Minnesota superintendent on 'fearful' students being followed by masked ICE agents

0:00Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Mehrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. I know for a fact right now behind our high school in the park, there are ICE agents looming, and they've been circling my schools again this morning, parked outside of my middle school. The superintendent of the Minnesota School District, where federal agents detained a five-year-old boy, says ICE is harassing her students on a daily basis.

0:54It's Thursday, January 29th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

1:04Today on the show, Borders are Tom Homan promises to rein in ICE tactics in Minnesota, but will swapping out the face of the administration's immigration agenda change anything on the ground? Also, ICE is already the biggest federal law enforcement agency by funding. A lot of those tax dollars are going to detention centers, expanding what the Brennan Center calls a deportation industrial complex. And as the government is building up this infrastructure to increase the nation's ICE detention capacity, the Trump administration has also attempted to reduce oversight of these detention facilities.

1:43But first, the five-year-old boy detained by ICE in Minneapolis is not doing well after being sent to Texas, according to Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro, who visited him yesterday. His dad said that he hasn't been himself, that he's been sleeping a lot because he's been depressed and sad. You've probably seen a picture of Liam Conejo Ramos, whose middle name means rabbit. He's the boy in the blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, who was detained by ICE along with his father in a suburb of Minneapolis earlier this month. And he's one of at least four students who have been taken from Minnesota's Columbia Heights School District.

2:26where Zina Stenvik is the superintendent. She spoke to Scott Tong. Last week's detention of Liam, the five-year-old from your district, attracted a lot of attention. The Department of Homeland Security says his father entered the U.S. unlawfully, and after he picked up Liam from school, he fled from federal agents and left Liam behind. That is DHS's version. What is your understanding of what happened? Well, according to the family attorney, the family did enter lawfully, used the app, have followed all of the rules and regulations for doing so. And when I visited the home, I saw all of the documentation myself with the numbers, the immigration numbers and everything on there.

3:12What is your reaction to you've been at the home to seeing images of Liam in the last few days? You know, Liam is kind of a symbol at this point for all of the children who not only are being detained, but sorry, I'm a little raw right now. Within the last hour, I've had three of my high school students, three different high school student vehicles stopped surrounded by three ice vehicles. Oh, my goodness. And so we want Liam back. We want him back home. I've spoken with his mother and I'm heartbroken that he's under the weather right now in that detention center. And at the same time, you know, let him be a symbol for all of the children.

4:04The other students of mine that have been detained, two of whom are also in a detention center in Texas, and the ones who are getting harassed right now this morning, I know for a fact right now behind our high school in the park, there are ICE agents looming and they've been circling my schools again this morning, parked outside of my middle school. So I'm a little, forgive me, but I'm just a little bit. No, of course, there's so much around you and your job is to manage, take care of the people around you, take care of the children. Can you talk a little bit more about what happened this morning?

4:39It's not my job to talk to a 16-year-old child that I had to do this morning and talk them down and listen to them about their experiences where they showed that had to show their passport to masked agents. That should never be any superintendent or teacher or educator's job. This child was lawfully driving on their way to school, you know, and then I had to listen to a voicemail from another child who was stopped. You know what he did? He called the school principal immediately to hear the fear in his voice. And, you know, he ended the voicemail by saying, please let me know as soon as you get this message.

5:20They're looming around the high school and I just want to keep everyone safe. Oh, my goodness. These are children. And just to understand, these students this morning, have they been detained? No, because they have passports. These folks are, by and large, at least the ones that the children and the families that I'm working with, either they're citizens or they have other legal means to be here in this country. I'm really tired of hearing the phrase illegal tossed around as though being an asylee, a refugee, or having a legal work permit isn't a legal means of being in our country. What has changed in your school district?

6:06Are teachers walking students home? Are many families keeping their kids at home? Yes, to both of those. Everything has changed. We are doing our best to provide normal routines for students and continue the learning, which is our mission, which is what our purpose is in the first place. But yes, people, community members and teachers are walking children to and from school or giving extra rides, providing resources such as food and other supplies, diapers, things like that. You know, many, many community members are standing on the corners of every single one of my schools in the morning and in the afternoon.

6:49It's a very clear pattern of strong ICE activity around our schools in the morning when children are arriving and in the afternoon when they're trying to go home. What else are you hearing directly from students? They're very fearful. You know, the older students are able to articulate and understand the racial profiling and the targeting that's happening. The younger children, regardless of where they were born or what they look like, are all afraid that they're going to be taken. They ask us that. Can I be taken? Will my parents be home when I get home from school? What do you tell them when they ask you that, where they ask that to the teachers?

7:35What could one possibly say, right? We tell them that while they're here at school, they're as safe as possible. and we are working to find safe passage to and from school for them, whether that's church members, community members, other parents, because the bus stops and the walk zones have become, unbelievably, I have to say, have become not safe places. We have been talking to Zena Stenvik, superintendent of the Columbia Heights School District, just north of Minneapolis. Zina Superintendent, thanks for the time. Thank you.

8:20A federal judge in Minneapolis said yesterday that ICE had violated at least 96 court orders in 74 separate cases just this month. Judge Patrick Schlitz wrote, This list should give pause to anyone, no matter his or her political beliefs, who cares about the rule of law. As we just heard, ICE agents are still very active in Minnesota, despite the administration official now in charge there promising to focus on targeted operations instead of broad sweeps that have arrested American citizens and led to agents shooting at least two of them dead. Robin Young has an update on Border Czar Tom Homan's pledge to do better after the break.

9:08Thank you.

9:55Today in his press conference in Minneapolis, Borders R. Tom Homan said he's working on a plan to draw down the federal presence in Minnesota. He was brought in earlier this week, replacing ICE leader Gregory Bovino, charged by President Trump with settling tensions after federal agents shot and killed 37-year-old VA nurse Alex Pretty over the weekend. But in a press conference today, Holman made sure to stress that while he will get back to Trump's original pledge of finding criminals, ICE operations will not be too limited. We are not surrendering the president's mission in immigration enforcement.

10:29Let's make that clear. Prioritization of criminal ailments doesn't mean we forget about everybody else. That's just simply ridiculous. Minnesota Public Radio's Brian Baxter is here. Welcome back, Brian. Hi, Robin. Well, let's tick through some things. Holman also said the withdrawal of law enforcement agents in Minnesota is dependent upon cooperation. In fact, it could wind down completely with broader access to jail. So flesh out that tension there. That's right. Tom Homan says that the reason there are so many agents on the street is because they're having to go home by home or to these various locations to pick people up.

11:03And that means sending teams in and then sending teams on top of that to deal with crowd control issues. He said if the agents can just go to the jail, these very controlled settings, they can scale back dramatically. There have been some county jails that have been very cooperative with ICE over the years. The state prison system is cooperative with ICE, but there have been others that have been reluctant to share information about immigration status of people that they have in custody. There's some indication that that might start to happen at least a little bit. Well, OK, so there is that potentially a softening on the side of Governor Walz and others in the state.

11:38But does that the equation that he gave are people calling that out? Because it doesn't seem to make sense. chief, we can't get the criminals. We're just going to go get regular people from their homes. Yeah, but Mr. Holman did say that they're going to try to even on the streets take a more targeted approach. And part of the frustration for a lot of people in Minnesota has been that as these ICE agents and these Border Patrol agents have been moving around the city, they have been just sweeping up people who they come in contact with, even if that wasn't the intended target of the mission in the first place.

12:10He says that if there's more targeted approach, less of that other collateral damage will happen. Okay. But even before Homan spoke, ICE agents got an email from a top official yesterday specifically telling them not to engage with, you know, protesters, they call them agitators. And Homan reiterated that today. The email said, it's just not worth what you're provoking. Talk about the message they seem to be trying to cement here. And what are they responding to? You know, you had state Republicans criticizing the Trump administration. Yeah, I mean, there have been clashes repeatedly as ICE and Border Patrol agents have moved about the city.

12:49And in some cases, it's been inflamed by the way that the agents have reacted, spraying people who have come up to them, shoving them. And basically what they're saying here is that they just don't want to engage. And maybe that in itself will lower the temperature a bit. Yeah. You talk about the targeted operations, you know, targeting somebody, surveilling them, you know, knowing what you're doing, arresting them. And, you know, we've seen them not doing that, you know, raiding Home Depot parking lots, car washes, other locations. So, yes, he's saying it's going to be more targeted. Did he mention schools?

13:27You know, we spoke to a superintendent today from the Columbia Heights district, which you know. She talked about scared children calling their principal because they see ice in the schools. Children taken away, the little five-year-old now detained in Texas. Did Homan say anything about schools are out of bounds? He did not. And in fact, you bring up another point is that people here want to see these changes in action. They don't necessarily trust that what they're hearing is necessarily going to translate into lower visibility of these federal agents. They want to see fewer of them out there.

14:01And so there's kind of a both-way trust issue here. Yeah. By the way, there's a new video of Alex Preddy which shows him in an interaction with agents. This is days before the one in which he died. He seems angry at something. He kicks the taillight off their car. They get out and pull him to the street. Do we know what was going on there? And we only have about a minute and a half, but how that tape is being received in Minneapolis? We don't know all of it. We do know that he was not taken into custody. The video does show that he had a gun in his waistband, but no indication that the officers saw that.

14:36People here are saying, on the political right, are saying it shows he was an agitator. Other people are saying it has nothing to do with what happened 11 days later when he was encountered by seven officers and pushed to the ground and ultimately shot. Yeah. Look, Hohen made sure to clarify the tiny step back they're taking right now should not be confused with defeat. But Maine Senator Susan Collins was able to negotiate for ICE ending large scale operations in Maine. Is anyone thinking that's possible in Minnesota? I think the dynamics are different. As you know, Maine is Maine Senator Collins is a Republican up for reelection.

15:13The White House desperately needs to keep that seat in Minnesota. It's a democratically led state with all of the officeholders, statewide officeholders, Democrats. So they deal with it in a different way. And in fact, your Republican candidate for governor dropped out and got very angry, you know, saying, you know, how could I run on what the Trump administration is doing and look my daughter in the eye? Very different dynamics, as you said. Minnesota Public Radio's Brian Bax, thank you as always. Thank you. You're welcome.

15:51coming up next the federal government is pouring money into immigration detention centers last year congress authorized a record-breaking 45 billion dollars for detention after the break where is all that money going Thank you.

16:36working towards bringing people and nature together. In this moment, optimism isn't naive, it's necessary. Follow Nature is the Solution wherever you listen to podcasts and discover stories of impact and possibility.

16:54ICE got a huge budget increase last year. And today in the Senate, eight Republicans joined Democrats to reject a budget deal that would have given ICE even more money. But a lot of funding for ICE is already locked in from the huge expansion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Brennan Center says that's funding a deportation industrial complex that will outlast the current administration. Lauren Brooke Eisen is senior director of the Brennan Center's justice program and author of a book called Inside Private Prisons. A lot of what she learned about those private prisons dovetails with these detention centers we're going to hear about.

17:34in this conversation with Robin Young. Let's start with a piece of the budget that you're probably thinking the most about. It is an eye-popping$45 billion. That's two-thirds of the money that is allocated for new detention centers. There's$75 billion for ICE in general, but$45 billion for detention centers. ICE is already the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. This is a budget that eclipses all other state and local police budgets combined. So there is that. But when it comes to building detention centers, the New York Times recently pointed out the border began closing under President Biden.

18:11By the time Trump came in office, it was shut down. So Trump lifted restrictions so that immigration officials could arrest migrants anywhere in the country. Now, do you think, as others watching this do, that this money to private contractors to build these detention centers,$45 billion, has driven the need to find people to fill the centers? In my book, I examine the broader prison industrial complex that relies on a vast infrastructure of financial incentives. And these intertwined financial incentives are also true in the immigration detention complex. That detention industrial complex relies on a multibillion dollar network of public and private sector interests that profit from the detention of undocumented individuals.

18:55individuals. And the current administration has surprisingly abandoned its traditional enforcement priorities, which previously focused on those with criminal records. And ICE is now treating all undocumented immigrants as equally eligible for removal. And this is leading to neighborhood sweeps and business raids in major U.S. cities. Well, your colleagues at the Brennan Center also did a deep dive, and they point out that so much money has gone to some form of detention and very little to things like the courts so people can have fair trials or the systems that have been in place to help families navigate how to immigrate correctly.

19:41In fact, the funding bill caps hiring of new immigration judges over the next three and a half years at 800 new judges. That's a 14 % increase compared to a 400 % increase in funding for these new detention centers. We should point out that Borders are Tom Homan, speaking in Minneapolis today, said that ICE is going to go back to its original pledge, which was to just detain and look for people who are criminals. We've taken that up elsewhere in the program. But to you who've examined this notion of a prison industrial complex, if built, how hard is it to take it apart? It's going to be very difficult to take it apart.

20:27And I think you see that bearing out in some of these contracts. So for example, in February, ICE awarded GeoGroup a 15-year contract to manage a single 1 ,000-bed facility in New Jersey. And we're also seeing the current administration start to look into buying warehouses. And there's this new warehouse strategy. The ICE acting director, Tad Lyons, was quoted recently at a border security conference. He said the administration's goal was to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages. And Lyon said, like Prime, but with human beings. Well, okay, so as objectifying and offensive as that is, you say there's another way to keep these private companies working and not put people in the facilities.

21:24What is that? There is. So corporations are also poised to profit from both surveillance and for supervising undocumented people living in the community. This often involves phone reporting, GPS monitoring, and surveillance through their SmartLink program, which uses facial recognition and other technologies. And currently, there are about 180 ,000 people in this program. And GEO Group estimates that in the next two years, they think they might be monitoring closer to about 460 ,000 people in this program. And as the government is building up this infrastructure to increase the nation's ICE detention capacity, the Trump administration has also attempted to reduce oversight of these detention facilities.

22:13Okay. That's Lauren Brooke Eisen, Senior Director of the Brennan Center's Justice Program. Lauren Brooke, LB, thank you so much. Thank you for having me on.

22:29That's it for Here and Now anytime today. This podcast comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Will Walkie, Hafsa Qureshi, and Lynn Managon. Our editors were Todd Munt, Micaela Rodriguez, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Allison Hagen and Grace Griffin. and here at NOW's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you tomorrow.