Federal agents confront protesters in Minneapolis.Tom Baker/AP
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As immigration officers in Minneapolis and St. Paul target daycares and schools, a growing number of parents are terrified to bring their kids in, according to St. Paul City Council member Molly Coleman. “We’re hearing this from folks regardless of immigration status,” even families who are here legally, she says.
Coleman told me that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers showed up at her son’s Spanish immersion daycare on Wednesday and also arrested a teacher at one of the daycare’s other locations in Minneapolis. She isn’t sure what happened to the teacher. “We know they were at public schools” this week, too, she adds: “They are everywhere you look.”
“Right-wing activists are spreading lies about Minnesota.”
Minneapolis Public Schools canceled classes on Thursday and Friday “out of an abundance of caution,” citing safety concerns related to the local ICE presence. The Trump administration has described its enforcement surge in the Twin Cities as the “largest immigration operation ever.” On Wednesday, a federal officer in Minneapolis fatally shot a 37-year-old woman who was trying to drive her vehicle away from agents, prompting widespread outrage. Administration officials have not disclosed exactly how many ICE officers are on the ground, but they’ve threatened to send up to 2,000.
Also on Wednesday, armed US Border Patrol officers went to Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis just as classes were getting out. They tackled people, handcuffed two staff members, and hit bystanders with pepper spray and pepper balls. One school official told MPR News that he had instructed an officer to “please step off the school grounds,” whereupon the officer “knocked me down.”
“I’ve never seen people behave like this,” the official added. MPR News also viewed footage of masked officers dragging someone down the sidewalk outside the school. “I think school property should be off-limits. I think our kids need to feel safe at school,” Kate Winkel, who lives in the neighborhood, told the outlet. DHS denied targeting the school, students, or staff.
ICE has turned its eyes on daycares after a right-wing YouTuber accused some of them of fraudulently receiving government money. Nick Shirley’s video caught the attention of the Trump administration, which froze federal child care funding to the state and continued to criticize the city’s Somali community, which runs some of the daycares.
“Right-wing activists are spreading lies about Minnesota,” says Coleman, the council member. In the current climate, she declined to name the daycare her son attends, which ICE visited on Wednesday, but said it is run primarily by Latina women with work authorization.
Parents in her district are afraid to bring their kids in, she says. “Everything is so precarious that it feels like ICE could enter into any building, a home or a school, at any time. So families are choosing to stick together, and that means kids staying home from school,” she says.
Even in cities where fraud is not a focus, daycares and schools have been targets of the Trump administration. In Chicago, federal agents were videotaped dragging a worker out of the Rayito De Sol daycare center, slamming her face against the daycare’s glass doors, and handcuffing her as she said in Spanish, “I have papers.” The arrest occurred in front of children, according to witnesses.
I recently visited Memphis, where another heavy-handed enforcement operation is underway, and heard multiple reports of officers pulling people over near schools or even parking en masse in school parking lots ahead of student pickup. At Jackson Elementary, in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood, I wrote:
“I’ve been here 22 years, and I’ve never seen it this bad,” PE teacher Cassandra Rivers tells me. Because people are afraid of being detained while dropping off their kids, the Memphis-Shelby County School Board has agreed to create more bus routes. Meanwhile, daily attendance is down at least 10 percent at Jackson, Rivers says. Some students are so anxious that she has started calling their homes in the afternoon just to assure them that their parents are safe and sound.
Separately, I spoke with a 12-year-old girl whose dad immigrated from Mexico. She dreams of becoming a nurse, which would require good marks, but she told me she didn’t turn in a class project recently because it required sharing personal information like her age and why her parents came to Memphis. “I got worried. Why are they asking those types of questions? I feel like it was a trap and they are trying to take information to them”—ICE—she told me. Even though she’s a citizen, she has had to be vigilant about law enforcement, she added: “If I do a wrong movement, that would bring them here.”
In a Minneapolis suburb, the Edina High School student newspaper quoted a school cultural liaison who said “grades are suffering, attendance is suffering, [and] mental health is suffering” because of the recent ICE raids. That was last month, when there were fewer ICE officers on the ground.
Minneapolis Public Schools, in canceling classes this week, said the district would not use e-learning, which is only permitted for severe weather, and that it would also cancel school programs and athletics. On Thursday, Education Minnesota, a teachers union, put out a strong statement demanding that ICE stay away from schools.
