Preliminary injunction granted against immigration arrests under 8 U.S.C. § 1159(a) because they violate the Fourth Amendment. U.H.A. v. Bondi, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 40545 (D. Minn. Feb. 27, 2026)*:
When the clock strikes 12:00 a.m. on the 366th day after a refugee was lawfully admitted to the United States, according to the Government, 8 U.S.C. § 1159(a) gives Department of Homeland Security officials the power to arrest and detain that refugee with no limits on the length of detention. Because § 1159(a) provides no such power, the Court will issue a preliminary injunction enjoining Defendants from arresting or detaining refugees in Minnesota on the basis that have not yet been adjusted to lawful permanent resident status—which, by law, cannot occur until one year has passed. The Court will not allow federal authorities to use a new and erroneous statutory interpretation to terrorize refugees who immigrated to this country under the promise that they would be welcomed and allowed to live in peace, far from the persecution they fled.
The Government contends that § 1159(a) provides them with arrest-and-detention power and that such power is necessary to prevent refugees from skipping town before they have been adjusted to lawful permanent resident status. The Government’s position flatly contradicts the plain meaning of § 1159(a) and contravenes forty-five years of agency practice. Section 1159(a) did not give the Government this authority when Congress passed this provision in 1980, and it does not give the Government the authority to do so now.
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D. Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures ….” U.S. Const. amend. IV. The Fourth Amendment’s “basic purpose … is to safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by governmental officials.” Camara v. Mun. Ct. of City & Cnty. of San Francisco, 387 U.S. 523, 528 (1967). After experiencing firsthand a government that policed its subjects without due respect for their individual liberties, “[t]he Founding generation crafted the Fourth Amendment as a response to the reviled general warrants and writs of assistance of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity.” Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 303 (2018) (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, 403 (2014). The protections of the Fourth Amendment apply to arrests of noncitizens. See United States v. Quintana, 623 F.3d 1237, 1239 (8th Cir. 2010); cf. United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 884 (1975) (“For the same reasons that the Fourth Amendment forbids stopping vehicles at random to inquire if they are carrying aliens who are illegally in the country, it also forbids stopping or detaining persons for questioning about their citizenship on less than a reasonable suspicion that they may be aliens.”).Plaintiffs argue that Defendants’ arrest and detention of refugees in reliance on § 1159—specifically, without a warrant or probable cause tied to a specific offense— violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures. Plaintiffs are likely to prevail on their Fourth Amendment claim for two key reasons.
First, for many of the same reasons outlined above, the Court concludes that the plain text of § 1159 creates no offense which unadjusted refugees have committed such that their arrest could be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Plaintiffs persuasively argue that the vague language of § 1159 stands in contrast with other statutes through which Congress has granted immigration officials the power to make warrantless arrests. For example, 8 U.S.C. § 1357 expressly states that noncitizens can be arrested without a warrant if the immigration official has “reason to believe” that the noncitizen is “in the United States in violation of any such law or regulation [regulating the admission, exclusion, expulsion, or removal of aliens],” if they are also “likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.” See also Quintana, 623 F.3d at 1239 (“The Attorney General’s regulations implementing 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a) carefully distinguish between warrantless arrests for the purpose of commencing civil deportation proceedings, and warrantless arrests for criminal violations of the immigration laws[.]”). Section 1159, on the other hand, does not establish or reference any misconduct or offense which unadjusted refugees have committed that could give rise to any reasonable exercise of the Executive’s arrest power. Importantly, refugees—who have been vetted and admitted to the country—commit no crime or removable offense in failing to obtain a green card one day after they become eligible to do so; nor do they lose their status as lawfully admitted to the United States.
“No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded, by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law.” Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 9 (1968) (quoting Union Pac. R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891)). Because § 1159 itself does not create any independent offense, criminal or civil, justifying Plaintiffs’ arrest, and does not reference any other statute that does so, the arrest of a refugee under § 1159 based solely on the fact that they have not yet been adjusted to LPR status is inconsistent with not only the statute itself, but with the refugee’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures.
Second, even if the Court were to construe § 1159 to permit arrest and detention of some kind, the record before the Court provides no evidence that Defendants’ warrantless arrests of refugees in furtherance of Operation PARRIS have been based upon individualized probable cause inquiries. The “Fourth Amendment’s ultimate touchstone is ‘reasonableness,'” Brigham City, Utah v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398, 403 (2006), and generally, this requires an arrest to be supported by either a warrant or probable cause. See Terry, 392 U.S. at 20 (“[W]henever practicable,” the government must “obtain advance judicial approval of searches and seizures through the warrant procedure.”); Borgman v. Kedley, 646 F.3d 518, 522-23 (8th Cir. 2011) (“A warrantless arrest is consistent with the Fourth Amendment if it is supported by probable cause ….”). Indeed, where Congress has established federal authority to make warrantless immigration-related arrests, the Eighth Circuit has read the requirements of the Fourth Amendment into the statute and required that such arrests be supported by probable cause. Quintana, 623 F.3d at 1239 (“Because the Fourth Amendment applies to arrests of illegal aliens, the term ‘reason to believe’ in § 1357(a)(2) means constitutionally required probable cause.”). However, under Operation PARRIS, refugees in Minnesota have been arrested and flown across the country: (1) without the warrants presumptively required under the Fourth Amendment, and (2) seemingly without probable cause that the refugees have committed any offense, even under § 1159. Instead, Plaintiffs have presented evidence that arrests under Operation PARRIS may simply have been based on the fact that those detained were not citizens.30Link to the text of the note
Because the warrantless arrest of a refugee premised solely on their failure to adjust to LPR status violates that refugee’s right to be free from unreasonable seizures and because Defendants have failed to demonstrate that arrests carried out in furtherance of Operation PARRIS have been supported by probable cause, the Court concludes that the Fourth Amendment provides an additional basis to support Plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction of the Refugee Detention Policy.
