Why a Bay Area Attorney Says Immigrants’ Rights Are Being Violated in Minneapolis

In late November, Bay Area criminal defense attorney James Cook began offering his legal services free of charge to residents of Minneapolis — the latest American city to be embroiled in the Trump administration’s escalating immigration crackdown and ensuing protests from residents opposed to sweeping enforcement operations.

His days often start before dawn, with an early morning text or call from distressed residents who report having seen their friends or family be taken away by masked agents.

“A lot of people have my information, that’s been texted far and wide throughout Minneapolis by protesters and ICE watchers and other people, and they send me the information,” Cook said.

Armed with a list of names of detained or missing residents, Cook will head to the local ICE detention facility to confirm whether those people are being held there and plan next steps to prevent their deportation and, if possible, win their release.

Cook, who grew up in Minneapolis and has homes there and in San Francisco, admitted that — in general — he hasn’t found much success. Of the hundreds of names he’s been given, he said he’s only successfully argued for somebody’s release from detention a couple of times.

“My thing has been to try to get a suspension or something so that the person can get proper counsel and do the nuanced work that needs to be done,” Cook said. “Just to stop it or delay it and since the efforts have really been ramped up, I haven’t been able to do any of it.”

The Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge has led to the arrival of as many as 2,000 federal officers operating in Minnesota, many in the Minneapolis area — with up to a thousand more on their way, according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. While some agents are from Customs and Border Patrol, the bulk of the presence is from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The operation, which the DHS called the largest in the agency’s history, has led to the arrests of more than 4,500 immigrants, according to the Minnesota Star-Tribune.

Residents like Cook have expressed their opposition to what they see as an incursion of hostile, anonymous and unaccountable agents and that opposition has only intensified since ICE agents killed Renee Good earlier this month and shot and wounded another person this week.

Cook, who has been on the ground, said he’s worried that the rights of those arrested are not being protected. “When they pluck people off the street for simply exercising their First Amendment rights, that’s a constitutional violation,” Cook said.

Cook said he also believes the rights of citizens monitoring or protesting federal officers are also being violated, pointing to examples of people detained seemingly without cause other than shouting at federal agents.

Cook is not an immigration attorney. His area of expertise is in criminal defense law and mostly in state courts, not federal.

“In criminal defense, you have one prime directive,” Cook said. “Your mission is to get people out of custody and … in doing so, make sure the government fully follows the Constitution.”

Cook works for Burris, Nisenbaum, Curry & Lacy, an Oakland-based law firm with a history of taking on high-profile cases of police or government misconduct. Partner John Burris represented Rodney King — whose videotaped beating at the hands of multiple Los Angeles police officers in 1991 sparked large-scale unrest in the city— and the family of Oscar Grant, an unarmed Black man killed by a BART police officer on New Year’s Day 2009.

It was partially that history, Cook said, that caused people in the Twin Cities to begin reaching out to him for help and compelled him to begin offering his services pro bono.

One major obstacle Cook said he’s facing is the fact that detainees are often transferred out of the state very quickly after they’re detained, often to facilities in Texas where they are prepared for deportation.

“By the time I get there, even if it’s just a few hours later, if they’re in El Paso or they’re on a plane on the way, I can’t do anything,” Cook said. “All I can do is give the family, you know, some of the referrals that I have in El Paso.”

Cook recalled being contacted by the family of a man who had been detained one day around 8 a.m.

“I got over to the detention facility at noon and confirmed that he was there … I filed a notice of suspension and then, I went back later that day just before they closed and they’d already sent him to Texas,” Cook said. Cook said the client had called his family before noon the following day to say he was back in Durango, a state in northern Mexico.

Conversations like these are why Cook reminds his clients and their families that they still have constitutional rights — which should legally be upheld.

“There’s no way, based on what I’m seeing anecdotally, that people are being treated properly as pre-trial detainees, if they’re doing the deportations that quick,” Cook said.

“Whatever way they’re wording it, they’re not giving them the proper information. That is where I think that real research — where the questions need to be asked and where the government needs to be held accountable.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not return a request for comment. Cook also didn’t mince words about the stakes he believes are involved.

“In high school, you learn about Nazi Germany, and you think like well, ‘I’d want to try to stop it back then’ or the Japanese internment camps. Well, this is the time, we’re living that right now,” Cook said. “In fact, that’s what I would say to any attorney, if you ever thought like … ‘I would do things to stop it.’ Well, this is it. This is what you can do.”