US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has taken custody of two children who attend the same Minnesota elementary school as Liam Ramos, the detained five-year-old, according to school officials.
The superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, told the Guardian that two brothers, in second and fifth grades, were detained with their mother on Thursday. The mother has a pending asylum case and the family has since been transported to a Texas detention facility, the school official said.
Their detention comes amid growing outrage over the government’s continued holding of Liam, a pre-schooler, who is at the same Texas facility with his father and was reported this week to be in a “depressed” state.
The mother of the two boys was first taken into custody during a court appointment for her ongoing immigration case on Thursday, said Zena Stenvik, the superintendent. The mother called school leaders from detention asking that they bring her children to her at the Whipple federal building, a local facility where immigration officers have been holding people arrested during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration operation in the region.
The mother told the school there was no other family to take care of her sons, leaving her no choice but to have her boys detained with her, Stenvik said.
“It was awful. It was heartbreaking for everybody,” the superintendent said. “This isn’t something we are prepared or trained for. We’ve dedicated our lives to protecting and educating children.”
Stenvik said she and Jason Kuhlman, the boy’s principal at Valley View elementary school, made a plan to have trusted school officials be by the boys’ side to comfort and take care of them as they escorted them into the detention center to be reunited with their mother.
“[For ICE] to put us in a position like that, I don’t have words … the frustration, the anger, it’s overwhelming,” Kuhlman told Minnesota Public Radio. “[The boys] were very quiet and … stoic until we walked through the doors of the Whipple building, and then the older one started to get upset and rightfully so. He’s a fifth-grader, so I guarantee he knows what’s going on … I think the fear started setting in.”
The family has not been publicly identified and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not immediately respond to inquiries on Friday.
A school nurse held both of the boys’ hands as they walked into the facility, said Stenvik. Kuhlman had the family’s immigration paperwork on him and asked officials if the mother and her children could be released with the school leaders, but agents refused, the superintendent said: “It was very, very traumatic for the children and adults alike.”
Leslee Sherk, principal of Columbia academy, another school in the district, also accompanied the boys to the facility and told Minnesota Public Radio they appeared in shock: “It’s a lot of people in there with guns and weapons and formality and security and masks … It is not a place for kids. It’s scary.”
The boys and their mother have since been transferred to the family immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, the superintendent said. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democratic congressman, visited Liam and his father at the facility this week and said he was concerned about the boy’s mental state.
There are now five students enrolled in the Columbia Heights school district who are detained in Dilley, Stenvik said.
Liam and his father were taken into custody last week as they came home from school. DHS has said agents weren’t targeting Liam and alleged that his mother refused to take him. But school officials, some who rushed to the scene of the arrests, have said it appeared agents were trying to use the boy as “bait” to get his family members to open their front door so agents could potentially detain others.
Liam’s family has an active asylum case and had entered the US at an authorized port of entry, lawyers have said.
Minneapolis immigrants’ rights lawyers have been fighting in court to stop ICE from rapidly transferring detained people out of state, which they say takes them out of the court jurisdiction in Minnesota, making it harder for families to access their lawyers and fight their cases.
In another case last week, immigration agents detained a two-year-old girl and her father in Minneapolis and quickly transported them to Texas despite a judge’s order to keep them in state, lawyers said. The government has since returned the girl to Minnesota, allowing her to be reunited with her mother, following a federal judge’s order.
“This will have long-lasting negative impacts on our children, not just for those who are horrifically detained, but those who are living in fear, those who are not leaving their homes and are now learning online, and those who are driving to school and being stopped,” Stenvik said. “We are not crime-ridden here. Our students and their families are not criminals … Our families deserve to go back to living in a peaceful way.”
