A Minneapolis school closed all classes on Monday after receiving a bomb threat, authorities said. The district said the closures were “out of an abundance of caution” after an emailed threat targeted several schools.
Columbia Heights Public School's superintendent Zena Stenvik told MS NOW, “The bomb threat to the school district definitely didn’t help with with our sense of safety and security.”
Authorities swept all schools in the district and found no active threat. Classes are expected to resume on Tuesday.
The threat came just one day after 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, returned home from an immigration facility in South Texas. Liam is a preschooler in the Minneapolis district and was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on January 20. Photos of him wearing a fuzzy blue bunny beanie and a Spider-Man backpack went viral online, which brought in national attention to ICE’s aggressive detention practices under the Trump administration.
A federal judge ordered the release of Liam and his father on Saturday and called their detention as an “imposition of cruelty” by the Trump administration.
US District Judge Fred Biery said: “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
Liam and his father were released from the Dilley family detention centre on Sunday and returned to Minneapolis.
The school superintendent Stenvik said she spoke with Liam’s mother after he arrived home and confirmed he will return to school with a support plan once he has recovered.
Four other children from the district are still being held at Dilley. Stenvik said, “Some of our youngest students are very aware of what is happening. They see it with their own eyes, as well… the kids are coming to school asking about it because they see it.”
Stenvik criticised the impact on children, saying, “I am confident that this will have long lasting negative impacts on children, and I really just find it to be senseless again. Cases that we’re working with, like Liam’s family’s case, they entered the United States legally. They were following the rules.”
