https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/23/us-immigration-two-year-old-minnesota-girl
US immigration agents detain two-year-old Minnesota girl: ‘depravity beyond words’
DHS detain a toddler and her father on Thursday and fly them to Texas before returning child on judge’s order
Federal immigration agents detained a two-year-old girl and her father in Minneapolis on Thursday and transported them to Texas, according to court records and the family’s lawyers.
The father, identified in court filings as Elvis Joel TE, and his daughter were stopped and detained by officers around 1pm when they were returning home from the store. By the evening, a federal judge had ordered the girl be released by 9.30pm. But federal officials instead put both of them on a plane heading to a Texas detention center.
Irina Vaynerman, one of the family’s lawyers, told the Guardian late Friday afternoon that immigration officials had since flown both of them back to Minnesota and released the two-year-old into the custody of her mother. The father remains detained in Minnesota, she said.
“The horror is truly unimaginable,” Vaynerman said. “The depravity of all of this is beyond words.”
Court records and the attorney’s accounts paint a harrowing picture of the toddler and father’s detention and the frantic efforts that followed to get her released from custody and reunited with her mother. The detention came two days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained five-year-old Liam Ramos in Minnesota, in a case that has prompted international backlash and increased scrutiny of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown in the region.
As the father and daughter were arriving home on Thursday, agents entered their backyard and driveway area, Kira Kelley, one of the family’s lawyers, wrote in a filing. The officers did not have a warrant, the attorney said. One agent then allegedly broke the glass window of the father’s car while the girl was inside.
The mother was by the door and stepped inside the house as the agents approached, Kelley wrote. The agents refused to allow the father to bring his daughter to the mother or other family members “waiting terrified inside the home”.
The two-year-old and her father were then placed in an immigration agent’s vehicle, which Kelley wrote did not have a car seat.
Lawyers filed an emergency petition, first reported by the Minnesota Star Tribune, demanding that ICE release Elvis Joel TE and his daughter. A Minnesota-based federal judge issued an order around 8.10pm prohibiting the government from transferring them outside of Minnesota, and soon after issued a second order that the government immediately release the girl into the custody of Kelley, her attorney.
Kelley had obtained permission from the girl’s mother to be a temporary guardian “for the purpose of retrieving the infant from immigration detention”.
The federal judge said the release of the girl was necessary due to the “risk of irreparable harm”, saying it was highly likely the underlying petition would succeed on the merits.
“Needless to say, she has no criminal history,” the judge wrote, of the toddler.
But the government, the family’s lawyers wrote, placed the father and daughter on a flight to Texas around 8.30pm.
The father, originally from Ecuador, has a pending asylum application and no final order of removal, according to his attorneys. The girl, the lawyers wrote, has lived in Minneapolis “since her arrival in the United States as a newborn”.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to questions on Friday about why the father and daughter were taken to Texas and what steps the government took to comply with the judge’s order.
In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said border patrol had been conducting a “targeted enforcement operation” on Thursday when agents “identified” Elvis Joel TE. DHS called him an “illegal immigrant”, alleging he had unlawfully reentered the US and claiming he was “driving erratically with a child”.
DHS alleged that the father refused to open his door or lower his window and said agents “attempted to give the child to the mother who was in the area, but she refused”. “DHS law enforcement took care of the child who the mother would not take,” the statement said.
Vaynerman, the family’s lawyer, said the claim that the mother “refused” to take her daughter was false, saying agents would not let the father return his daughter to the home to be with her mother.
During the arrest, a crowd gathered outside, leading agents to deploy “crowd control measures”, DHS said. The Star Tribune said social media videos showed agents appearing to use chemical irritants and flash-bang devices.
DHS’s statement said the father and daughter were “reunited [at] a federal facility”, but did not acknowledge that she had since been returned to her mother. Spokespeople did not respond to additional questions about the lawyers’ accounts of the episode and the daughter’s return.
“This case is horrific … Anybody who is a parent or cares for young kids knows the fear that happens when a child is separated from their parent,” said Vaynerman, a civil rights lawyer and co-founder of Groundwork Legal, a Minnesota-based public interest law firm. “There is no way to know the long-term impact this will have on this little toddler.”
Vaynerman criticized DHS’s practice of quickly transferring people it detains out of state, saying the tactic is meant to move cases out of the jurisdiction of courts in Minnesota and made it harder for families to reach lawyers and fight their cases.
“This is creating terror in our city and state. It’s something I truly have never ever seen before to this extreme,” she said.
The family’s lawyers have urged the court to issue a broader order blocking the government from transferring individuals outside of Minnesota for at least seven days after they are given an opportunity to contact legal counsel, and bar out-of-state transfers for people with pending habeas petitions, meaning they have ongoing challenges to their detention.
“The lack of humanity at every step of this process of what the government has been doing and how they have been unlawfully detaining people, including toddlers and children, it’s truly unimaginable,” said Vaynerman. “And yet this is where we find ourselves. There has to be an end to this type of cruelty.”
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