COLUMBIA HEIGHTS, Minnesota: A five-year-old boy was among four children detained by U.S. immigration officials from the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights.
School officials and a lawyer for the family of the five-year-old, however, challenged the government narrative of the five-year-old's detention put forward by Vice President JD Vance.
The Ecuadorean boy and his father, both legal asylum applicants, were taken away to a family detention facility in Dilley, Texas, said Marc Prokosch, the attorney representing the family.
Zena Stenvik, superintendent of the Columbia Heights Public School District, told a press conference that armed and masked ICE officers apprehended four students, listing two 17-year-olds and a 10-year-old in addition to the five-year-old boy, Liam Conejo Ramos.
"ICE agents have been roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots multiple times, and taking our kids," Stenvik said.
"The onslaught of ice activity in our community is inducing trauma and is taking a toll on our children."
The arrests are part of President Donald Trump's stricter immigration campaign. Nearly 3,000 federal officers were sent to the Minneapolis area. People there have been very nervous since January 7, when an immigration officer shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three.
Armed federal officers have been chasing people they say are dangerous criminals or are in the country illegally. At the same time, worried protesters have started their own watch groups. They blow whistles to warn others about ICE raids and to show their anger at the increased enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security said Liam's father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, was in the U.S. illegally, but did not give details.
Witnesses said Liam, wearing a blue hat and a Spider-Man backpack, saw masked officers take his father from their driveway after they returned from preschool. Witnesses also said officers then tried to use the boy to get his mother to come outside.
Vice President Vance later said officers were chasing the father, who ran away, and that they had no choice but to take the child who was left alone. He said officers could not just leave a five-year-old child by himself, and they also had to arrest someone who was in the country illegally.
But witnesses, including school officials and neighbors, said they offered to take care of the boy, and ICE refused. Mary Granlund, head of the local school board, said schools are allowed to take a child if no parent is present.
Granlund said the boy's mother was inside the house, but the father told her not to come out, likely because she feared being arrested too. When asked if the boy was being used to draw the mother outside, Granlund said yes.
She said people in the community now feel unsafe, especially around schools, and that children should be in school with their classmates, not in the middle of police actions.
A city council member, Rachel James, said officers put the boy in a black SUV and drove away quickly. She said the child looked frozen with fear, did not cry, but appeared extremely scared.
Later, Prokosch said the father was not in the U.S. illegally, and that state records showed no criminal history for the family. He said they were waiting for a hearing with an immigration judge.
