How Minneapolis Students Are Dealing With ICE Crackdowns, Protests, and Widespread Fear: 'This Is Not Normal'
Sylvia, 17, is a senior at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, about two miles from where Renee Nicole Good was killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7. “That’s the moment that it hit me,” she says of the shooting. “This is not normal, and we can’t accept this as normalcy.”
In the weeks since, as has been widely reported, the immigration crackdown on Minneapolis has been relentless. There have been constant protests in response, with an “economic blackout” planned for Friday, January 23rd.
Meanwhile, chaos and fear have been seeping into schools, disrupting learning across the metropolis. ICE agents have detained several students—including a 5-year-old boy, an action Vice President JD Vance defended while visiting the city on Thursday—and the schools in the Minneapolis district have gone under frequent lockdown in response to the presence of federal agents. All now offer a remote-learning option —with students in a growing number of other cities, from Portland, Maine, to New Haven, Ct, staying home from school amid ICE fears.
The Effect on Teen Lives
Zicoya, a 15-year-old African American sophomore in Minneapolis, has been opting for remote school because her parents fear she could be targeted over her complexion. “A lot of the students of color have chosen to do that,” she says. “I definitely am anxious about what’s going on. Because I know they’re taking people whether they’re illegal, and even minors.”
Recently, she says, she saw a video on social media of ICE dragging a couple of people, including a child, out of her local grocery store. And she listened in horror as a friend recounted how her mother was being observed by ICE agents outside of her home, forcing the mom to wait in her car with her toddler until the agents finally drove off.
Sylvia, who has continued to attend school, says it feels “empty and a lot more segregated.” There is a large Hispanic population, “and most of them are staying home for their safety,” she says. “It makes me mad. It’s so unfair that for their, like, personal safety, their learning is being disadvantaged.”
District leaders told Minnesota Public Radio News on Friday that children, parents and school staff members have been pulled into vehicles by masked ICE agents and that people have been pepper sprayed on school grounds, where federal agents have been lying in wait. Several school districts told MPR that as many as 20 to 40% of students have stayed home in recent weeks.
“ICE agents have been roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots and taking our children,” Zena Stenvik, superintendent in the Columbia Heights district, where detained 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramo attends preschool, told MPR. “The sense of safety in our community and around our schools is shaken, and our hearts are shattered.”
The remote schooling brings echoes of the pandemic shutdown, except for the fact that “everyone had to do that,” says Zicoya, and so this time it feels even more isolating. But, she’s “scared” of attending school, she says, and of seeing ICE harassing other people, which she imagines “would probably be traumatizing.”
Lila Dominguez, a high school junior who has been documenting ICE raids for her school newspaper, told the Guardian that life has felt precarious. “The fact that our own government is keeping us from the schools that they provide and they want us to be at is scary, and it’s sad and it’s angering,” she said.
On TikTok, Minneapolis teen Taylor posted about feeling “jealous” of who teens who get to post about “a normal life,” as people in her community are “under occupation” and “suffering cruelly.”
The entire situation has given Sylvia and her friends a lot of anxiety.
“I definitely am more worried and stressed,” she says. She worries that “any big car” she sees could be filled with ICE agents. She’s nervous while working her job as a restaurant hostess because “if ICE comes in, I’m the first point of contact.” And she fears for her dad, who is Asian. “He bikes to work, and he works near where Renee Nicole Good was shot. So, I worry about him, and I worry about, like, my classmates and my coworkers and my neighbors.”
Last week, she took part in a school walkout, one of many across the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
“It was really powerful. I think it was like two thirds of the high school walked out,” Sylvia says. “I also saw that the middle schoolers were walking out—these 11-year-olds were out there—which absolutely breaks my heart.”
But as Clover Cary, 14, told the Sahan Journal, a local publication that reports on immigrant communities, “We just don’t want this occupation in our city.”
Families Are Pushing Back
Many parents have been organizing in response to the ICE activity, according to MPR, either by doing grocery shopping or laundry for families in hiding or by organizing school carpools or patrolling the perimeter of school property, armed with loud whistles (with some grappling over the idea that it may not be enough).
But for parents like Ella, a mom of two kids ages 12 and 17 who is a naturalized Armenian Russian citizen, patrolling the school is not an option.
“Even though I have my passport, and don’t have as much as a traffic violation, because of my complexion and of how I look, I do not want to expose myself to being potentially dragged on the ground into a vehicle,” she says. “Although it can happen to anyone, as is evidenced by what happened to Renee Good.”
Ella, who works in communications and has a degree in international human rights, says that what’s happening is “absolutely terrifying” and “completely unnecessary,” adding, “No one deserve this.” She bemoans the fact that her community was just beginning to rebuild after the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd when the ICE siege took hold.
Her kids still attend school because of their “paler complexion,” from their father. “But it’s still really awful because some of their classmates disappear or can’t come to school, and it’s really hard to focus,” she says. “It’s hard for them to process this.” Plus, she says, when the school went into “code yellow” lockdown in response to ICE activity recently, “the kids did not immediately know what was going on. So it’s obviously was very distressing, because they also use code red or yellow if there’s an active shooter in the building.”
While the family doesn’t live far from where the kids go to school, Ella says she still must think carefully about whether to risk going out to pick them up in the event of a bus delay. It’s difficult, she says, “explaining how something as easy as going to pick up your kids from school is becoming a dangerous undertaking.”
As for Sylvia, the whole situation has made her angry most of all. She says it will forever shape how she moves through the world.
“I’ll be more politically minded,” she says. Because before, while injustices were easy to move on from after initially feeling upset, she says, “I’m living through it. And I think I’ll have a lot more empathy for people in these situations now.”