This article is part of Witness: The Human Impact of Immigration Enforcement, an ongoing documentary project documenting the lives of people affected by immigration enforcement. My goal is to move beyond politics and headlines and help readers better understand the human stories often missing from the conversation.
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“The only leverage that our clients have is adherence to the rule of law. If the law says something, you’ve got to follow it. We have to have hope and faith that the law is fair and equitable. And when the law says it means to do something, it actually means it, to protect people, to enforce the rights that people have.
“What we’re seeing now is an erosion of any adherence to that, taking away the ability to enforce those rights… to insidiously just start ignoring that these [laws] actually exist.”
— Milo Mumgaard, Executive Director, Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid
Milo Mumgaard has spent most of his adult life working inside systems that are easy to take for granted until they stop working. Legal aid. Immigration law. Labor protections. Public benefits. Due process. The ordinary machinery that is supposed to make the law mean something for people who do not have money, power, or a team of attorneys standing behind them.
He is now the executive director of Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, but his path here reaches back through Nebraska, Arkansas, migrant farmworker law, labor, public-interest advocacy, and decades of immigration policy. What struck me talking with him was not simply the depth of that experience. It was how plainly he sees the current moment: not as an abstract fight over immigration numbers, but as a test of whether the law still protects the people who need it most.
Making the Law Real
Milo began doing legal-aid work after law school during the Reagan era. His first work included representing migrant farmworkers, at a time when federally funded legal-aid programs had considerably more freedom to pursue class actions, legislative advocacy, and other systemic strategies. He remembers the work in almost literal law-enforcement terms: employers were already legally required to provide things such as minimum wages, safe working conditions, and even basic sanitation in the fields. The lawyers were simply trying to make those protections real.
That distinction matters. Legal aid is not simply charity with lawyers attached. At its best, it is the part of the justice system that gives people enough leverage to insist that the law apply to them too.
Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid has deliberately structured itself to preserve that leverage. It does not accept Legal Services Corporation (LSC) funding1. That strategic choice allows it to represent noncitizens, pursue class actions, and advocate for legal and policy changes that an LSC-funded organization could be restricted from undertaking.2 Central Minnesota Legal Services is a separate nonprofit with different funding sources; the two organizations coordinate and route eligible clients to the appropriate office.3
That sounds like an organizational detail until you understand what it means on the ground: This funding strategy allows maximum support for cases in this space.
When the Mission Gets Hijacked
The most disturbing part of our conversation was how quickly ordinary legal work has been displaced by emergency response.
Milo described a shift that began before the largest enforcement operations. Legal Aid had traditionally advertised community education sessions openly. As ICE and Border Patrol activity increased, that changed. Meetings moved toward word of mouth and trusted community partners. Attorneys had to think not only about protecting clients, but whether contact with Legal Aid itself could expose its lawyers to additional risk.
Then the scale changed.
“We went from being an immigration law project that provided a variety of immigration legal services,” he told me, to a situation where that program — along with a significant part of the rest of Legal Aid — became “solely focused on detention and related issues.”
That is mission displacement in its clearest form. Legal Aid’s mission extends far beyond defending individual clients. Its independence allows it to pursue class actions, impact litigation, and policy advocacy — using the law not only to protect people without power, but to challenge the systems causing the harm.
Families began planning for the possibility that a parent might disappear into detention, forcibly removed from their children.
That broader North Star mission is now being displaced by the immediate emergency demands of immigration enforcement: Who was detained, and how do we get them due process?
For example, Legal Aid found itself helping parents prepare Delegations of Parental Authority (DOPAs)4, allowing a trusted adult to care for their children if they were suddenly detained. In the language I have repeatedly heard on the street, parents aren’t being “detained.” They’re being kidnapped.
When a primary wage earner is taken, families already living close to the edge go deeper into lockdown, unable to work normally, pay rent, buy groceries, or move through their communities without fear. And the harm does not stop with the person taken into custody. It radiates outward — spouse, children, landlord, employer, school, grocery store, neighborhood.
That is one reason the phrase “immigrant community” can be misleading. Immigrants are not living in some parallel society. They live inside ordinary working communities. When they are destabilized, those communities are destabilized with them.
The Missed Opportunity
Milo has been around immigration policy long enough to remember when “mass deportation now” was fringe politics.
Twenty or twenty-five years ago, he told me, people carrying those signs outside congressional meetings were easy to dismiss. Today, versions of those ideas are driving federal policy.
What makes that especially maddening to him is what could have happened instead.
He calls comprehensive immigration reform “the missed opportunity of my generation.” The argument was never that borders should disappear. It was that the country needed a regulated system that reflected reality: American agriculture needs immigrant labor. Businesses need workers. Families need workable legal pathways. Undocumented residents need a process that allows them to come out of the shadows. Workers need protections that prevent their immigration status from becoming a weapon employers can use against them.
Instead of debating how to make those systems fairer and more functional, Milo said, “we have a new detention facility that’s going to hold 1,500 people down the road. How do we help those people just barely get some due process?”
That contrast landed hard with me. A generation ago, the policy question could have been how to build a functioning immigration system. Now lawyers are fighting simply to preserve the floor — due process, basic rights, and the expectation that the government itself obeys the law.
Immigrants Are Not an Abstraction
Near the end of the interview, I asked Milo what Americans miss when immigration is discussed almost entirely as an enforcement problem.
His answer was striking because it was so ordinary.
Immigrants, he said, are “woven into life all over the place.” They are part of American life in the same unremarkable way as electricians, neighbors, coworkers, parents, or the redheaded person standing next to you. Immigration status is a legal condition. It tells us nothing about a person’s character, their value to their community, or whether they belong among us.
His own family makes the point. His grandparents came from Denmark. His father was born in the United States but grew up in a Danish-speaking pocket of rural Iowa, surrounded by other Danish families. He spoke only Danish as a young child. And there was nothing remarkable about it. America was full of immigrant communities like this — Danish here, Norwegian there — where language, culture, and community carried forward from the old country.
What some Americans now condemn as immigrants refusing to assimilate is the same path their own immigrant ancestors followed — living among their own, speaking their own language, and becoming American across generations.
Milo sees the same pattern in the Ecuadorian, Guatemalan, Mexican, and other immigrant communities we sometimes regard so differently today. People arrive and settle near people who share their language and culture. The first generation may never become fluent in English. Their children usually do. Their grandchildren grow up thoroughly woven into American life. What we now sometimes treat as a failure to assimilate is, in many ways, assimilation working much as it always has.
“Maybe a crazy quilt,” he said, “but it’s a quilt.”
“We Stand for What Is Normal”
There was another thread running through everything Milo said: optimism.
Not optimism in the naïve sense. He told his staff that things may get worse before they get better. He has watched legal protections erode, immigration politics radicalize, and organizations divert themselves into emergency response.
But he also believes the current moment is a chapter, not the whole book.
Milo grew up in rural Nebraska and has worked much of his career in conservative states. He rejects the idea that basic dignity, fairness, and equal treatment belong to one political geography — red state, blue state. Even in places where Trump wins overwhelmingly, Milo points out, millions of people did not vote for him. A political majority is not everybody.
For Milo, that matters. His years in Nebraska and Arkansas taught him that people who share what he considers basic American values exist everywhere, even when they do not hold the political majority. He sees that as something to call upon — a reservoir of decency that is still there. It is also part of the reason he remains optimistic.
That belief shapes how he sees his job at Legal Aid.
“We stand for what is normal,” he told me. “We stand for what is American. We stand for what resonates with the Constitution.”
That may be the clearest description of why organizations like Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid matter right now. They represent individual clients. They help families. But their mission reaches far beyond one case at a time. Their independence allows them to pursue class actions, impact litigation, and policy advocacy — challenging systemic injustice and using the law to make change that can reach thousands of people they may never represent individually.
But they also preserve something larger: the idea that power is still constrained by law, and that the person with the least leverage is still entitled to its protection.
That broader mission matters even more today because some institutions traditionally responsible for enforcing civil rights are themselves being weakened. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has lost more than half its staff, following hundreds of departures and a major shift in enforcement priorities.5
That puts even greater weight on organizations like Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid — and on the larger network of legal-aid organizations, civil-rights groups, nonprofit law firms, law-school clinics, and volunteer attorneys working alongside it. When the federal government retreats from enforcing rights, these organizations become an increasingly important backstop: representing individuals, challenging systemic violations, and forcing the government itself to obey the law.
A North Star
“Rule of law is it.” — Milo Mumgaard
Near the end of our conversation, Milo described Legal Aid as an “existential organization.” He wasn’t talking simply about whether Legal Aid exists. He meant that organizations like his are grounded in something more fundamental — the constitutional principles of fairness, equal treatment, due process, and the rule of law. They exist not only to practice those principles, but to preserve them, give them force, and remind us what they mean — and to insist that government remain accountable to them.
They are a North Star.
Their absence, he said, would represent a profound problem for the justice system — and for America itself.
“That would be a significant existential value-based problem for the justice system, and for America then as a whole, if [organizations] like Legal Aid did not exist.”
That role feels particularly essential now. Throughout our conversation, Milo returned to the same concern: our current leadership increasingly abandons that North Star when it gets in the way of what it wants to accomplish. Due process becomes an obstacle. Civil-rights enforcement is weakened. Legal protections still exist on paper but become harder to enforce. The question shifts from What does the law allow us to do? toward What can we get away with doing?
This conversation with Milo brought that North Star into focus for me. Everyone operates from values. The question is what those values are, and what they are anchored to. The Constitution and the rule of law provide a fixed point against which policy and power can be judged: Is it lawful? Is it fair? Does it protect people’s rights?
That is also where Milo finds his optimism. America has fallen into what he calls these “pits of bad things” before. He believes they are not ultimately reflective of the country as a whole. A hundred years from now, he imagines Americans looking back at today’s Ecuadorian or Guatemalan communities much as he looks back at his father’s Danish community in Iowa — their children and grandchildren simply woven into American life.
If we remain anchored to that North Star, Milo believes this moment can become a blip rather than our direction.
- Legal Services Corporation, “Clarifying Misconceptions About the Legal Services Corporation,” April 10, 2025, which confirms statutory restrictions on LSC grantees including class actions and most immigration-related work. https://www.lsc.gov/press-release/clarifying-misconceptions-about-legal-services-corporation ↩
- Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, “About Us.” MMLA states that it does not accept Legal Services Corporation funding, allowing it to take class actions, represent noncitizens, and pursue legal and policy changes at the Minnesota Legislature. https://mylegalaid.org/about-us/ ; ↩
- Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid (MMLA) and Central Minnesota Legal Services (CMLS) are separate nonprofit law offices with different funding structures. MMLA was created as a non-Legal Services Corporation (LSC)-funded organization in 1982 in response to proposed restrictions on the use of LSC funds. CMLS continued receiving LSC funding and, for a time, contracted with MMLA to provide LSC-funded services. When federal law in 1996 extended additional restrictions to organizations receiving LSC money even indirectly, MMLA ended that arrangement to preserve its ability to represent clients and pursue legal strategies that LSC rules restricted. The two organizations continue to coordinate services and route eligible clients between them. See Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, “History”; Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, “FAQs”; and Central Minnesota Legal Services, “History”. ↩
- A Delegation of Parental Authority (DOPA) is a Minnesota legal document that allows a parent to temporarily authorize another adult to make decisions concerning a child’s care, custody, and property. It can be used as an emergency plan when a parent is at risk of detention or deportation. Under current Minnesota law, the delegation may last up to one year and does not transfer the parent’s underlying parental rights. See Minn. Stat. § 524.5-211 and LawHelp Minnesota, “Delegation of Parental Authority (DOPA)”. ↩
- Reuters, “Trump’s DOJ has cut thousands of law-enforcement jobs while vowing to get tough on crime,” April 23, 2026. Reuters reported that the DOJ Civil Rights Division had lost more than half its staff. Reuters had earlier documented 368 departures from the division by July 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/trumps-doj-has-cut-thousands-law-enforcement-jobs-while-vowing-get-tough-crime-2026-04-23/ ; https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-justice-dept-civil-rights-unit-faces-mass-exodus-2025-07-23/ ↩
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