ICE's Assault on a Minnesota School District

"On Wednesday morning, well before the school run started, Mary Granlund was attempting to coax her dog outside for a brief walk in negative-two-degree weather, and her phone was already pinging with texts. "It's, like, 'Can someone help bring my kids to school today?' 'Can anybody pick my kids up from school today?' 'Has anyone called the police about the abandoned car?' " she told me."

"Granlund is the chair of the school board in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, a northeastern suburb of Minneapolis. This community of about three square miles and twenty-two thousand people is, like much of the greater Minneapolis metro area, presently swarmed with agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, and has been for weeks. Many parents who used to ferry their children to and from school every day have either been captured by ICE or are sheltering in place out of fear."

"Among the untold thousands of children nationwide who have been swallowed up in ICE dragnets, six of them are students in the Columbia Heights school district. One is a fourth grader who was abducted with her mother when they were driving to school; they are currently being held in the notoriously abject South Texas Family Residential Center, in Dilley, Texas. Two seventeen-year-old students were also taken: one, a boy, is back home, but the other, a girl, is in Dilley."

Columbia Heights, Minnesota, has been heavily patrolled by ICE and Border Patrol agents for weeks, creating fear and disruption. Many parents have been detained or are sheltering at home, leaving educators and neighbors to transport and protect children. Abandoned cars with engines running and open doors have become common. Six students in the Columbia Heights district have been taken into federal custody, including a fourth grader and her mother held at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, two seventeen-year-olds (one returned, one in Dilley), siblings in second and fifth grade in Dilley, and five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Ecuador.

Read at The New Yorker