From The New Yorker this week:
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. On Thursday, a pair of siblings in the second and fifth grade were taken into federal custody with their mother; they, too, are in Dilley.
So is the sixth student, Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old boy from Ecuador. A single image of the little boy, snapped by a neighbor at the scene of his abduction, has become iconic of Operation Metro Surge, which is what the Department of Homeland Security calls their occupation of Minneapolis. In the picture, Liam stands next to a salt-stained S.U.V., bundled up for the cold and wearing a bright-blue winter hat with fluffy white bunny ears. Behind him, the disembodied hand of a federal agent grips his Spider-Man backpack.
Liam, along with this father, was the subject of a scathing court order by Judge Fred Biery yesterday; the full text is here
:
Liam and his father were released yesterday and are back home in Minnesota. Though he is home now, note that the impacts of what happened to him will be long-lasting.
What it's like to be the superintendent there now:
What it's like to be the chair of the school board there now (this from The New Yorker, as well):
Granlund, in her capacity as school-board chair, has repeatedly demanded that ICE agents leave public-school property; in the first of these encounters, a few weeks ago, a masked ICE agent used his phone to record Granlund, her car, and her license plate, while reciting aloud her full legal name and address. Teachers at Highland Elementary School routinely stick around after dismissal to patrol the perimeter of the high school next door—where Homeland Security agents often loiter—as it lets out for the day. “I’ve seen first-grade teachers and music teachers with whistles in hand, running toward ICE,” Zena Stenvik, the Columbia Heights Public Schools superintendent, told me. “Literally, educators are putting their bodies between ICE agents and children.” On January 21st, an ICE vehicle pulled into the loading dock of the high school; in a video of the incident, taken from a classroom window, students can be overheard in a hubbub of jeering, incredulity, and fear.Recently, Granlund was picking up her son from the high school when she heard that ICE had descended on a nearby apartment complex, one that is home to many students in the district. She ran with some teachers, blowing their whistles, to the parking lot where ICE agents had been spotted. In a video of the incident, about a half-dozen women, unarmed and dressed for the classroom, square off against at least four masked agents of the federal government, their chests puffed out under bulky tactical gear. The women scream at ICE to get out, that they are not welcome in their community. “Are your moms proud of you?” one calls out. “Do they know what you do? Do they know that you separate families?”
One of the most wrenching passages I read this week was this one, also from Columbia Heights, from Minnesota Public Radio:
Kuhlman said the children’s mother called the school early Thursday to tell them she’d been detained and asked school leaders to bring the kids to her at the Whipple Federal Building near Fort Snelling because there were no family members in Minnesota to care for them.
“We had to deliver them to a detention center,” Kuhlman said.
“The kids were with us. They were safe. They feel comfortable with us because we’re caring adults. But to ask educators to deliver them is horrible, you know?” he added. “I will always abide by a parent’s wishes. And she wanted to be reunited with the boys. She wanted to go together. But great goodness (for ICE) to put us in a position like that. I don’t have words.”
He said the boys cried when he told them what was happening and were frightened and asked to hold a school nurse’s hand when they walked into the Whipple Building.
“She was holding both their hands. It’s a lot of people in there with guns and weapons and formality and security and masks,” said Leslee Sherk, principal of Columbia Academy, another Columbia Heights school leader who helped deliver the children to the Whipple Building.
Those are the second and fifth grader mentioned above.
They are not home in Minnesota and safe.
They should be.
