‘Bad Guys Are Taking Mommies and Daddies’: ICE Upends Minneapolis Kids' Lives

Vera Swanson is like many 5-year-olds.

Her favorite colors are purple and sparkly blue. She loves strawberries. Art is her favorite subject in school. She really likes drawing axolotls.

“They’re so cute. I made them today,” Vera said while sitting on her couch in St. Paul with her parents nearby, just days after federal immigration agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

She’s bubbly and extroverted. She can’t help but say hello to everyone she sees while running errands with her mom, Stacy.

She’s well-liked at her French immersion school and is proud she can count to 20. Her teachers enjoy having her in class. Other parents come up to Stacy Swanson instantly knowing who she is by hearing their children’s stories of Vera, even if their kids aren’t in Vera’s class.

Since President Donald Trump’s surge of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents became a constant presence in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Vera’s heard her friends say something is happening.

And Vera’s taken up a new hobby: setting traps at home.

“I do need to make one because the bad guys are taking mommies and daddies,” she said.

Vera and Stacy, like thousands of other children and parents in the Minneapolis metro area, are grappling with the reality of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement operation. Since December 2025, ICE, whose campaign, Trump has said, is ostensibly about combating fraud, has not only resulted in fear, mass protests, unlikely community organizing, and two deaths—it has also wreaked havoc on school-age children, parents, and teachers in the Twin Cities.

Parents are figuring out on the fly how to tell their children about and protect them against armed federal agents, who are occupying the city and ripping people haphazardly off the street. Teachers are scrambling to instruct half-empty classrooms and keep students sheltering at home caught up. Students are facing an “unprecedented” disruption to their education for the second time in six years. And kids are wondering when they might see their friends again.

Talking to children about ICE

In an upheaval reminiscent of the coronavirus pandemic, federal agents have completely upended schooling in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, which has a combined population of more than 3 million people. Local news outlet MPR News has reported that in districts with significant Border Patrol presence, as many as 40 percent of students have been absent in recent weeks.

Some teachers are instructing half-empty classrooms as students attend online for fear of going outside. Parents worry their child might be taken, especially after ICE grabbed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos on Jan. 20 from his Columbia Heights driveway and used him as bait to capture his father.

The two were shipped to a detention center in Texas before a federal judge ordered them released. They returned to Minnesota on Feb. 1, though the Columbia Heights school district said four more children are still likely being held in a Dilley, Texas, detention center. On Feb. 2, the district canceled classes after a “credible” bomb threat was emailed to their schools.

The Columbia Heights Police Department said in a statement that they didn’t find any suspicious packages or devices. Classes resumed Feb. 3.

Swanson, 40, doesn’t sugarcoat what is going on and has tried to instill in her child a sense of duty to help those around her. She pulls from the stories her father, who retired as a sergeant in Benton County, told her when she was younger.

(Read more: Government Killings and Kidnappings in Argentina Drove Mothers to Revolt—And Win)

“I grew up listening to good guy, bad guy stories from my dad,” Swanson said. “I do the same for Vera. In our situation, ICE is not the good guys.”

Vera’s 5 and doesn’t fully comprehend what’s happening, but she knows she wants to help.

“All bad guys are trying to take dark skin people like my friend,” Vera said in an interview with Rewire News Group. “A lot of people have dark skin, so I try to keep them safe.”

Swanson is proud of her daughter’s conviction at such a young age, but it still weighs on her.

“I’m sure she’ll look back at this time in 20, 40, 60 years and say, ‘Wow, I lived through that,’” Swanson said. “I’m hoping that she won’t remember how stressed mom and dad were, or that it was a scary time. I hope she just remembers, like, ‘Oh, we went to a protest or we yelled because we wanted the bad guys to get out.’”

School disruptions

Mike Vestal, a third-grade teacher at Northport Elementary in Robbinsdale, a northwest suburb that borders Minneapolis, said the immediate chaos is apparent. Around 85 percent of the students at Northport are Black, Hispanic, or Asian and Pacific Islander.

“We’re sitting there trying to teach a class that is basically half here,” said Vestal, 61, who’s taught in the district for more than 30 years. “That makes it really difficult as a teacher.”

He worries, too, about what ICE’s disruption might mean in the long term. Robbinsdale, like most school districts in the metro—including Minneapolis and St. Paul—has switched to mixed modality, or hybrid, teaching. As of January 14, students in his district can come to class in-person or attend online for safety.

Around half of his 23 students are regularly not in the classroom.

Vestal said what pains him most is the cruelty of ICE’s violent campaign and the indifference some outside the Twin Cities have shown to their efforts. School is supposed to be a safe, fun environment for students. He still tries to make it that way, but fears the impending performance drop-off among students who switched to online learning or have simply been absent. Student performance declined during the switch to online learning during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Online learning is not great,” Vestal said. “It will never be the same as here.”

Vestal said he has at least been through the drill of preparing curriculum for online students, back in 2020 and 2021. But he struggles knowing he cannot reassure his students that everything will work out.

One day while Vestal was in the school office, a 9-year-old student who wasn’t in his class came running in. She said she was at the bus stop when armed, masked officers came up and started asking questions. Her mom came out and the officers went straight to her while the girl bolted onto the bus.

“She comes to school not knowing what’s going on with her mom,” Vestal said. “She’s breaking down and crying. We’re emotional. What do you say? How do you react to that? This is all new territory. That day was a blur to me. You can’t say to this student everything is going to be OK, because it’s not. Her mom did go to the detention center.”

‘No one wanted to go to school’

Luca, a 15-year-old Roosevelt High School student from Minneapolis who asked to only be identified by his first name, said school felt somewhat hollow in the aftermath of the death of 37-year-old Renee Good, an observer whom an ICE agent shot and killed on Jan. 7. Minneapolis Public Schools closed for safety reasons and canceled two more days of class when agents showed up and used tear gas against his classmates, a claim which DHS has denied.

“When I came to school, I found lots of friends and classmates missing. It felt scary,” Luca said. “I understood that no one wanted to go to school because of how scared they felt and about being abducted.”

Adriana Adams, a 16-year-old 11th grader at Johnson High School in St. Paul, said ICE’s chaos has jaded her. She already missed important formative school years during the pandemic. She should be playing softball and gearing up to hopefully go to the University of Minnesota.

Instead, she’s watching her classmates and their families live in constant terror.

“I just see kids constantly, basically just fearing for their lives,” Adriana said. “My classes are really empty now because students are scared to go to school or leave their houses. My life is just less humorous as it was before, and less content.”

Adriana, who is multiracial, wanted to join the hundreds of students at the state Capitol Jan. 14 for a walkout protest—partly planned by Luca—but knew her parents would worry. ICE might terrorize the gathering or, worse, abduct her.

“I don’t know how these kids are doing it,” said Adriana’s mom, Shannon. “I don’t think my generation could have held up as well as they are. Both my kids have taken it very well.”

Community groups have organized school patrols throughout the day to make sure ICE agents don’t harass or take children. The groups, largely made up of parents like Victoria Downey, 42, of St. Paul, clad in high-vis vests and armed with whistles, use social media groups or encrypted chats and pay special attention during pick-up and drop-off.

“I never thought I’d do this,” said Downey. “Frankly, I didn’t think I’d become a community organizer in this way, but that’s the role I’m playing now.”

Downey said her son, 5-year-old Otis, is still pretty upbeat. He was especially excited during the recent cold snap when his kindergarten class got to do indoor Harry Potter yoga for recess.

“But he’s a little more clingy than normal,” Downey said. “He needs more hugs. He definitely seemed upset at bedtime a few nights ago and wanted to sleep with me.”

(Read more: Pregnant Immigrants, Babies May Suffer Complications from Chronic Stress of ICE Raids)

Otis was especially inquisitive after Pretti’s shooting. Downey teaches a yoga class about a block away and was caught in the post-shooting chaos.

“Otis has asked questions about, ‘Were there ten ICE agents?’ And I said, ‘No,’” Downey said. “‘Twenty?’ ‘No, there were more.’ I’ve tried to keep some of the level of violence of what I saw away from him because I don’t think it’s good for him to see. I’ve talked to other parents about this. Our nervous systems are on high alert all the time. It makes it really difficult to be a good parent, to not react.”

She’s noticed her son is a bit more reactive as well, especially when he sees she is upset.

“I’ve had a tendency to just cry a lot,” she said. “I’ll see something or hear something—I’m OK with crying in front of him, but he’s come up to me a couple times and said, ‘It’s OK mama, I’ll protect you.’ That’s my job as a mom. I need to protect you.”

‘They could come back at any moment’

But the biggest stressor ICE has brought to the Twin Cities is uncertainty, parents told RNG. Uncertainty over whether they might abduct you or your child. Uncertainty over how to tell your children what the armed, masked men in the street are doing. Uncertainty over when they’ll leave. And uncertainty over how to rebuild once—or if—they’re gone.

“Even if they packed up tomorrow and left, I think that everyone would still be on edge for a long time,” Shannon Adams said. “Whether it’s a month, a couple months, a year, they could come back at any moment. And we all know that. At the drop of a hat, they could come back and start it all over again.”

Vera, too, didn’t know how long the bad guys or “naughties,” as she calls them, might be a presence in her life. It could take a year because she wants to make sure all the bad guys go away. She gets to see her friends, but is looking forward to seeing them more once ICE isn’t in her life.

She was happy to hear a “big, big, meanie bad guy goed somewhere else”—referring to Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino’s reassignment. If she were president and had her way, Vera said, she’d reassign the rest of the agents as well.

“I’d tell them, ‘Go and clean the house.’”

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