The terror for children, parents and teachers in Minnesota started even before Operation Metro Surge sent thousands of heavily armed, masked federal agents into the streets. The school year began with a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in South Minneapolis, where two children died and at least 24 others were injured. Local families barely had time to process those deaths — only five years after the killing of George Floyd rocked their city — before their daily lives were upended by the chaotic presence of federal officers harassing citizens under the guise of immigration enforcement.
A teacher named Sarah in the Twin Cities told me that her school received a bomb threat after Renee Good’s killing, ostensibly for being too supportive of immigrants. “I kind of forgot about it because we went on with our day, teaching,” Sarah, who is a mother, told me, acknowledging how absurd it was that lockdowns and the shadow of violence were now unremarkable fixtures of the public school experience in Minnesota. (Like many people I spoke to for this story, she requested that I use only her first name because she feared retaliation against or further targeting of her school.)
Two things became clear as I talked to parents, educators and school board members in Minnesota and Maine, where there was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown called Operation Catch of the Day in January targeting immigrants from Somalia.
The first is that the fear and disruption touch nearly every parent and child in these places. A Minnesota woman named Alli, who has a child on the autism spectrum, told me that because she and her child are not white, she is worried about him having a meltdown in public and attracting immigration enforcement. She wondered aloud to me, “Can we go to swim class tonight,” or should they just stay home to avoid being hassled and potentially traumatized?
The second is that everyday people who otherwise describe themselves as not especially political are stepping up for their fellow parents and children. We know public schools are often a hub of local connection, but what stands out is how far schools have extended their care into the community. Fellow parents are offering rides, food, grocery delivery and money to the families affected. They’re patrolling the sidewalks in front of schools to keep an eye out for ICE vehicles in the deep northern freeze.
Educators like Valley View Elementary School’s principal, Jason Kuhlman, are taking students to visit their detained parents at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. Valley View is where Liam Conejo Ramos — the prekindergartner in a bunny ears hat whose photo while being detained by federal agents has become an icon of the crackdown’s cruelty — is a student and where at least 25 other families have had a parent or guardian apprehended.
“We gave them hugs,” Kuhlman told my newsroom colleague Sarah Mervosh, of two children he took to see their detained mother. “We’re crying; they’re crying.” Later he found out that the three were taken to a detention center in Texas.
It struck me that these parents and teachers, mourning together, are treating all children as their own.
When parents across the country leave the house for school drop-off or errands, they have to figure out whether the route they are taking is safe by checking Signal and WhatsApp chats and social media posts and recalculate if they think agents are lingering. If they are immigrants or the relatives of immigrants, they are afraid of being targeted and detained even if they are here legally.
Alexandra, a stay-at-home mother of two children in a suburb of Minneapolis, is married to an immigrant from the Caribbean. Though her husband is naturalized, she explained that he will no longer do pickups and drop-offs at school, and she doesn’t take her children to places like Mall of America because she is afraid they will be targeted because of the color of their skin. “I’m terrified when he leaves by himself that he won’t come home,” Alexandra said of her husband. “He travels anywhere he goes with his passport. It’s like my body is on constant alert, knowing that anywhere I turn, something could happen and my kids could see that and it would affect them for the rest of their lives.”
Even the littlest children notice that their friends are missing from class and have questions. On Jan. 27, 21.3 percent of public school students in Portland, Maine, were absent, according to Sarah Lentz, the chair of the city’s school board. That’s about three times the average for a typical day in January. Attendance dropped so much in the Twin Cities that public schools are now offering remote learning as an option for children too scared to go in person.
A few years ago, I wrote an article about how public school is for care: that so many educators and counselors are going above and beyond their job descriptions to give children whatever they may need when they walk through the door, from food to clothing to emotional stability. That is part of the mission of public schools — to take the children as they are, whoever they are. Lentz told me that Portland schools have long served recent immigrant communities and that the school district has worked with multiple food organizations for decades. “We send bags of culturally relevant food home on the weekends for kids and their families that need it,” she said, including halal options.
Among the greatest critics of public schools seem to be members of the Trump administration who have not set foot in them for decades, if at all. They do not acknowledge that schools, for all their imperfections, are highly functioning civic centers providing so much more than academics. It also occurs to me that the organizing on behalf of all children in Minnesota and Maine schools might be one reason the people running the Education Department want to defund public schools.
The heroism of ordinary people helping one another is profound and a silver lining of this preventable tragedy. But we should not lose sight of the real fear and anxiety, which won’t disappear overnight, even as the federal government claims to be backing off in Maine and Liam and his father have been returned to Minnesota from their detainment in Texas.
Every person I spoke to in Minnesota and Maine said that the disruption to their children’s lives was much worse than with Covid. At least then they knew that they would be safe when they were inside. The parents I spoke to who were organizing grocery drop-offs and driving other people’s children to school were afraid of being followed by ICE agents to immigrants’ homes or back to their own.
“These actions are going to have lifelong impacts on our kids, whether they’re experiencing it, whether they’ve witnessed it firsthand or they just saw it on social media,” said Anil Hurkadli, a Minneapolis-based independent educational consultant who served in the Department of Education under President Joe Biden. Whenever this ends, Hurkadli said, it’s going to take the entire community to help the children recover.
In an essay he wrote for The Minnesota Star Tribune, Hurkadli pointed out that during immigration crackdowns in Florida and California in the past few years, test scores fell among children who were affected. It’s nearly impossible to learn when students are afraid that their parents will be taken away.
For those of us who do not live in Maine or Minnesota, the past two months should serve as a warning. The targets are ultimately arbitrary — far from the southern border and hardly the states and cities where the most undocumented immigrants live. ICE raids continue all over the country, even if the presence of federal officers is not as disruptive or violent as it has been in these states.
Just because it’s not our children today doesn’t mean it won’t be tomorrow.
End Notes
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There was a public education bright spot last weekend when Leigh Wambsganss — a Texas Republican who was a proponent of book-banning efforts and far-right school board takeovers in Texas — lost a state legislative special election in the Fort Worth area to a Democrat, Taylor Rehmet. Wambsganss far outspent Rehmet in the district, which President Trump won by 17 points in 2024. This suggests to me that even in heavily Republican districts, parents do not want a far-right agenda in their public schools and are sick of the divisiveness.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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