ICE agents arrested and held Willmar teenager Suban Noor incommunicado for four days during Operation PARRIS sweep

On Monday, January 12, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 19-year-old Suban Noor, a Willmar Senior High School student and Walmart employee, on a street in downtown Willmar, Minnesota, as she stopped to pick up food for her family after driving home from school and dropping her mother off at work. Eyewitness Christina Vander Pol wrote on Facebook that she watched "ICE agents swarm the street ... cornering a 19-year-old Somali girl in her car," who was then "cuffed and roughly swung with her hands tied behind her, crying out, before being shoved, barefoot, into the back of a vehicle." Noor's car was left abandoned mid-street with the door open; her Walmart name tag, bank and credit cards, and cellphone were left strewn across the passenger seat, and her backpack lay unzipped with school supplies still inside.

Noor's family had no contact with her for the rest of the week and did not know where she was being held. Yasin Alsaidi, deputy director of Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, told the West Central Tribune he believed she had likely been transferred through St. Paul and was probably being sent to Texas or Louisiana, the standard destination for ICE detainees from Minnesota, but that her location had "not been confirmed." Alsaidi said there was no evidence Noor had done anything criminal, and that the arrest was likely part of Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), a Department of Homeland Security initiative announced January 9, 2026, re-examining the immigration status of Minnesota's roughly 5,600 refugees who have not yet obtained lawful permanent residence. Rather than conducting interviews as the operation's announcement described, Alsaidi said, ICE was instead arresting and detaining refugees and asylum seekers directly, using address and identity information already on file with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. According to Shafia Abdullahi, Willmar Public Schools' cultural liaison, Noor and her family had just completed the application process for their green cards when she was arrested.

Alsaidi said the pace and volume of Operation PARRIS arrests, combined with detainees' near- immediate transfer out of state, was overwhelming legal aid organizations' ability to locate and represent those detained, and that not enough time had passed since the operation began for ICE's Office of the Principal Legal Advisor to establish a process for responding to attorneys seeking information about detained clients.

Updates

2026-01-16 — Released without explanation [1]

Willmar Police Chief Michael Holme told the West Central Tribune that Homeland Security Investigations' own detainee-locator system showed Noor was no longer in ICE custody. Neither ICE nor any other agency notified her family or the school of her release; the Tribune reported the family remained unaware of where she had been held even after her release, and no explanation for the arrest or release was provided.