Minnesota Superintendent Fires Back at JD Vance Over Child Detentions

Immediately after the 2016 election, the Columbia Heights School District partnered with the Wilson Law Group to provide bilingual 'Know Your Rights' presentations and facilitate 'Delegation of Parental Authority' (DOPA) forms. These forms allowed parents to designate guardians for their children in case of detention, a measure the district had never anticipated needing.

Right after the inauguration, on February 10th, we started partnering with the Wilson Law Group, which provided bilingual presentations to our families and our staff called Know Your Rights. Over a year ago, we were having families fill out DOPA forms, delegation of parental authority, so in the case that they had to give their child away because they would be detained.

The district experienced its first direct ICE presence on campus in January, with agents parking in school lots. This quickly escalated to the detention of students, including a 10-year-old girl, Elizabeth, apprehended with her mother while driving to school, and later, 5-year-old Liam Ramos, who was taken despite neighbors and school officials offering to care for him.

January 3rd, which was a Saturday, I got a cold call from a principal... ICE is on the campus... January 6th, our little 10-year-old Elizabeth was taken apprehended and detained with her mother while they were driving to school... I pull up... and she comes up to me with tears in her eyes saying, 'They took the child.'

The constant threat of ICE detentions created pervasive fear among students, with children asking if they would be taken or if their parents would be home. This fear led 800 students to switch to online learning, severely impacting their education and creating a 'new normal' that the superintendent insists must not be normalized.

I've had children say to me, 'Am I going to get taken? Will my parents be home when I get home from school today?'... 800 online. As good as we've gotten at it, it's systematized unfortunately. It cannot be normalized. This can never be normal.

The community organized extensively, holding training sessions for over 200 people on how to respond to ICE. Grandparents and other volunteers stood on street corners, sometimes for 16 hours in bitter cold, to act as lookouts. School staff, including the superintendent, drove school vans and walked students home to ensure their safety from ICE agents.

In sometime in January, we had 220 people show up to a church for a training... You're welcome to stand on the corners. We've got grandpas out there wearing their Minnesota nice watch t-shirts... I was driving the school van one time and I had a handful of kids in the back... And then Ice pulls up and I was like, 'Get in the van.'

Superintendent Stenvvic directly countered JD Vance's argument that detaining children is necessary to enforce laws, stating that the families involved in her district, including Liam's, had no criminal records and possessed thick files of legal immigration documentation. She emphasized that ICE was 'snatching and kidnapping and disappearing people who are here legally.'

Liam himself, Liam's father, Liam's mother, in all of the cases that I've worked on, they are they have no criminal record. So, they are they are snatching and kidnapping and disappearing people who are here legally. They have an, you know, again, thick immigration paperwork. I've seen it with my own eyes.