A five year-old-boy is among four children detained in one Minnesota school district by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, officials claim.
The child and his father have since been flown more than 1,000 miles from their home in Minneapolis to a facility in Texas.
Mary Granlund, chair of the Columbia Heights Public Schools, told reporters: “We’ve had four children taken from my school district. That’s far too many. That’s far too many, right? I really just want children to be reading and writing and learning science and all of those subject areas.”
Agents snatched the boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, from a running car on Tuesday, a local school leader claimed.
The child was then sent to knock on a house to lure his dad, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, outside, Columbia Heights Public Schools Superintendent Zena Stenvik added.
She said the immigration force was “essentially using a five-year-old as bait,” in a press conference on Wednesday.
“Why detain a five-year-old?” she asked.
“You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”
The White House has struck a different tone, however.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that “ICE did NOT target a child”.
She insisted the force had come to arrest Conejo Arias, an Ecuadorian national, before he fled on foot “abandoning his child”.
“For the child’s safety,” McLaughlin said, “one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias”.
She added that parents are given the choice to be removed with their children or have them placed with a person of their choosing.
Stenvik said the family has an active asylum case and has not been ordered to leave the country.
She insisted that there was another adult present when the pair were taken, but the agents would not let Liam be left with him.
They are now in a family holding cell in Texas, Marc Prokosch, the family’s lawyer, claimed.
“Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do,” Prokosch said of the family’s asylum claim.
“So this is just cruelty.”
Since Donald Trump ramped up the presence of ICE officers in Minneapolis, two 17-year-olds and a 10-year-old have also been taken.
Stenvik said attendances in schools had plummeted in recent weeks – with some classes down by two thirds.
Ella Sullivan, Liam’s teacher, described Liam as “kind and loving”.
“His classmates miss him,” she said. “And all I want is for him to be safe and back here.”
It also comes just weeks after an ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good.
