‘Time to speak up’: In Columbia Heights, school leaders stepped in to protect families as ICE surged
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When U.S. Immigration and Customs agents first descended on families in Columbia Heights schools, superintendent Zena Stenvik smoldered but stayed quiet.
She didn’t speak out in early January after armed federal agents detained a fourth grader and her mother on their way to school, or when a district family disappeared from their home on Jan. 9, taken by ICE. She kept quiet as masked federal agents began following district school buses and circling school parking lots.
But then came Liam Conejo Ramos, the little 5-year-old in the blue bunny hat.
Stenvik recalled rushing to Liam’s home on Jan. 20 after hearing ICE was at the family’s house. When she arrived, the Valley View Elementary School boy was in custody with his father. ICE agents, she said, tried to use the child as “bait” to detain his pregnant mother, who became so distraught she needed to be taken to the emergency room.
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By early next morning, Stenvik knew silence was no longer an option. She called Mary Granlund, the district’s school board chair, and said, “I’m ready. Are you?”
In the three weeks since, Stenvik, Granlund and a cadre of Columbia Heights principals, teachers, interpreters and social workers have intervened in ways once unimaginable for leaders of a small suburban school system.
Stenvik and her staff now do daily patrols. They check on detained kids or families and find them legal help. They help coordinate a garrison of parents and others who are hand-delivering food to families in hiding as schools teach 25 percent of the student body virtually because kids are afraid to come to the buildings.
“It was time to speak up,” Stenvik said in an interview with MPR News. “I'm glad that we did, because I think that there's some disbelief, because it's so shocking and so aggressive and violent and harmful to children.”
“There's absolutely nothing normal about this,” she said of needing school personnel to stand on street corners at the end of the day waiting to see if ICE might appear. “We should be going about the business of school.”
‘I’m with you’
Stenvik and Granlund at first worried going public would do more harm than good to families in the Columbia Heights district. But after Liam’s mom said she wanted people to know what had happened, Stenvik moved forward.
Within hours, the two were standing in Liam’s preschool classroom, telling local news reporters the 5-year-old and his father had been taken by ICE.
“We had reached a saturation point,” said Stenvik. ICE agents were “literally swarming all over the schools, day in and day out, in the morning, in the middle of the day, in the afternoon, parking in our parking lots … on the weekends. We just decided that we couldn't even have a bigger target on our back.”
Since Liam’s detention, two more Columbia Heights students have been taken into ICE custody, and the district has discovered that a third family, including a fifth grade student, who had disappeared in early January, were sent to a family detention center in Texas.
Twenty-six parents from Liam’s school, Valley View Elementary, have also been detained. The district has not been able to get an accurate count of how many students total have seen their family members detained.
“These operations are not what we were told they were going to be,” said Stenvik. “We were told that perhaps an ICE agent would show up to our school with a signed judicial warrant, and we were trained on what to do when that happened. That's not happening at all.”
The reality, she added, is closer to fishing. “They're casting out their hook and reeling in anyone who fits the profile, which is — let's be clear — brown people, immigrant people, Black and brown people, Indigenous people, and reeling them in indiscriminately,” she said. “So it's not targeting violent criminals, clearly.”
Despite promises of a drawdown from federal officials — White House border czar Tom Homan on Thursday said the surge was coming to a conclusion — Stenvik said she has seen no decrease in ICE activities around her district.
The presence of ICE agents the past few weeks has changed life dramatically for students. The district estimates 800 of its students, about one in four, are now learning from home because they’re too afraid to attend classes in person.
As the schools have emptied, staff have filled cafeterias, meeting rooms and hallways with diapers, rice, beans and other groceries to distribute to hundreds of families too afraid to leave their homes. They are driving to pick up stranded families who have been left on streets after being released from custody by ICE agents.
“We were taking the licks. You know, they were taking our families, and it's hard seeing them get taken,” said Jason Kuhlman principal at Valley View Elementary.
“It wasn't until Liam's hit — you're talking our youngest learners being abducted — and our (federal) administration saying the dad ran, and it was a blatant lie — It was time to go on the offensive,” he said.
Stenvik’s willingness to take a public stand galvanized district leaders, Kuhlman said.
“This is happening in America. This is happening in our state. And how do we say enough?” Kuhlman said. “The superintendent said, ‘I'm done,’ and I said, ‘I'm with you.’ And all the leaders in Columbia Heights said the same thing.”
‘We love our children fiercely’
Kuhlman and his staff are focused on making their school a place where kids who can still come to class in person feel safe. They’re doing more artwork and taking more breaks.
The principal, though, said the stress and fear students are feeling is showing up in how quick kids are to reach an emotional breaking point.
Sandra Garzon, an interpreter at the district’s early childhood family education center, saw a glimpse of that during a recent lockdown drill. One of the kids in her class began screaming. She believes it came from the stress and fear the student had felt after seeing a person in his family be detained by ICE.
“That little kid that was super scared when we had a normal drill. And he's scared, because he's seen everything that everyone is going through, even one of his family members that was taken,” Garzon said.
Kuhlman and Stenvik sometimes worry about school staffers overextending themselves or putting themselves in danger.
Stenvik recalled being outside during school dismissal while ICE agents were conducting an operation across the street from the district’s high school, elementary and family center complex.
She told students to go back inside and wait. But then she watched as elementary school teachers came running out of the building with whistles to confront the cars filled with masked, armed men.
“(There were) a lot of whistles happening,” Stenvik said, adding that Granlund, the school board chair who was also on the scene, asked the ICE agents to leave the area.
Later that night Stenvik called Michele Janke, principal of Highland Elementary School in the district, to say she was concerned about staff “running out there” and whether they’d all be trained to “stay back and not get into trouble, or not get shot.”
Janke, she said, was insistent that her staff wanted to be able to protect kids, saying “Oh, we love our children fiercely.”
She has asked staff to be careful, adding that they continue to patrol the perimeter of their buildings.
“They're out here almost every day. Elementary school teachers,” Stenvik said. “First grade teachers taking care of some of our littlest kids.”
‘Everyone is afraid’
On Thursday after hearing Homan say the surge was ending, Columbia Heights officials posted a statement saying they were cautiously optimistic but pushed back hard on Homan’s comments that the ICE surge had made Minnesota safer. They also raised concerns about the at least seven students who have been detained by ICE.
While the crackdown may be ending, the fate of 5-year-old Liam and his family remains unclear. Liam and his father are back in Minnesota after being detained and flown to a Texas ICE facility, but the fight continues to keep the government from deporting the family, their immigration lawyers say.
Staff at Liam’s school, Valley View Elementary, and other Columbia Heights schools remain weary and worried.
Their superintendent still worries a staff member may get shot confronting masked agents at school dismissal. Valley View principal Jason Kuhlman worries about burnout.
“This level of support is not sustainable for our staff,” he said, noting that the school would need to find a full-time coordinator just to handle food donations and distribution and another for rides, carpooling and getting kids home.
“Normal for us right now is running around with our hair on fire trying to manage everything and make sure all of our people are taken care of,” he said. “At some point in time, that will go back to normal, I hope. I really hope.”
In the district’s early childhood and family education classrooms, teachers say they find themselves crying at random intervals throughout the day.
“We're having to navigate, like, how a 3-year-old gets to preschool safely. Like, what is going on? No one should ever have to deal with that,” said ECFE teacher Olivia Timmons.
“There's literally no other human response than to just cry. And then you just wipe the tears, and you just kind of walk into class. Or, depending on the class and who the adults are that are here, you just continue to cry, and then they cry with you.”
“Everyone is afraid, and it's not only newcomers, but also second and third generations. We have families that parents were born here; their kids are second generation, and they're afraid to leave their homes,” said Garzon, the interpreter.
She said the burden of what’s happening is falling particularly hard on mothers.
“They want to be there for their kids. They want to provide support, but they also need that help and support, and they need to be strong for them,” Garzon said. “They could be fine in front of their kids, and then they go in the kitchen and cry. If they see us, they hug us. They cry with us because they're afraid.”
