Minnesota parents now need to be extra careful, as ICE agents have employed a new tactic where they target children instead of the parents. The reasoning behind this strategy is that adults are often more wary and more able to slip through the attempts of ICE agents to catch them in Minnesota. Children, however, are being used as a form of bait to lure out their parents. Such an incident has already happened in Minnesota before, with a five-year-old boy getting detained by ICE agents alongside his father. It does not seem like ICE agents are interested in stopping this tactic in Minnesota anytime soon.
Recently, students at Columbia Heights High School recorded ICE agents present on school grounds in Minnesota. Videos show lines of students pressed against classroom windows, watching an unmarked black vehicle parked on the property. It soon became clear that the people inside were ICE agents. School administrators were notified and went outside to confront them. The agents eventually left, but their presence on campus has heightened concern among students and families across Minnesota.
Online, users reacted with outrage, calling it a serious overreach and viewing it as another attempt by ICE to detain children in Minnesota. “Monsters,” one user said. Some users even referred to them as predators, saying that they shouldn’t be allowed to be near any children, much less their schools where they gather. One user, who claimed to be a teacher, expressed worry and shock over the incident in Minnesota. “As a teacher, I cannot imagine this happening but know we must prepare for it. Our poor children/students will never recover from these events,” they said.
Another group of commenters expressed that if the government didn’t take action against ICE in Minnesota, they would pull their kids from school and shift to homeschooling. “If they so much as show up at my child’s school, I will be switching to homeschool. There are a lot of resources and information about homeschooling, and the people I know that are already doing it have said wonderful things about it,” one user said.
Others remarked that perhaps schools in Minnesota should just stick to online learning until the situation with ICE agents calms down. “Oh, my, we’ll have to all do completely online school here in Minnesota. Like Covid, when students lost ground because they couldn’t have in-person learning. We’ll never get our society back to order at this rate. I am heartbroken, devastated, and really mad. Going out to do a shift at patrolling a school with a whistle.”
Some online users sounded the alarm, calling the actions of ICE agents in Minnesota not a standard deportation process but an act of human trafficking. “Human trafficking, this is not a deportation process. PEOPLE ARE MISSING EVERYWHERE, and families don’t know where they are!” one commenter said.
