Father Of Minneapolis Police Detective Faces Deportation After Arrest During Operation Metro Surge

By Max Nesterak, Minnesota Reformer

May 4, 2026

Roberto Hernandez Vargas lived in the United States for nearly three decades without any contact with ICE agents.

He has no criminal record. There was no warrant for his arrest or order for removal. He had started the process of applying for permanent residency with the sponsorship of his son, Roberto Hernandez, Jr., a U.S. citizen and detective for the Minneapolis Police Department.

Then the Trump administration flooded Minnesota with thousands of immigration officers for Operation Metro Surge, and Hernandez was caught up in the dragnet while driving to work at a restaurant on Jan. 5.

Since then, the 62-year-old has been locked up in an out-of-state detention facility, wearing a green jumpsuit and held in a cell around the clock except for a short outdoor recess once a day.

“We aren’t criminals. No one that is detained here with me has committed a crime,” Hernandez said in an interview in Spanish from a New Mexico detention facility. “I don’t know why they treat us like this.”

While the Trump administration repeatedly boasts it is going after the “worst of the worst,” the majority of the roughly 60,000 people in ICE detention have not been convicted of a crime. Like Hernandez, many have spent decades growing deep roots in the country and raising American children and grandchildren.

“My father is not the worst of the worst,” Hernandez Jr. said. “I understand that there’s criminals out there. We deal with them almost daily … and some people do deserve to be in jail, but not my old man.”

Unexplained arrest

Hernandez was pulled over by ICE on his way to work as a cook at the Trail Stop Tavern in Eagan. Three officers approached his car.

“English or Spanish?” one asked.

Spanish, he replied. The officers asked if he was from America or not, but he didn’t answer. He told them he didn’t want to say anything more without a lawyer present.

Hernandez says they asked him to get out of the car, a white Honda Civic registered to his son, but he declined at first. He didn’t know why they pulled him over — he wasn’t speeding, he didn’t run a light, his taillights were working.

The officers didn’t show a warrant, or even know who he was. The arrest report included in court filings also doesn’t provide an explanation for the stop.

It could be they ran his plates and noted a Hispanic name or they simply pulled him over because he looks Latino.

U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, found “compelling and troubling” evidence that ICE agents racially profiled Latino and Somali residents during Operation Metro Surge as a matter of policy. The Supreme Court ruled last fall 6-3 that immigration agents may stop people based on their apparent race, language or workplace, overturning a federal judge who held it was highly likely the practice was unconstitutional.

Twin Cities law enforcement leaders have also spoken out about non-white officers and their family members being stopped by ICE agents and asked to prove their citizenship.

“It is definitely questionable. They’re not stopping family members of folks who are Norwegian or Irish,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told the New York Times.

Hernandez Jr. said he believes his dad didn’t do anything to justify getting pulled over, but at the same time, he finds it hard to accept that federal agents would racially profile him.

“I really wish that what they did was legal … I don’t know,” he said. “If that was me doing a stop like that … racially profiling someone. Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t have my badge.”

Hernandez says the officers were able to persuade him to step out of the car by telling him they just wanted to check his record. If it came back clean, they would let him go.

Instead, they put him in handcuffs. He was able to call his son’s girlfriend — he didn’t want to bother his son at work — and tell her he was being detained. One of the agents told her they were taking him to the Whipple Federal Building and going to leave the Honda Civic unlocked with the keys in the cupholder.

Within hours, he was on a plane to Texas without ever having spoken to a lawyer.

He was taken to Camp East Montana outside El Paso, a now notorious detention center on the site of a camp where Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. There, he was urged to self-deport multiple times before being transferred several days later to the Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico.

Bond denied

More than three weeks passed before he was able to speak to his immigration attorney, according to his legal filings.

Two more weeks passed before immigration authorities filed a charging document for his deportation, called a notice to appear.

“It’s absolutely absurd the agency took somebody into custody without a warrant, without probable cause, without any reasonable suspicion … and it took them a month to even figure out what to do next,” said Rachel Engebretson, an immigration attorney who recently took up Hernandez’s case pro bono.

The charging document is riddled with contradictions and inaccuracies, including Hernandez’s name. It was issued to Jose Ignancio Sanudo, Hernandez’s deceased brother-in-law, because officers found his old driver’s license when they searched Hernandez’s wallet.

The arrest report says Hernandez both has no children, and has two sons. (The latter is accurate.) It says he was arrested on Jan. 5 but also Jan. 7. It says he had no currency, but Hernandez says he had $462.

It says officers read him his rights, that he said he “admittedly (sic) entering the United States illegally,” and that he expressed “a desire to depart the United States without an order of removal,” all of which Hernandez disputes.

Hernandez sought to be released on bond, but a judge in immigration court, which is part of the Department of Justice, denied his request twice.

Judge Ralph Girvin said he likely didn’t have jurisdiction to grant bond, given the Trump administration’s decision that immigration judges may not issue bond to people who entered the country illegally — never mind that Hernandez says he was waved through a legal port of entry.

Girvin also said the fact that Hernandez had another person’s driver’s license in his possession indicated he was a flight risk and could be dangerous, according to court records. Hernandez and Engebretson declined to comment further on the license given pending legal proceedings.

Hernandez Jr. attended one of the bond hearings in his uniform to speak in support of his dad’s release, and the judge asked him, “You’re not an illegal, are you?” he said in court filings.

More than two months ago, Engebretson filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to order Hernandez be released from detention to return to his family while his immigration case proceeds. She argues the government violated his due process rights by arresting him without a warrant and seemingly without probable cause. She also argues he poses no danger to the community, no flight risk and must care for his ailing wife.

A judge has yet to make a decision.

In the interim, Hernandez believes he’s lost more than 15 pounds in detention. Hernandez suffers from high cholesterol and already he fainted twice because an untreated throat infection caused his blood pressure to spike. It’s been over a month since his blood pressure has been checked.

“Everything is very bad. It’s not good,” Hernandez said.

Had he had a lawyer sooner, all of this likely would have been avoided. He likely would have been ordered released by a federal judge in Minnesota in a matter of days, which is perhaps why his request for a lawyer wasn’t acknowledged.

Federal judges in Minnesota — and across the country — have widely rejected the Trump administration’s policy of “mandatory detention” that denies immigrants the opportunity to be released on bond pending immigration proceedings even if they’ve lived in the country for years.

Again and again, judges have ordered ICE to release immigrants like Hernandez, who were arrested without warrants and pose no obvious safety or flight risk. Appeals courts have split on the issue, however, meaning it is likely to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Weeks after his arrest, the Advocates for Human Rights filed a class action lawsuit accusing the the Department of Homeland Security of systemically preventing detainees from accessing attorneys.

Detainees were moved so frequently and quickly that even the government struggled to keep track of them, according to detainee lawyers. DHS officials also denied detainees access to private phone calls and barred them from sending mail or email.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee, sided with the lawyers bringing the case, finding that the government’s “policies and practices at Whipple all but extinguish a detainee’s access to counsel.” She granted a temporary restraining order in the case in February and ordered DHS to give immigrants access to lawyers immediately after being detained and before being transferred out of state.

“The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights,” Brasel wrote in one of many scathing orders issued by federal judges during Operation Metro Surge.

Another family separation

This isn’t the first time the Hernandez family has been separated because of their immigration status.

Hernandez’s wife had to move back to Mexico for 14 years before she was able to return as a permanent resident with the sponsorship of her son. During those years, Hernandez worked two jobs to support his sons.

“Now it’s the other way around … My dad’s taken away, and I’m with my mom,” Hernandez Jr. said.

Hernandez Jr. worries about his father having to return to Mexico. They have an extended family, but where they live is dangerous, with cartel members sometimes shutting down the streets.

His mother, who has diabetes and other medical issues, also relies on his father as her primary caretaker. She would have to decide whether to return to Mexico to be with her husband after years of separation, which means leaving her children, grandchildren and life in America behind.

“This is a great country here in the U.S. It’s a great country that gives opportunities,” Hernandez Jr. said. “I’m praying and I’m staying faithful to our God that He’ll get my dad out of this situation.”

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..