ICE Accused of Using 5-Year-Old as 'Bait'

A Minnesota school superintendent says immigration agents didn't just detain one of her students—they made the 5-year-old knock on his own front door to help them find more people. Columbia Heights Superintendent Zena Stenvik said Wednesday that masked federal agents stopped Liam Conejo Ramos in his driveway Tuesday as he arrived home from kindergarten with his father, MPR News reports. "Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let him take care of the small child, and was refused," she said. Instead, she said, agents had Liam walk to the door and ask to be let in so they could see who else was inside, "essentially using a 5-year-old as bait."

The boy and his father were then taken away, and they are now in a detention center in Texas, according to the family's attorney, Marc Prokosch. Stenvik says Liam's family has an active asylum case and no deportation order. Prokosch, who is weighing a habeas corpus petition, said he doubts the detention is illegal under current law but questions why agents would exercise their authority this way: "Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's moral. You know, yes, they may have the legal authority to detain a 5-year-old, but why?" Liam's teacher, Ella Sullivan, said he's "a bright young student, and he's so kind and loving, and his classmates miss him, and all I want is for him to be safe and back here."

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that "ICE did NOT target a child," the AP reports. She said the boy's father, an Ecuadorian national, fled on foot, "abandoning" the boy. McLaughlin's version of events differed from Stenvik's—she said agents tried to get Liam's mother to take the boy but she "refused" to accept him. Vice President JD Vance, who visited Minneapolis on Thursday, defended the agents' actions, the New York Times reports. "What are they supposed to do?" he said. "Are they supposed to let a 5-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?"

District officials say Liam is one of four Columbia Heights students detained by immigration agents in separate incidents over the past two weeks, including a 10-year-old taken with her mother on the way to school and a 17-year-old seized after agents entered an apartment. Stenvik says agents have been "circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots and taking our children," and that fear has driven nearly a third of students to stay home. Other Twin Cities districts report absentee rates as high as 40% and are expanding virtual options.

• In a post on X, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz urged the federal government to stop its "campaign of retribution." "Minnesotans want safety. They want freedom. They want what's best for our kids," he said. "Masked agents snatching preschoolers off the street and sending them to Texas detention centers serves none of those purposes."