The Urgency of the Moment

In early January, as the more-publicized Operation Metro Surge was ramping up, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services launched Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening) in Minnesota. The agency called the campaign, which planned to target more than 5,000 refugees in the state who hadn’t yet been granted green cards, a “sweeping initiative reexamining thousands of refugee cases through new background checks and intensive verification of refugee claims.” 

As federal agents swarmed the state and began to detain refugees who had already been thoroughly vetted and committed no crimes, the reported violations of rights and bullying tactics disturbed E. Michelle Drake, a celebrated class action attorney and head of Berger Montague’s Minneapolis office, and her colleagues. “We all felt desperate to do something to help,” she says.

They began by filing dozens of habeas petitions seeking the immediate release of refugees and other immigrants who’d been detained in the course of the federal operations. They also brought a class action lawsuit against top officials in the federal government challenging the lawfulness of their actions. 

Taking up the cause meant long hours and missed family dinners, but Drake was driven by the urgency of the moment. “In January and February, I worked harder than I ever worked in my life,” she says. “The whole firm felt if ever there was a time to give everything, this was it.” 

As a member of the debate team at Edina High School and daughter of an attorney—her father, W. Michael Drake, did securities litigation—Drake knew from a young age that law was a viable career. A summer job during college with the nonprofit Wilder Foundation solidified the idea. The job had her bringing adjudicated youth and children in need of protective services on a wilderness experience. “Unlike many other programs of that ilk, this one really was very caring and nurturing,” she says. “I felt there were ways in the justice system that you could really help people.”

After graduating cum laude from Harvard Law School, she worked in the Georgia Capital Defender office in Atlanta, where her responsibilities included representing defendants facing the death penalty. It was crucial but emotionally draining work—even before tragedy struck.

Drake’s paralegal was murdered, his killer never found. In a separate incident, a court reporter and judge she worked closely with were killed inside a Fulton County courtroom during a trial.

“[Those events] did not alter in any way my perspective on the death penalty,” she says, “but made it more difficult personally for me to have a steady diet of death penalty cases.”

Drake and her husband were ready for a change. Even though she no longer had family in Minnesota, she liked the Twin Cities and longed to return to her roots. She began her work at Nichols Kaster in 2007. When Berger offered her the opportunity to open its Minneapolis office in 2016, she was primed to do so. 

Drake had promised herself that even after leaving her public defender role, she would stay committed to working on behalf of those sentenced to death. To that end, she became involved with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which works to eliminate mass incarceration, the death penalty, the criminalization of poverty, and racial injustice in the legal system. She currently chairs the nonprofit’s board.

It’s not necessarily the type of work you would expect of a class action attorney bringing major claims on behalf of consumers. Drake has served as lead or co-lead class counsel in more than 50 class actions over the past decade, and has achieved settlements and verdicts valued in the billions of dollars in total. One of her high-profile cases came in 2023 against CoreLogic, a background check company that misidentified people as being on a government sanctions list that often deals with terrorism and drug trafficking. As lead counsel, Drake negotiated the second largest Fair Credit Reporting Act exchange settlement ever: $58.5 million. 

Drake also took on the three big credit bureaus—Experian, Equifax and TransUnion—for reporting public records in ways that caused harm to people even if they had satisfied a judgment immediately or had it overturned on appeal. As co-lead counsel in three separate cases, she and her team negotiated monetary and injunctive relief valued in the billions of dollars on behalf of more than 100 million consumers. Their work ultimately also led to industry reforms.

At the heart of those cases, beyond the big sums, were Drake’s core values. She was using the legal system to right wrongs, just as she’d hoped to do dating back to her summer job with the Wilder Foundation. “I was really happy with what we were able to achieve in those cases,” she says.

So when Operation PARRIS hit Minneapolis, Drake was poised to help. She and her Berger colleagues quickly connected with immigrant advocate organizations such as Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, the University of Minnesota Law School’s James H. Binger Center for New Americans, The Advocates for Human Rights, and the International Refugee Assistance Project. “We learned the law as quickly as possible, and we’re all federal court litigators, so we felt comfortable filing things in federal court and litigating in federal court,” Drake says.

As she explains, prior to being granted refugee status and admitted to the United States, people are screened by several federal agencies, including the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Defense. They are interviewed by USCIS and given a medical examination. After they are finally approved and admitted, they undergo a final inspection by U.S. Customs and Border Protection upon entry into the U.S. Once they have been in the country for a year, refugees are able to apply for a green card or lawful permanent resident status. Many of those detained by ICE during the early months of 2026 were in the process of doing so.

As soon as Drake and company got word of a detainment, they’d file a habeas petition. And they kept filing them—as many as 40 within the broader effort brought by the legal community, Drake figures. Almost all of them prevailed, resulting in the release of the refugee or immigrant in question.

On behalf of The Advocates for Human Rights and affected refugees, Drake also filed a class action lawsuit against administration officials, including then-attorney general Pam Bondi, then-DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and ICE acting director Todd Lyons. The DHS had justified its actions during Operation PARRIS with a new interpretation of a federal statute that it said gave the government broad latitude to arrest and detain refugees who had been in the country for 365 days. The lawsuit challenged that interpretation, alleging that the Trump administration had created and implemented a policy to arrest and detain refugees simply under the guise they were determining their green card eligibility. 

Drake sees the federal government’s detainment and interrogation of refugees as not only illegal but vindictive. “My view is that it was highly retributive, driven by a lot of political factors with no basis in history or any of the statutes that govern refugee admissions and adjustment,” she says. 

Federal agents were arresting refugees, often by force or deception, and sending them immediately to places like Texas. The suit details examples of these tactics among the hundreds of cases in which refugees were targeted. In one instance, a refugee answered a knock at the door of his home, and a man in civilian clothes told him he had hit the refugee’s car. When the refugee stepped outside to have a look, he was surrounded by armed men, taken to a detention center, flown out of state, interrogated about his refugee status, and kept shackled in handcuffs for 16 hours before being released on the streets of Texas. Another refugee was arrested with his wife and 4-year-old daughter, flown to a detention center in Houston, held for two days of questioning about their green card applications, then driven to an airport with no means to pay for their return home to Minnesota. In a third instance, ICE agents pulled over a 16-year-old high school junior on her way to school. The girl, a refugee, showed them her driver’s license, but they handcuffed her, forced her to leave her car on the side of the road, and threatened to send her to Chicago or Texas before releasing her the next day.

These practices both rankled and motivated Drake. “Everything from not releasing people who have been ordered to be released to releasing them on the side of the road in Texas without any of their paperwork or documents or anything—it’s so inhumane and unnecessary,” Drake says. “These are people who the courts rule they didn’t have any right to detain in the first place.”

On Jan. 29, U.S. District Judge John Tunheim granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting DHS from arresting and detaining refugees and called for the federal government to release all of those it had detained under Operation PARRIS. 

A month later, on Feb. 27, Tunheim issued an injunction order 

that enjoined DHS from arresting or detaining refugees who had not yet received lawful permanent resident status. In his order, he declared, “The government’s startling theory—that the statute silently grants DHS the power to seize a refugee the moment the clock strikes midnight on the 366th day after admission—is wrong.”

It was a major victory for opponents of the federal campaign. 

“Michelle Drake’s advocacy doesn’t just respond to injustice—it forces it into the open and exposes it to the light of day,” says Michele McKenzie, executive director of The Advocates for Human Rights. “She turned the machinery of detention and coercion on its head—throwing a decisive legal wrench into DHS’s plans to strip refugees of their rights. It is an honor to be represented by her and to watch her work.”

Co-counsel Ghita Schwarz, senior director of U.S. litigation at International Refugee Assistance Project, praises Drake’s strategic thinking, leadership and ability to act quickly. She calls Drake’s courtroom presentations “mesmerizing” for the way she was able to break down technical legal arguments to make them accessible to the judge while “infusing them with moral rigor. … I can’t say how impressed and inspired I am by how she works with clients and communities and her incredible intellect, skill and strategy,” Schwarz says. “She’s an extraordinary lawyer.”

Things aren’t finished—despite a reduction in local agents, the federal government continues to pursue refugees and immigrants. “There is still a tremendous unmet need for habeas petitions,” Drake said in March. “But there are at least now more pathways for people to get assistance.”

In addition to winning the release of many refugees and the success of the lawsuit, Drake has earned the respect of her two teenage children, a 15-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son. 

“The best thing is that my kids are really proud of me,” she says.

She sees the effort as necessary, dictated by the moment and the responsibilities of their profession. “If you’re going to be a lawyer and have all these tools, you need to use them to do good in the world,” Drake says. “And when there are people who really need your help, you should help them. And this was a moment when that became obvious.”