ICE flew a 2-year-old and her father to Texas despite a court order to release the toddler

On the afternoon of January 22, 2026, ICE agents detained Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria and his 2-year-old daughter, identified in court filings as C.R.T.V., in the driveway of their south Minneapolis home as the family returned from buying groceries. According to an affidavit filed by an attorney for the family, an agent broke the vehicle's window while the toddler was inside, and agents would not allow the father to hand the child to her mother, who was standing outside the home. The family, who came from Ecuador, has an active asylum case; the father has no criminal record and no removal order, the family's lawyers said.

Attorneys filed an emergency habeas corpus petition the same evening. At 8:10 p.m., U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez issued an order prohibiting the government from moving the child out of state and directing her release from custody, citing an "overwhelming" risk of irreparable harm. The government nonetheless placed the child and her father on a commercial flight to Texas at roughly 8:30 p.m. and told the family's lawyers it would not comply with the order. The toddler was returned to her mother in Minnesota the following day; her father remained in federal custody. The Department of Homeland Security defended the detention, saying the father was an undocumented immigrant who had committed felony reentry and disputing the family's account of the arrest, but it did not dispute that the transfer occurred after the court's order.

The transport took place during Operation Metro Surge, a large federal immigration crackdown in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area that ran from December 2025 into February 2026. The Standing records this event because flying a detainee — here, a 2-year-old child — out of a court's jurisdiction within minutes of a judge's order barring exactly that move both defies a direct judicial command and denies the due process owed to people contesting their detention. It belongs in the archive as an instance of the executive overriding the judiciary's authority to protect individuals from unlawful detention.