2 more Minnesota children are taken into ICE custody
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Two more Minnesota children — a second grader and a fifth grader — were taken into custody with their mother on Thursday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The children are from the same Columbia Heights elementary school as Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old whose detainment by ICE last week gripped the Twin Cities and the nation as images of the small boy flanked by agents in his winter hat circulated online.
Columbia Heights school officials said Thursday’s detention happened after agents apprehended the children’s mother during her court appointment earlier that day.
Jason Kuhlman, principal at Valley View Elementary where the children attend school, 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.
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“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.
“It is not a place for kids,” she added. “It's scary.”
— Elizabeth Shockman and Kerem Yücel, MPR News
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