MINNESOTA REFORMER: ‘I’m not giving up so easily’: After 4 months in detention, an asylum fight begins

Andrea Pedro-Francisco feels like part of her is still trapped in a nightmare — back in the crowded, windowless cell block of the Texas detention center she left weeks ago.

“My mind is halfway here, thinking ‘Yes, I’m back,’ but the other half feels like I’m still there,” said Pedro-Francisco, a migrant from Guatemala who was among thousands of people detained during the winter immigration crackdown in Minnesota.

Her account provides a rare glimpse into the Trump administration’s deportation machine, which currently holds more than 60,000 people in detention, about 70% of whom have no criminal convictions.

Few whose fate remains in limbo have shared their stories publicly, fearing reprisals from the federal government against themselves or their family. Others who vanished overnight from their communities have remained invisible to the outside world.

Pedro-Francisco’s experience was particularly hellish because she was dealing with a potentially life-threatening ovarian cyst while in custody, an ailment that drew the attention of members of Congress, who ultimately got her a temporary reprieve from deportation in June.

The likelihood that Pedro-Francisco would ever return to her family in Minnesota was vanishingly small. Immigrants without legal status seldom get out of detention under the Trump administration — unless to be deported.
Pedro-Francisco, 24, has a slight frame and long black hair. Speaking to the Reformer in Spanish from her second-floor apartment in Burnsville, her soft voice was at times drowned out by the lawnmower running outside.

She sat still on the sofa with her hands folded in her lap — moving still causes her pain. Her loose black pants barely hid a heavy ankle monitor.

Pedro-Francisco arrived in the United States in 2019 when she was 16 years old, presenting herself at the border with her mother to seek asylum. They traveled from Guatemala’s Western Highlands, a region long marked by poverty and violence against Indigenous people like them; Spanish is their second language after their native Mayan language.

They made their way to Minnesota with virtually nothing and took on significant debt throughout the journey, but quickly built a new life. They found jobs cleaning houses, moved into a small apartment in the suburbs and joined a church, where Pedro-Francisco sang in the choir and played the bass guitar. Her mother had two more children, a boy and a girl, in the United States.

When thousands of federal immigration agents arrived in Minnesota this winter, they tried to keep a low profile. But they couldn’t afford not to work.

On Feb. 5, at the height of Operation Metro Surge, Pedro-Francisco and her mother were stopped by immigration agents on their way to a job. The agents released her mother after she pleaded with them to let her return to her 5- and 1-year-old children who have no one else to care for them.

Pedro-Francisco, who was scheduled to have surgery for the cyst in less than a week, was taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, and then put on a plane to El Paso, Texas — before a lawyer could challenge her detention.

She was taken to Camp East Montana, a troubled tent prison at Fort Bliss where the federal government once held Japanese Americans detained during World War II.

It’s now a well-worn path for immigrants arrested in Minnesota. More than 2,300 of the roughly 3,500 people detained in Minnesota during three months of Operation Metro Surge were sent to Camp East Montana. Most were eventually deported, according to a Reformer analysis of data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

The detention center, the country’s largest, has been beset by reports of inhumane conditions since being hastily constructed last year to hold upwards of 5,000 people in five massive tents.

Pedro-Francisco was kept in a room with about 60 people except for about an hour a day, when they were chained together and taken outside.

“They chain us up as if we had committed a very serious crime,” Pedro-Francisco said in an interview with the Reformer while in detention in March. “They treat us like animals.”

Medical emergencies pervade ICE detention
Within days of Pedro-Francisco’s arrival, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis and COVID-19. Later that month came an outbreak of measles that led the facility to close to visitors and attorneys for weeks.

Detention is no place for the sick. Pedro-Francisco said she lost around 15 pounds because the food was inedible. The roof leaked when it rained. She froze at night under a thin blanket while lying on a hard mattress.

Within a couple of days she was taken to a hospital, where a doctor confirmed the cyst, yet declined to operate. While her doctor in Minnesota had prescribed opioids for the pain, Pedro-Francisco said she received only Tylenol and ibuprofen in ICE custody.

As the weeks passed and Pedro-Francisco grew sicker, her family and attorneys worried her life could be at risk. Large ovarian cysts can rupture, leading to deadly infections, or twist, cutting off blood supply to the ovary and causing infertility.

More than 50 immigrant detainees have died in federal custody since the beginning of Trump’s second term — a fifth of them suicides — according to an investigation by the Associated Press.

Three people died in Camp East Montana in a six-week period before Pedro-Francisco arrived.

One of Pedro-Francisco’s attorneys, Asra Syed — who was connected to her through the informal network of volunteer lawyers that sprang up during Operation Metro Surge — reached out to members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, seeking help.

Craig put in inquiries to the Department of Homeland Security, hoping to leverage her position to secure medical treatment, but she said she was ignored.

Instead of medical care, ICE offered Pedro-Francisco another solution: self-deportation. Every two or three days, she said, ICE officials entered their room to ask people to sign forms agreeing to voluntary removal.

Immigration attorneys and human rights advocates say ICE is intentionally making living conditions unbearable and withholding treatment to coerce people to voluntarily leave.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a federal lawsuit against ICE in May alleging that the conditions inside Camp East Montana amount to “unconstitutional punishment” with widespread medical neglect, physical and sexual abuse by officers, inadequate food and lack of access to attorneys.

ICE spokesperson Leticia Zamarripa, in response to requests for comment on Pedro-Francisco’s treatment, shared a statement boasting of the agency’s “comprehensive medical care.”

“This is the best health care that many individuals have received in their lives,” the statement said, a claim belied by Pedro-Francisco’s story as well as the government’s own assessments.

Pedro-Francisco was moved to the El Paso Processing Center in March, a low-slung tan stone building next to the airport. No one explained why she was moved, though she said it seemed like the sickest detainees were held there. The conditions were only marginally better.

Faith in freedom
During the months Pedro-Francisco spent locked up, she often turned to the Bible, finding her faith growing that God would help her.

She turned to Psalm 91:15, in which God promises protection to the faithful: “When he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him.”

She read and reread Acts 12, which tells of an angel freeing the disciple Peter from prison, throwing off his chains and leading him past the guards and iron gates.

Suddenly, Pedro-Francisco was herself freed.

It came weeks after her lawyers and advocates had exhausted seemingly every available avenue to free her.

A federal judge in Texas rejected Pedro-Francisco’s habeas corpus petition challenging the legality of her detention without bond. ICE rejected her request for humanitarian parole so she could receive surgery.

U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, who had seen news coverage of Pedro-Francisco’s case, first reported by the Reformer, called a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security. About a week later, on June 3, Pedro-Francisco was called for a meeting after dinner, and a detention official told her that they were letting her go. She thought he was joking.

“It was such a huge surprise,” Pedro-Francisco said. “I can’t even explain how I felt that day because I thought there was no hope — I’d been turned down so many times.”

When she got back to the housing unit, no one else could believe that she was being released that very day, not even the guard.

ICE strapped a monitor to her ankle and dropped her off at a shelter for migrants, Annunciation House, which has become a waypoint for immigrants arrested in Minnesota who are allowed to return home.

She spent two nights in the shelter and then flew back to Minnesota with a ticket paid for by a donor — four months to the day after she was arrested.

Pedro-Francisco underwent surgery to remove the cyst within days of returning to Minnesota.

During the operation, doctors found another mass they believe was caused by endometriosis — a condition in which uterine-like tissue grows outside the uterus, causing pelvic pain, sometimes leading to serious health complications.

She said she’s feeling better since the surgery, but still has pain and struggles to sit up for long periods. She hasn’t been able to pick up her bass guitar to play again.

Doctors want to wait to see how the condition progresses before deciding if another surgery is necessary.

By then, Pedro-Francisco could be in Guatemala.

Her asylum case has been transferred from Texas to Minnesota, and it’s unclear how soon an immigration judge will decide whether to grant her asylum, said her attorney Ruby Powers.

She faces the possibility — the likelihood, really — of deportation as she pleads for asylum before an increasingly restrictive immigration court system.

Unlike regular federal courts, immigration courts are part of the executive branch, and the Trump administration has reshaped them to pursue its goal of mass deportation.

Just 0.2% of asylum claims were granted in Minnesota in the first two months of the year, down from 13% in early 2024 before Trump took office, according to a Star Tribune analysis of data from Mobile Pathways.

Pedro-Francisco has been coming to terms with the prospect of being sent back to Guatemala — to the place where she says she no longer has a home. And yet, she’s keeping the faith that sustained her through detention.

“In my heart I’ve always felt like I still have to fight,” Pedro-Francisco said. “Come what may — good or bad — I accept it, but I’m not giving up so easily.”

She remains connected to the El Paso Processing Center through a woman she became close to there, who was also detained in Minnesota.

Pedro-Francisco talks to her on the phone and sends some money, though she has little to spare.

The donations that poured in for immigrants in Minnesota during the surge have largely dried up even as ICE ramps up its deportation goals.

“The people (in detention), it’s like they’re part of me now, because I know the situation now — I’ve gone through the same thing,” Pedro-Francisco said. “I’m here, but I’m always thinking about them.”