As We Move On, Let's Not Forget The People Still Locked Away [OPINION]

By J. Patrick Coolican

April 10, 2026

I’ve noticed this week that the volunteers who had been greeting us at the door of my 4-year-old’s child care center aren’t there anymore.

I take it as another small sign of normalcy, which many Minnesotans rightly crave after months of federal quasi-occupation. “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget,” wrote John Keats.

For so many Minnesotans, however, there’s no forgetting because they are locked in a cage.

Sahan Journal reported this week that 3,400 Minnesotans were sent to Texas since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge, as the feds sought out more detention space — and judges friendlier to their mass deportation agenda.

More than 525 remain there, marooned away from family, friends and lawyers.

The Reformer’s Max Nesterak reported on the plight of Andrea Pedro-Francisco, a Guatemalan asylum seeker who was picked up by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge and shipped to Texas.

Pedro-Francisco, a house cleaner who plays the bajo in her church choir, had been driving to work with her mother and a neighbor one morning when they were stopped for no apparent reason. There was no warrant for her arrest. She had no criminal record.

Andrea Pedro-Francisco played bass guitar at her church in Minnesota before being arrested and sent to detention in Texas (Courtesy photo)

She had been scheduled for surgery to remove a cyst on her ovary that’s at risk of rupturing — the pain was so severe that her Minnesota doctor prescribed an opioid. Instead, in federal custody, she’s received substandard medical care — no surgery, no proper monitoring or medication.

Pedro-Francisco was taken to Camp East Montana on the site of a former World War II detention camp for Japanese Americans at Fort Bliss near El Paso.

If a novelist included that historical detail, an editor would advise that it seemed far-fetched — a little too on the nose.

The conditions there are all-too-real, however.

It’s ICE’s largest detention facility, with around 3,000 people packed into long tent structures. Pedro-Francisco told the Reformer she is kept in a room with around 60 people except for about an hour a day, when they are chained together and taken outside. The ceiling leaks. The food is inedible. Pedro-Francisco says she’s lost around 10 lbs.

It’s also disease-ridden, with outbreaks of COVID-19, tuberculosis and the measles.

As Nesterak writes: “Three detainees died in the facility in a six-week period, including a man who was suffocated in a struggle with multiple guards. His death was ruled a homicide. Suicide attempts are so common that some guards take bets on which detainee will succeed next, according to a former detainee who spoke to the Associated Press.”

The measles outbreak — thank you, RFK Jr. — prevented Pedro-Francisco from seeing her lawyer, and kept U.S. Rep. Angie Craig from inspecting the facility, as is her statutory right.

A judge this month ruled that Pedro-Francisco will remain there pending deportation proceedings, citing a new appellate ruling that overturned decades of precedent, finding that undocumented immigrants can be held in detention without bond during deportation proceedings, even if they were paroled into the country after seeking asylum and have lived here for years.

If you think this is someone else’s problem, you’re not paying close enough attention. The deposed and disgraced commander of Operation Metro Surge, Gregory Bovino, said he had a plan to deport 100 million people. Which is nearly 1 out of every 3 of us.

More than 40 years after Executive Order 9066 authorized President Franklin Roosevelt’s Department of Defense to incarcerate 100,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II — on the very same ground Pedro-Francisco finds herself today — President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. It offered a formal apology from the United States government and $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim.

Let’s hope a similar reckoning for people like Pedro-Francisco doesn’t take 40 years.

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..