Judge slams brakes on Trump's 'dystopian nightmare' to lock up refugees

A federal judge in Minnesota has blocked President Donald Trump's plan to arrest thousands of legal refugees for questioning and re-evaluation, calling the plan a "dystopian nightmare."

The order was first reported by Chris Geidner, who runs the Law Dork blog.

"In a pair of memos issued in December 2025 and February 2026 — which Law Dork has covered extensively — the Department of Homeland Security has purported to change that policy by rescinding and re-rescinding the 2010 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy that most recently enunciated that policy for applying the relevant provision — 8 U.S.C. 1159 — of the Refugee Act of 1980," wrote Geidner. The policy, known as Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), seeks to throw out the longstanding rule that legal refugees cannot be detained solely on the basis of their status.

The plaintiffs, noted the court order, identified one case of a refugee “arrested on January 11, 2026, without a warrant, transported to a detention center in Minnesota, then flown in shackles to Texas, where he was questioned about his refugee status.”

This change of policy is not supported by federal statute, wrote U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton.

“The Government’s startling theory — that the statute silently grants DHS the power to seize a refugee the moment the clock strikes midnight on the 366th day after admission — is wrong,“ concluded Tunheim. “This theory finds no support in the text, the history, or the purpose of § 1159(a)(1) and marks a sharp break from more than four decades of agency practice.”

Operation PARRIS is part of a massive change of policies designed to curtail the freedom of people born outside the United States to come and live there; the Trump administration has also ramped up mass deportation proceedings and huge surges of federal immigration agents to cities that protest him. A long string of courts have found the administration in violation of several laws.