Each year I bring students to county jails across Minnesota to conduct intake interviews with people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Because Minnesota has no federal or private immigration detention centers, ICE relies exclusively on county jails to hold those it detains.

The trips take all day; the drive alone takes two hours, and we have to work around jail lockdown times. We make these visits as part of the “Minnesota Detention Project,” a collaboration with local immigration nonprofits that identifies those who are detained and need legal consultations.

Having law students interview detainees serves a pedagogical purpose. Students learn how to build rapport, how to ask questions efficiently but empathetically, and how to listen for legally relevant facts. For example, the manner of entry into the United States can be enormously important in determining a person’s legal fate, so students need to learn about different types of visas, what “parole” means, and what counts legally as “admission.”

Intakes are what lets a lawyer separate the signal from the noise. Learning the details of a person’s history, not only of how they arrived in the United States, but of their family, their employment and their hardships are­­—or were—necessary to give information, provide context and let them know what options are available to them.

Immigration law is complicated—exceedingly technical, reliant on counterintuitive concepts, and deeply dependent on individualized discretion, whether exercised by a consular official, a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer, an ICE agent, or an immigration judge. Whether a person is deportable often turns on details such as birthdates, relationships to U.S. citizens, or the location that a person was arrested or encountered. Similarly, whether they are forced to undergo the deportation process while incarcerated or free can also depend on age, whether they have financial means, or whether or not they lived with family or lived alone. Although immigration judges are tasked with answering two simple questions when considering bond—whether a person is a flight risk or are a danger to the community—those questions hide a vast array of narratives and interpretations.

Law students are not just learning the law but are often also learning what it means to be an authority, a counselor and a guide for other people. I’ve often thought about how some people think of lawyers like a mechanic. Give a lawyer a problem and they will fix it for you. Similarly, law students, especially those drawn to public interest, want to help; they want to be the problem-solver.

Most years after an intake visit, students are struck by how confusing the law could be, how long interviews would take and the sheer amount of information that they were asked to collect.

By the fall of 2025, when my students and I arrived at the Kandiyohi County Jail to conduct intakes, the immigration landscape was undergoing a radical transformation. A planeful of Venezuelans were sent to the notorious mega-prison CECOT in El Salvador. International students were detained and ordered deported based on their views on Palestine. Videos and photographs of ICE agents tackling and arresting people who showed up for their immigration court hearings were shared widely. Well before the murders of protestors by CBP agents in our streets, the new face of immigration enforcement was becoming clear, and it involved public spectacle and violence.

Our job though was the same—we were going explain to those who were detained what they could expect when they arrived at court and whether they could be freed. Their problem was detention, and our job was to explain whether that problem was fixable.

Unfortunately, right before our visit, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued Matter of Yajure Hurtado, which categorized anyone entering the United States without status to be “mandatorily detained.”  Entire swaths of people without any criminal history were no longer eligible for release, regardless of how long they lived in the United States, whether they had DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) or other legal protections from removal, or whether they were pregnant or victims of crimes. Freedom suddenly became the exception rather than the rule.

After this last visit, the students made new observations. We had come in prepared to discuss factual nuances and circumstances and yet suddenly only one answer would emerge over and over. Information about family, medical history, age, length of time in the United States, and fear of return all seemed irrelevant. Over and over, the most repeated answer to the most common question was, “You likely can’t bond out. You will remain detained.”  Individual lives, narratives, and journeys were reduced to a single outcome- detention followed by likely deportation. If they wanted to keep trying to stay in the United States, they would have to endure weeks, perhaps months, of life inside a jail cell and the result would be at best uncertain. A legal system that had long claimed to care about nuance, narrative, and detail suddenly stopped listening.

But that was not the end of the story. Even as the immigration courts became a locked door, the intervening months after Operation Metro Surge brought some hope that stories still mattered. Where immigration judges were transformed into “deportation judges,” federal district judges began to listen. In 1996, Congress tried to close the federal courts to immigrants, and they largely succeeded, but in January and February of 2026, the power of the Great Writ began to pry those doors open. The stories and narratives told in habeas corpus petitions were convincing federal judges that detention was cruel, unnecessary and often illegal and unconstitutional. In a remarkable opinion, a federal judge ended his opinion with a picture of a little boy in a hat and a bible verse. There is no happy ending yet; that same little boy in a hat still faces deportation with his family and is still traumatized by his time inside a cell. To temper justice with mercy, the law must be willing to accept the full breadth of human experience—and lawyers bear the responsibility of carrying their clients' stories into a system that resists hearing them.