How a 5-year-old boy got caught up in the ICE crackdown
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Good morning. ICE draws condemnation for detaining a preschooler in Minneapolis.
Local officials and the federal government are at odds again.
The onslaught of ICE activity in our community is inducing trauma and is taking a toll on our children.
What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?
Why did ICE detain a 5-year-old boy in Minneapolis?
Crime is down across cities big and small, red and blue. The Atlantic tries to untangle why. And the gothic southern vampire flick Sinners sets a new Oscars record. It's Friday, January 23rd. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
As the immigration enforcement surge continues in Minneapolis, there's been fresh outrage over the detention of several children, including one five-year-old boy on Tuesday.
What are the community reactions to the ICE crackdown?
You might have seen by now the image of Liam Conejo Ramos wearing a winter blue hat and a Spider-Man backpack as agents escort him to a vehicle. He appears to have been taken as part of an arrest of his father, but federal and local officials differ in their accounts of what exactly happened. Speaking alongside their lawyers, the board chair for Columbia Heights Public Schools, Mary Granlund, said that she saw the whole incident unfold in the family's driveway as she was on her way to pick up her own kids from school.
And as I got out of my car and came around the corner, I heard, what are you doing? Don't take the child. And there was ample opportunity to be able to safely hand that child off to adults. And mom was there. She saw out the window and dad was yelling, please do not open the door. Don't open the door.
She said she heard another adult who lived in the same household plead with agents to let them take Liam. And Granlund even offered to take him herself as a representative of the school. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security says the agents had sought to arrest the child's father, who fled and left Liam in the vehicle. Later, the spokesperson said the mother apparently refused to take Liam, and the father told agents he wanted Liam to stay with him. Liam and his family are originally from Ecuador. The family's lawyer, Mark Prokush, said that just over a year ago, they presented themselves at the Texas border to apply for asylum. He said they were following all the right protocols and posed no flight risk.
They did everything right when they came in. They've shared all of their information with the government, and they were following the process. They were just trying to secure safety and persecution for their family from their home country.
DHS claims that Liam and his father are now together in a Texas facility. According to the Associated Press, families of children held at that same facility say they're malnourished, ill, and suffering from prolonged detention. In court filings from December, ICE attested that about 400 children were held in federal detention beyond the court-mandated limit of 20 days. Yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance was in Minneapolis. He was there, as he put it, to, quote, bring down the temperature. And while he acknowledged that along the way they were, quote, going to make mistakes, on this arrest, he steadfastly defended the officials. Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?
If the argument is that you can't arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity from ever being the subject of law enforcement. That doesn't make any sense. No one thinks that makes any sense. Liam is one of several children detained in recent days. Elizabeth Shockman is an education reporter at the local public radio station MPR News and has been exploring the impact of the immigration surge on schools.
For those districts that are affected, they are seeing absences anywhere between 20 to 40 percent of their student population who is not coming to school. In some cases, these are citizens who are afraid to attend school. So it is having a pretty profound effect on kind of the daily school activities and daily activities of people here.
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