U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents forced medical staff to give “powerful sedatives” to a mental health patient so they could remove him from the hospital, his lawyers allege in a new court filing.
Adrian Sotelo Guzman was hospitalized at M Health Fairview Southdale hospital in Edina on Feb. 19, after agents arrested him during Operation Metro Surge. After detaining him, agents took him to the hospital after he appeared to have “abnormal behavior and an altered mental state.” He was diagnosed with being in psychosis due to bipolar disorder.
ICE agents sent Sotelo Guzman to Texas last month, despite arguments from his attorneys and hospital staff that doing so would harm his well-being. He is currently being held in ICE custody at the El Paso Behavioral Health System, but his attorneys said in a recent court filing that they don’t believe he is receiving adequate care or his prescription medication there.
“It is unclear to his family and counsel what, if any, treatment he is receiving,” Sotelo Guzman’s attorney John Bruning wrote in a court document filed on Friday. “His family and counsel are unable to visit him, and he is functionally unable to have meaningful conversations over the phone.”
Sotelo Guzman’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court in Minnesota last month arguing that his detention was unlawful, and that ICE agents had said they planned to remove him from Fairview Southdale. His lawyers wrote that it appeared that agents were trying to interfere with Sotelo Guzman’s civil commitment case, which was ongoing in state court at the time they removed him from the hospital.
On Feb. 26, U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor initially ordered ICE to let Sotelo Guzman remain in Minnesota while his habeas petition was pending, but then later that same day granted the federal government’s request to send Sotelo Guzman to Texas.
According to a new habeas petition filed in Texas, within an hour of Traynor’s initial order that barred agents from removing Sotelo Guzman from Minnesota, ICE agents “apparently forcibly removed Mr. Sotelo Guzman from the hospital, ordered medical staff to forcibly and involuntarily inject him with powerful sedatives without medical purpose, and secreted him out a back exit of the hospital to avoid the protestations of the medical staff.”
Fairview officials said in a statement that the hospital cannot comment on individual cases due to patient privacy laws, but they pushed back on the allegations in the court filing.
“The claims described do not reflect our practices. Clinical decisions, including any medications, are made by licensed medical professionals based on a patient’s medical needs,” the statement said in part.
The statement says that when patients are in custody, the hospital coordinates the discharge “in a manner that protects patient dignity and privacy.”
Jamey Sharp, a leader with Unidos MN’s Healthcare Justice Committee, said ICE agents have been placing hospital workers in “impossible” situations.
“When we’re forced to do these things by our administration and by law enforcement, it causes moral injury [for] all of us health care workers, and makes it hard to keep doing our work, makes it hard to sleep, and completely devastates us,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security has not yet responded in court to the newly filed petition. ICE officials did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication.
Sotelo Guzman, 27, is from Mexico and came to the United States as a young child. He has had Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status. He most recently entered the United States in 2024 and was granted parole so he could receive medical care. His attorneys said in his habeas petition that ICE has not shown evidence as to why his arrest now was warranted.
“Instead, as with several thousand others arrested in Minnesota over the course of the three-month-long Operation Metro Surge, the only reason Mr. Sotelo Guzman was arrested, discernable from ICE’s court filings, is because ICE physically could,” Bruning wrote.
Sotelo Guzman currently has an immigration court hearing scheduled on March 25.
Last week, health care workers pleaded with lawmakers at the Capitol to pass a bill that would restrict ICE’s presence in hospitals and require hospitals to create policies surrounding the access of immigration officers. In recent months, hospital workers have spoken out about ICE presence in Twin Cities hospitals.
“This is why we need to have strong policy, both at the Legislature and at each individual hospital system to ensure that it’s people with medical training that are making medical decisions,” Sharp said.
The bill passed the Senate Health and Human Services Committee and has been referred to the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety committee.
“ICE has intentionally created environments of fear and suffering in our state, and has created unsafe working conditions for all health care workers,” Rachel Anderson, chair of the Minnesota Nurses Association’s Governmental Affairs Commission, testified at the committee meeting last week.