ICE breaks into St. Paul home in armed warrantless raid, detains six including a 12-year-old flown to Texas

On the afternoon of Thursday, January 15, 2026, federal immigration agents broke through the door of a home on Nevada Avenue East in St. Paul, Minnesota, and stormed in carrying assault rifles. Surveillance video inside the house captured the agents moving room to room. They detained six residents — members of a Venezuelan family that had immigrated in 2023, with the detained adults each holding work permits and state-issued identification — including a 12-year-old boy. A woman holding an infant was not taken after she presented a state ID. Neighbors said the agents told the family they had a search warrant but never produced it; a document that appeared on the doorstep the following day was issued by a Ramsey County (state) court, lacked a case number or file stamp, did not match a sample state warrant, and had no record of being filed. Agents described the operation as a "narcotics investigation." A family friend who went to a federal building near Minneapolis to retrieve the 12-year-old was told the boy had been transported to an immigration center in San Antonio, Texas.

The family's relatives filed a habeas corpus petition in U.S. District Court demanding the release of all six. U.S. District Judge John Tunheim ordered the Department of Homeland Security to respond and produce a judicial warrant by 5 p.m. on Monday, January 19, stating that in the absence of a warrant the detainees' release would be granted. When the deadline passed and government attorneys failed to respond, Tunheim granted the petition and gave DHS 72 hours to return the detainees — believed to have been moved out of Minnesota — and release them, while also requiring the government to update the court on the family's status within five days. The family was subsequently released, and Justice Department officials apologized over the raid.

The Standing records this event because an armed, forced-entry raid on a family home — conducted without a presented or valid judicial warrant, detaining six people including a child and shipping the 12-year-old across the country — is a denial of due process in immigration enforcement and an unlawful detention, confirmed when a federal judge granted habeas relief because the government could not produce a warrant. Breaking the door under arms on the strength of an unfiled, never-shown state-court document maps to the misuse of no-knock raid tactics and the militarization of routine immigration enforcement. The raid is part of the documented pattern of warrantless ICE home operations in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area during Operation Metro Surge.