Columbia Heights Public School District superintendent Zena Stenvik said armed and masked officers apprehended two 17-year-olds, a 10-year-old, and the five-year-old this week, Reuters reported.
“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 told a press conference.
She said the activity is inducing trauma and taking a toll on children in the community.
The detentions are part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has deployed about 3,000 federal officers to the Minneapolis area.
The five-year-old, Liam Conejo Ramos, and his father were taken to a family detention facility in Dilley, Texas, according to family attorney Marc Prokosch.
Prokosch said the Ecuadorean family was in the country legally with a pending asylum petition and awaiting an immigration hearing.
Vice President JD Vance offered a different account, stating officers were pursuing Liam’s father who fled, forcing them to take the abandoned boy.
“What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?” Vance said during a visit to Minneapolis.
Witnesses, including school board chair Mary Granlund, contradicted the government’s narrative.
They said officers took Liam’s father from their driveway after he returned from preschool with his son on Tuesday.
Granlund said officers then used Liam to try to lure his mother from the house, refusing offers from school officials and neighbors to take custody of the child.
“The sense of safety in our community and around our schools is shaken and our hearts are shattered,” Granlund said
Columbia Heights city council member Rachel James witnessed the boy being placed in a black SUV.
“He was frozen and paralyzed,” James said. “He was not crying, but he looked so scared.”
The Department of Homeland Security said Liam’s father was in the country illegally but provided no details.
Attorney Prokosch denied this, stating Minnesota records show no criminal history for the family.