Refugees say Immigration and Customs Enforcement poses a similar risk to what they left behind

Every day, a different surreal conversation unfolds between the staff at the Center for Torture Victims and Refugees and the asylum seekers they serve.

“It reminds me of what I came here to escape.”

“It reminds me of what I left behind.”

“If ICE arrests me, will I be tortured?”

They’re all sentiments social worker Jill Davidson said she’s heard from her clients since the Trump administration deployed thousands of masked federal agents to the Twin Cities.

The center provides psychotherapy, social services and medical care to about 300 clients in Minnesota, most of them at its clinic in St. Paul. These clients are survivors of torture and state violence.

Now, employees say some of the circumstances their clients face in the United States may qualify them for their services if they occurred abroad. This includes clients recently arrested by federal agents.

“Withholding medical care is a form of torture.”

Davidson, the social worker, said that while being received at the clinic, torture victims often say they cannot turn to local police for help when government soldiers hurt them.

“That’s exactly what’s happening here,” she said.

Six of the center’s clients were sent to a detention center in El Paso, Texas, where they were unable to maintain contact with anyone, if they could be reached at all, according to Sarah Nelson, program director at the St. Paul clinic. She said no one knew exactly what was happening to them.

They are all asylum seekers and have permits to work in the United States. One was released and the other was transferred to a detention center in New Mexico.

“It’s really terrifying to go from giving someone psychotherapy to help them cope with past torture, to them disappearing into this detention center where you know people have been hurt and people are dead and you can’t contact them,” Nelson said.

Nelson described one client as having a serious medical condition and was scheduled to undergo surgery in February before being locked up. The facility refused to give the woman her medications or accept letters from her doctor.

She added: “Withholding medical care is a form of torture.”

Staff at the center waited for one of their clients at a scheduled immigration check-in, but he never came out, Nelson said. He was sent to Texas, where staff could not reach him.

Last week, Nelson’s colleague received a phone call from an unknown number. It was from that agent’s cellmate in El Paso. He said their client wrote the number on a note and sent it to him while he was released.

“The idea of ​​people passing secret notes to communicate with the outside is not a natural idea,” Nelson said. “That’s not how democracies work.”

The center was unable to send a message to its clients.

The Department of Homeland Security responded to an email for comment, falsely stating: “All detainees are provided with appropriate meals, water, medical treatment and have access to their family members and attorneys. All detainees receive full due process.”

In recent weeks, The Washington Post She was reported in an ICE search From a facility in Montana documented a failure to provide necessary medical care, food, and access to attorneys. A New Yorker article Detailed how "Immigration authorities have used medical negligence as a weapon to encourage self-deportation," A federal judge in Minnesota concluded that ICE had disobeyed the order Nearly 100 injunctions resulting from its activities in Minnesota.

“What is the privilege of being innocent?”

It’s not just incarcerated clients who suffer.

The Minnesota Torture Victims Center was founded in 1985 to help rehabilitate torture survivors, although today this non-governmental agency has a policy and advocacy arm, with offices around the world.

Until recently, the center’s Victorian-style home-turned-clinic in St. Paul was a place where asylum seekers could go in search of healing.

So much laughter used to travel from the waiting room and through the creaking walls, that the staff administering the treatment upstairs would sometimes come downstairs and ask everyone to turn the treatment down a notch.

These days, circles of empty chairs fill every room like relics in an old museum.

Yasna Shahbazi, a psychotherapist at the clinic, said that her online meetings with clients all “go back to square one,” as if the torture that occurred years ago had happened yesterday. There is no looking forward. “All my case notes are the same,” she said.

She said all her clients ask her why this happened to them when they didn’t do anything wrong.

It’s all a crisis response. Shahbazi and others catalog their clients’ insomnia, panic attacks, and nightmares about being pursued by law enforcement, which — in a turn of events — were triggered by the U.S. government, not the places they fled.

Most of the center’s clients are hiding out at home, and staff are discreetly delivering groceries to feed many of them. This is not the first time that many have been forced to hide.

MPR News spoke with two clients who recently fled ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia. They both have permits to work legally in the United States. Each of them requested that his name not be mentioned to protect his safety.

One of them was a doctor in Ethiopia who was arrested for his political views and continued to treat patients while he himself was tortured in a concentration camp.

He said the persecution of his ethnic group began with officials using rhetoric that dehumanized them. The doctor said that in the end, he was unable to drive his car for fear of being targeted and stopped because of his ethnic affiliation. The government started going door to door.

“You can’t even go out to mourn,” he said.

The man has not left his home in Minnesota for nearly a month.

Another man lost so much strength while hiding in Ethiopia that he needed physical therapy when he arrived in Minnesota. This is one of the services he received at the center before the federal deployment.

And now he’s hiding again.

He thinks a lot about the similarities between the events in Ethiopia and the United States, especially in what he sees as the collective punishment of a group of minorities, regardless of who they are, what they have contributed, or whether they are innocent.

He said: “If they describe us because of our skin color or our accent, what is the advantage of being innocent?”

“We will remember her”

For the two agents at the Center for Victims of Torture, there is one thing that ignites hope while they are in hiding: the dedication of Minnesotans to protecting their immigrant neighbors.

The Ethiopian doctor watched aerial footage of tens of thousands of people who took to the streets of downtown Minneapolis the day before Alex Pretty was killed.

“There are a lot of good people,” he said. “We’ll remember her. I’ll remember her.”

The other client said he was moved by those who “give their lives” for people they don’t know personally. When it’s safe to go back outside, he said, it all makes him more committed to serving the people of Minnesota.

He said: “This shows how sincere they are and how committed they are to the basic principles of human rights.”

Although America has not proven to be the country he envisioned when he came, he finds hope in people who continue to embody the values ​​he once understood as American.