Law students respond to the habeas petition surge in Minnesota

University of Minnesota Law School students are contributing their legal skills to help the community deal with the influx of habeas corpus petitions.

As the legal challenges to a huge influx of immigrant detentions have flooded the state’s system, University of Minnesota Law School students are volunteering to help Twin Cities attorneys manage the work. 

The state of Minnesota has seen a huge increase in the number of immigration habeas corpus petitions, which people file after being detained to contest their detention. In 2024, roughly 200 such petitions were filed nationwide. During the first six weeks of this year, Minnesota alone filed nearly five times that many cases. 

Wendy Gonzalez-Lazaro is a third-year law student who has been working in immigration law since the summer of 2024. There hasn’t been a single week since Operation Metro Surge began during which she hasn’t seen one of her clients detained, which she says is a drastic change from the work she was doing just one year ago, when hardly anyone was detained. 

“There’s been a lot of situations where they’re just kidnapping people to say ‘look at how many people we have detained,’” Gonzalez-Lazaro said. “But in reality, they’re either sending them back to the state where they kidnapped them from or keeping them locked up for no reason because they weren’t supposed to detain them in the first place.”

Teresa Padron, a second-year law student and president of the university’s student chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, said she’s been lending legal assistance to those affected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the Twin Cities Habeas Collective, which is a mass volunteer force for conducting intakes and drafting habeas petitions organized by chapter.

“Right now, I’m doing a ton of stuff outside of school because I’m really uniquely positioned to be able to provide some of those legal services to the degree that I can, while not being an attorney who can practice,” Padron said. 

Third-year law student Alex Mysler said he, too, has been using his experience in immigration law to volunteer with the collective. He said that his work involves various tasks, including conducting intakes, drafting habeas petitions, tracking the progress of cases and maintaining contact with families of people detained by ICE.  

Mysler described the situation for immigrants making appeals as dire. The collective recently turned families away due to their overwhelming caseload and urged them to seek legal counsel elsewhere.

Another complication for detainees comes from people presenting themselves as lawyers and scamming families out of thousands of dollars, Mysler said. To assist families, the collective has compiled a list of trusted lawyers in Minnesota and Texas. 

“You have to ask yourself how crazy it is that on a whim, the government for two months can kidnap thousands of people off the street and basically ruin a huge portion of their lives,” Mysler said. “Because the trauma that results from this, the economic devastation that comes from it, is horrifying.”    

Gonzalez-Lazaro said there have been times when she’s been sitting in class, wondering why she should learn the law when, at the end of the day, the government can choose to ignore it. While working for an attorney who practices immigration law, she’s seen judges fail to follow the asylum laws she was taught.

“It’s been one of those situations where I’m learning all these things, but realistically speaking, how are they actually going to be upheld by the time that I’m out there doing the work?” Gonzalez-Lazaro said.