Pro Bono Work: Fredrikson Law Firm
The Fredrikson law firm had a substantial immigration group of lawyers before Operation Metro Surge began in December 2025.
After Minnesota was targeted with aggressive immigration sweeps by federal agents, the Minneapolis-based firm shifted into overdrive to help immigrants in detention.
Early in the federal operation, Katy Drahos, Fredrikson’s director of pro bono and community service, says Fredrikson lawyers and staff considered what they could do to bolster their work with Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid (MMLA).
“We had been focusing on our ongoing pro bono practice with them in immigration, which is representing clients in naturalization proceedings, DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] renewals, some asylum work, and we had a few volunteers who had been doing intake for individuals in detention,” Drahos recalls.
Just as winter arrived, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents arrived in the Twin Cities and started rounding up immigrants, who needed access to legal advice or representation.
At Fredrikson, Drahos says, “I had so many attorneys reaching out to me, looking for ways to help.” Simultaneously, MMLA was getting swamped with requests for assistance from immigrants.
One important way Fredrikson could help was by educating a critical mass of Minnesota attorneys on how to handle intake phone calls with immigrants being held in federal detention facilities.
On Jan. 16, Drahos, who is a non-lawyer, and Ashley Roth, a Fredrikson pro bono immigration counsel, did a webinar on detention intake calls for about 200 attorneys from across the state of Minnesota. About 30 Fredrikson attorneys were among those who received the training.
Roth worked with MMLA staff to ensure what would be most useful in training attorneys to do detention intake interviews.
As the number of immigrant detentions skyrocketed, MMLA asked Fredrikson, which has the most Minnesota-based attorneys in a state law firm, to assemble and send pro se packets to detainees.
Pro se is a Latin phrase that means representing oneself in a legal proceeding. Drahos says Fredrikson helped in this manner because it could deploy its support staff to compile the packets and get them sent for expedited deliveries to detainees.
In a typical case of someone receiving a pro se packet, the person likely would have spoken to an attorney during a detention intake call. At the height of Operation Metro Surge, Drahos says, some detainees were held in the Twin Cities. But she says people who accessed the detainee intake call services were sent to a variety of detention facilities, including in Sherburne and Kandiyohi counties in Minnesota as well as to Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana.
“The biggest thing that we believe in our pro bono program is access to justice,” she says. “Rights are only as good as people know that they exist and are able to exercise them.”
Based on the high volume of detentions that were occurring in Minnesota over a period of weeks, immigrants were at risk of being unable to access solid legal information.
“We definitely heard from clients that this information helped them move forward,” Drahos says. “They could share it with their family, who could help them make an informed decision.”
In fiscal year 2025, 88% of Fredrikson attorneys took part in pro bono work. That translated into more than 20,000 hours of pro bono service, which included legal work for veterans, senior citizens, tenants, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and youth sports organizations.
