For The New Yorker Daily, Jessica Winter presents an in-depth picture of the Minnesota surge by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the small, suburban Columbia Heights, Minnesota school district where Liam Conejo Ramos was enrolled in pre-Kindergarten before he was captured by ICE and sent off with his father to a huge immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas.

Winter describes the turmoil faced in recent weeks by Mary Granlund, chair of the Columbia Heights Board of Education; Zena Stenvik, the school superintendent; and Jason Kuhlman, the principal of Valley View Elementary School, where Liam (recently released from the detention center, thank goodness) is a student.  Winter profiles Columbia Heights’ public schools, “serving a student population (that) is two-thirds Hispanic, with a sizable Ecuadorian population.” Granlund, the school board leader, has been personally trying to arrange for rides to school for vulnerable children and has undertaken to driving around schools to track the presence of ICE officers watching parents drop off or pick up students. Winter reports: “Masked men in tactical gear sometimes park in unmarked cars outside Granlund’s house; on at least two occasions, she said, they stayed all day.”

Granlund observes: “It’s worse since Bovino got kicked out… The number of abductions, the number of agents in our community, has not decreased. If anything, it feels retaliatory now.”  Winter elaborates: “Three Valley View parents were detained over the weekend of January 24th and 25th. Another was abducted on Wednesday morning. Three high-school students, in separate incidents, were pulled over by ICE on their way to school on Thursday morning.”

Principal Kuhlman reports that Valley View Elementary has lost three students who are now in detention in Dilley, Texas, and explains: “Typically, what we’re seeing is that ICE picks up one parent. It’s malicious, because the other parent probably isn’t going to be able to make it by themselves. They’re going to self-deport, or they will deport the whole family in order to stay together.”  Winter writes: “Kuhlman told me about one of his fourth graders, whose mother was taken by ICE while she was walking to the local supermarket to buy formula for her baby. The student’s grandmother, who also lived in the home and was caring for the infant, was too frightened to pick up the older child at school, so officials scrambled to find the child’s uncle. At Valley View alone, at least twenty-three families have had a mother or a father taken by ICE.”

The school district has established remote learning for students who are too afraid to come to school.  Superintendent Stenvik was forced to cancel an important annual district-wide event: “Stenvik cancelled the annual all-district band concert, scheduled for last week, in which players from the elementary, middle, and high schools perform together on one stage. ‘It’s the most magical thing you’ve ever heard’… I thought, ‘Should we live-stream it? Could we do it during the school day?’ In the end, she decided ‘to err on the side of safety,’ especially as many of the young musicians likely would not show up. ‘For a high-level ensemble… you need all of the parts.’ ”

Clearly ICE enforcement in the Twin Cities has disrupted education, something educators and legal experts have been expecting. Anticipating the problems ICE enforcement would likely cause in public schools, the Ohio ACLU published a memo summarizing the legal protection all of us should be able to expect in and around public schools: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) previously maintained a ‘sensitive locations’ policy over several different presidential administrations that limited immigration enforcement at schools and certain other locations. However, this policy was rescinded on January 21, 2025. Accordingly, it is no longer contrary to ICE or CBP policy to engage in enforcement operations at or near schools, school playgrounds, or bus stops.”

ACLU clarifies, however, that all immigrant students have the right to a free public education: “(T)he federal government’s revocation of the ‘sensitive locations’ policy does not affect the constitutional right of immigrant children to an education, does not affect the legal responsibilities of school districts towards their students, and does not affect a school’s own legal rights regarding who enters their property. The end of the sensitive locations policy, however, makes it more likely that immigration enforcement operations will take place at schools.”

What specific protections are currently in place to protect students’ rights and school operations? ACLU explains: “The Supreme Court, in the case Plyler v. Doe... held that discrimination on the basis of immigration status in access to basic public education violates the Constitution. As the Court explained, denying access to education ‘imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status’… Schools must (also) protect students’ rights, including their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and their privacy rights under (the) Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), as well as numerous other laws…  Requiring students, parents, or guardians to provide schools with information regarding their immigration status, or taking other actions that significantly interfere with the right to a basic public education, violates the constitutional principles set out in Plyler v. Doe…  FERPA generally prohibits schools and school districts that receive federal funds from releasing personal information contained in a student’s education records without the written consent of the parent/guardian or adult student. FERPA embodies the principle that schools should act with sensitivity in collecting and retaining information regarding children, and should take precautions to ensure that school records are not disclosed or used in a way that could harm students.”

On Sunday, the Washington Post traced the rapid growth of childhood detention during President Trump’s second term: “The numbers are rising quickly. Over the past four months, the average number of people, including children and adults, held each month in family detention has nearly tripled, from 425 in October to 1,304 in January, according to Department of Homeland Security data. An independent analysis by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization, concluded that at least 3,800 minors under 18, including 20 infants, were detained in 2025… The population at the detention facility in Dilley swelled. Immigration lawyers have said children have been held well beyond the 20-day legal threshold established in 1997 under a legal settlement known as the Flores agreement. Many children have been detained at routine immigration check-ins, immigration lawyers said.

In the past week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats have made reining in ICE to prevent the kind of abuse we have all been watching in the Twin Cities into a requirement for passage of the federal budget.  The NY Times’ Carl Hulse lists demands being made by Senate Democrats for reforms at the Department of Homeland Security: “unmasking immigration agents, ending their indiscriminate sweeps, and requiring them to obtain warrants as well as abide by strict use-of-force guidelines, among others.”

In a formal statement sent to members of the U.S. Senate, First Focus on Children adds a set of protections that are desperately needed to secure the safety and smooth operations of the institutions that serve our nation’s children, and to secure the rights and the safety of the hundreds of children and adolescents who have been hauled away—sometimes with parents and sometimes alone—into long-term immigration detention centers where many are being held for months.  First Focus demands that Congress take action to:

• “Protect and expand the Flores Settlement…. This decades-old agreement provides the only federal minimum standards for children while in immigration custody… We must strengthen, not gut protections for children.
• “End child and family detention. There is no safe or humane way to detain children beyond the short term. Instead of pouring funding into large-scale detention facilities, we should invest in community-based alternatives that keep families together while respecting due process and human dignity.
• “Restore sensitive location protections. Adopt the provisions in the Protecting Sensitive Locations Act.  Schools, child care centers, hospitals, places of worship, and other child-centered community locations must be protected spaces, not sites of fear.  Enforcement actions near schools don’t just harm children—they unravel trust in the institutions that help… (children) grow.
• “Guarantee legal and judicial protections for children—and keep families together whenever possible… Children should never face immigration court alone. Congress and the Administration must restore and permanently fund legal representation for all children in immigration proceedings, recognizing that legal counsel is not a luxury but a basic safeguard against injustice.”

On behalf of public school students, their teachers, and officials like the school superintendent, the school principal, and the school board leader in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, the National Education Association released a statement demanding “that ICE immediately end its occupation, (and) withdraw from our communities… This moment requires moral clarity and courage—because this is not just an immigration issue. It is a human rights issue, a civil rights issue, and a democracy issue. It is about whether the promise of justice and liberty applies to everyone equally, and whether the values we teach our students about freedom and democracy hold up in the world they are growing up in.”