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The Trump administration has unleashed a wave of fear and terror in Minnesota — and not even children are safe.
On Tuesday, Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old Minnesota boy, was detained by immigration officials outside of his home. A photo of the incident quickly went viral: The image of the worried little boy wearing a little blue hat with ears and a Spider-Man backpack, surrounded by federal agents, drew widespread outrage.
At a Thursday press conference about the incident, teacher Ella Sullivan spoke about Ramos. “He’s a bright young student, and he’s so kind and loving, and his classmates miss him. And all I want is for him to be safe and back here,” Sullivan told reporters. He is reportedly being held at a detention facility in Texas.
But Ramos’ detention isn’t the only time Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have arrested a child, just the latest. Columbia Heights Public School District, where Ramos attends Valley View Elementary School, has said that three other students have been detained by immigration officials in recent weeks.
Teachers say that parents still see school as a safe place for their children. And kids want to come to school. But the Trump administration’s siege on Minnesota has created a culture of fear and anxiety surrounding what used to be a mundane routine all around the state.
“Students feel cautiously safe when they’re in school largely because they have teachers they can trust,” Christoph, a high school teacher in Southern Minnesota who asked to only be identified by his first name, told HuffPost. “But there’s that lingering fear of what’s going to happen when that door opens.”
“Being a kid is no longer safe,” he said.
The fears are not unfounded. Last week, ICE agents detained a parent in Robbinsdale, a city about 10 miles from Minneapolis, while her child and others were waiting for the school bus. “Armed military masked men started asking her questions, her mom came out and they went and talked to her. They ended up detaining her,” Mike Vestal, a teacher at Northport Elementary School, told HuffPost.
“The kid ran to the bus. She was mentally shaken. This is a 9-year-old — it was pretty emotional.”
“You don’t think things like that would happen in America,” he added.
Teachers say that reports of ICE cruising through parking lots or casing school pickup lines looking for immigrant parents have children terrified. Educators are left to explain to their students what’s happening, keeping in mind that they can’t necessarily assuage their fears.
“I’m working with students who are 11 to 14, and they have a lot of questions and fear,” a middle school teacher in Minneapolis, who asked not to be identified for safety reasons, told HuffPost. “It’s a tricky thing to not be able to say ‘it’ll all be OK’ or ‘you’re safe.’ The things we want to tell our kids to be reassuring are just not true.”
Christoph added, “Their biggest fear is transition time, of walking to school, dropoff.”
Vestal said he and his fellow teachers are getting frightened emails from parents. “I have one that says ’I’m a citizen but I’m Latino, it’s too dangerous to send my daughter to school.”
In some school districts, attendance is down as families opt to keep their kids home. Vestal said nearly half of his class is missing.
“Where I teach, we have a lot of students who are third-generation Americans, and some of them don’t feel safe anymore,” Christoph said of his high school students. “They’ve felt safe their whole lives, and all of a sudden someone is coming after them.”
Education Minnesota, the state’s largest professional teachers’ organization, has decried ICE’s actions. “Schools shouldn’t need to do this. Children shouldn’t be denied their right to a public education because ICE has made the streets too dangerous to travel,” organization president Monica Byron told HuffPost in a statement. “This vendetta against Minnesota is disruptive, cruel and entirely unnecessary. It could stop with a phone call from the White House, and our schools could get back to normal.”
The Trump administration denies going after children as part of its immigration enforcement. At a press conference Thursday, Vice President JD Vance seemed to brush off the news of Ramos’ detention, suggesting officers took the child for his own safety.
“Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a 5-year-old child freeze to death?” he told reporters. School officials have said publicly that there were multiple options for Ramos’ care, including another adult at the home who could have taken the boy.
But President Donald Trump has long signaled that children could be collateral damage of his agenda of mass deportation: On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump announced that his Department of Homeland Security would be rescinding the longstanding rule that ICE could not conduct operations in sensitive areas like hospitals, churches and schools — all places where children are likely, even guaranteed, to be present. Even when children are not the explicit targets of immigration enforcement, ICE seems to have no qualms about sweeping them up with adults.
“I’ve been teaching for 32 years. It’s never been this bad before,” Vestal said. “This is the hardest it’s ever been to teach.”
It’s unclear when the Trump administration will end the operation. In the meantime, teachers have begun using familiar strategies to keep students safe; they are the same ones schools have designed for school shootings.
“The words we’re using, the codes and colors, are the same we would use if there was an immediate danger in the neighborhood or if there was a shooter in the school,” the middle school teacher said.
“Only now, the enemy is government-sanctioned.”