Outside the Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling, you’ll typically find protesters behind the chain link fences.
But inside the facility’s basement holding cells, a different story.
“So, the conditions were really bad,” says a former detainee who spoke with 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS. “You just would not lie down on the floor, I mean, with 50 people in one room? I mean, c’mon.”
The 33-year-old, who works as a remodeling contractor, says he spent 27 hours in a crowded holding cell after ICE agents detained him on Jan. 14.
RELATED: Woodbury man describes conditions inside Whipple Building; Minnesota congresswoman investigating
The worst, the man says, was the cold and a shortage of sanitary facilities.
“It was cold, there was just only one toilet for everyone to use,” he explained. “There were two toilets, but one of them didn’t work at all.”
The man says something else kept him awake all night — the lighting in his cell.
“Flickering non-stop just like when you turn on, turn off the lights, like flickering,” the man explained. “And not letting you sleep.”
He says that after 27 hours, an ICE officer told him he was free to go.
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“People have been wrongly detained,” Steven Thal, the man’s immigration attorney, says. “There hasn’t been a justification for why they’re being detained.”
Thal says detainees are typically shackled, are forced to sleep on concrete floors, and have no available medical care.
He’s among the attorneys who’ve filed Habeas Corpus writs to get their clients out of the Whipple Building.
“Basically, they’re inhumane, they’re intolerable,” Thal says about the conditions.
He isn’t alone.
Federal Court records show that since Jan. 1, immigration attorneys in Minnesota have filed 691 Habeas Corpus petitions seeking to have their clients released.
In 2025, there were 128 total filings over the course of the entire year.
Thal believes many of those cases are due to conditions within Whipple.
“Habeas petitions are definitely being filed daily with the Federal District Court,” he notes. “We have seen a tremendous increase in the number of petitions that have been filed during this most recent metro surge — not only due to the conditions, but also due to the lack of justification for their detention in the first place.”
The Advocates for Human Rights, a non-profit that gives legal advice to immigrant clients, released a statement about the increase in Habeas Corpus filings, saying:
“DHS is detaining people indiscriminately and unjustly. In this situation, sometimes the only recourse for getting someone out of unjustified and arbitrary detention is to ask the federal court to step in and order the release of the individual through a habeas petition. As the number of people detained without legitimate reasons increases, so do the number of habeas petitions.”
5 EYEWITNESS NEWS is working to get a response from Homeland Security about the condition concerns.
The agency has told the New York Times that claims about poor conditions are false.
Meanwhile, Thal says his Maple Grove client has a pending visa petition and has a green card application in with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
For his part, the man says he’s just glad to be free and away from the Whipple facility.
“I said, ‘Hey, I don’t have enemies, but if I did have enemies, I would not wish my enemies to go there,’” he says.
