents weren’t returned. Isihara explained to the judge that his intention wasn’t to defy court orders. “We were doing our best and things, unfortunately, slipped—slipped through the cracks,” he said. (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

A day after the contempt finding, Soto Jimenez’s lawyer received an overnight FedEx package with the documents.

Provizino agreed not to impose the fines, since the documents had been returned, but warned that her patience was waning. “The refrain of ‘understaffing’ and ‘too many cases’ has worn out its welcome, particularly when it comes at the expense of individual rights,” she wrote in an order on Friday. “Since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge, the Government has offered that excuse to the Court again,² and again,³ and again⁴ (and to other judges in this district again,⁵ and again,⁶ and again,⁷ and again,⁸ and again,⁹ and again¹⁰) to excuse its oversights and disobedience of court orders in immigration habeas cases.” Each footnote listed a separate case.

Some documents, like driver’s licenses, can be quickly replaced. But replacing an original work permit, which employers use to verify the legal authorization of prospective employees, can take months and cost hundreds of dollars. As a result, some immigrants—particularly those who are applying for jobs, or who lost their jobs while they were in detention—could be out of a job for months even though they have legal authorization to work.

Plus, in December of last year, the same month that Operation Metro Surge started in Minnesota, the Department of Homeland Security reduced the maximum length of time that a work permit is valid for asylum seekers from five years to 18 months.

Isabel had planned to apply for part-time jobs to supplement her work at the factory, but she can no longer do so without her work permit, which is valid until 2029. If she doesn’t get it back, she will have to apply for another. She would wait for months for it to process, and her new work permit would expire much sooner. After everything she went through—being ambushed by five officers at her appointment, sleeping on the floor of Whipple, feeling pangs of hunger, worrying about her daughters—it’s this change that made her emotional when we spoke. “We give everything to work,” she says, “That’s why we came to this country. We don’t want to take anything from anybody. We don’t want to eat what’s not ours.”

It’s legal for ICE to take foreign passports and other documents of immigrants in removal proceedings; the agency is supposed to provide those immigrants with certified copies of the seized documents, according to a 2023 ICE policy memo. But the widespread seizure of documents from people who are not in removal proceedings is new, the lawyers say.

“If the government doesn’t have a right to your property,” says Jennifer Whitlock, senior policy counsel at National Immigration Law Center, “I think there’s a case to be made that this is a fraud issue within the government.” Many immigrants released from detention have reported their phones, keys, and other valuables have been taken, too. Whitlock has been encouraging them to report the missing items to the Government Accountability Office.

David Gans, a scholar at the Constitutional Accountability Center, says that taking immigration documents flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures “in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” “If you look at the constitution’s texts, its language is broad and sweeping, and it protects persons—whether they’re citizens or not,” he says.

It’s unclear if the immigration documents are being intentionally withheld or simply lost in a system overwhelmed by a record number of arrests. “I think the carelessness is intentional—either they lose them intentionally or it’s intentionally careless,” says Jennifer Scarborough, an immigration attorney who has two clients whose work permits and licenses were taken after they were released from detention. Scarborough says the problem echoed family separation during Trump’s first term, when there was no system put in place to reunite children with their families.

Regardless of intent, ICE withheld documents from immigrants with a wide range of temporary or permanent legal statuses. One man I spoke with, an Ecuadorian immigrant in his 40s who has a visa for victims of human trafficking, was released from detention in Minnesota without his work permit or Social Security card and told to make an appointment on a website to get his things back. He has yet to receive his documents; a federal judge recently ordered that DHS provide a reason for not returning them.

Another man, a 48-year-old father of five who has protection from deportation through his pending U-visa, for victims of crimes who cooperate with law enforcement, was released from Whipple with his belt, glasses, and wallet—but not his work permit, Social Security card, or consular card. Agents at Whipple told him that they didn’t know where his things were. He, too, has felt terrified to go outside. “Most of the time, we are locked inside our house,” he says.

Even refugees, who enter the country legally after thorough vetting abroad, are reporting having their documents taken. According to a federal class action lawsuit, some refugees were arrested in Minnesota, flown to detention centers in Texas, and eventually released onto the streets without their documents or any way of returning home.

Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, says ICE’s failure to return the documents that prove an immigrant’s legal status “just reiterates that this has never been about who’s in violation of the law and the rules—it’s always been an anti-immigrant agenda.”

The widespread arrests and confiscation of documents has led some lawyers to change their advice to their clients. Ana Pottratz Acosta, who leads the University of Minnesota Law School’s Immigration and Human Rights clinic, used to tell clients to make sure to carry their immigration documents with them. Now, she tells them not to leave the house. “Effectively, every time that somebody leaves their home,” she says, “they’re rolling the dice.”