Lawfare Daily: Challenging Immigration Detentions in Minnesota
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The dramatic influx of immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota have landed an enormous number of people in detention. It's led to an unprecedented number of petitions for habeas corpus—that is, people arguing that their detention is unlawful.
On today's podcast, Lawfare's Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talked with John Albanese, an attorney at the law firm Berger Montague in Minneapolis, who represents people who are bringing these challenges. They talked about what the flood of habeas petitions actually looks like on the ground—what detention authorities the government is claiming, how the legal community is coming together to address the needs of people in detention, how government lawyers are faring, and how the judiciary is dealing with it all.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Electronic Communications Privacy Act turns 40 this year, and it's showing its age. |
| 0:06.0 | On Friday, March 6th, Lawfare and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars, |
| 0:11.1 | practitioners, and former government officials for installing updates to ECPA, a half-day event |
| 0:16.6 | on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public, |
| 0:21.4 | in person and online. Visit lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event. That's lawfaremedia.org |
| 0:28.2 | slash ECPA event for details and to register. |
| 0:35.2 | They're trying to get the message to the government that you need to be better prepared. |
| 0:40.3 | And you're holding hundreds of people without any lawful basis. |
| 0:45.5 | We're going to release them. |
| 0:46.5 | And we expect them to be released. |
| 0:48.0 | And their property returned. |
| 0:49.3 | And we want them to be released in Minnesota. |
| 0:51.1 | So they're not just left on the side of the road in Texas and told |
| 0:54.2 | to find their way back. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Natalie Orpet, executive editor of |
| 1:00.5 | lawfare, with John Albanese, an attorney at the law firm Berger Montague in Minneapolis. |
| 1:06.7 | So we would definitely have enough information that we thought was relevant to make the argument that they had no detention authority. |
| 1:16.8 | And the way the government was behaving, their assertions of authority were so sweeping that it wasn't individualized assessments about whether this person presents a flight risk or whether |
| 1:29.1 | this person is a danger. |
| 1:31.7 | The influx of immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota have landed an enormous number of people |
| 1:38.0 | in detention, which has resulted in an unprecedented number of petitions for habeas corpus, |
| 1:44.1 | that is, people arguing that their |
| 1:45.7 | detention is unlawful and that they should be released. Today we're talking about what that |
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