Trump’s ICE Won’t Stop Abducting Kids

People of conscience in Minneapolis and across the country have followed Liam’s ordeal with horror and shock, especially after a photo of Liam in a fluffy blue hat with a federal agent gripping his backpack went viral. But the Trump administration’s willingness to target and terrorize children and their caregivers extends far beyond Liam’ case.

In fact, Liam wasn’t even the first student in his school district to be taken that day; the same morning, masked agents grabbed a 17-year-old high schooler on the way to school in Columbia Heights. Federal agents have abducted at least seven students from the district since the start of the year, including a 10-year-old and her mother. Columbia Heights Public Schools Superintendent Zena Stenvik told reporters that ICE’s kidnapping tactics have included pursuing school buses and intruding onto campuses.

The same week Liam was taken, federal agents also abducted two students in the nearby Hopkins school district and detained a two-year-old girl along with her father, before flying them to Texas.

Child abductions are happening outside of the Twin Cities metro area, too. Last fall in Chicago, officers in riot gear detained a five-year-old girl at the laundromat with her mother. In late September, four U.S.-citizen children were detained for several hours in an indiscriminate, ​“invasion”-style raid of an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore. Then, in mid-January, seven-year-old Diana Crespo-Gonzalez was detained with her parents in Portland, Oregon, while seeking treatment for Diana’s persistent nosebleed. She, like Liam, was sent to Dilley and developed a fever.

These cases represent only a fraction of the child abductions happening nationwide. In December, the Marshall Project estimated that more than 3,800 children had already been detained by ICE during Trump’s second term — at least 20 infants among them.

Many of these children have wound up in Dilley, where clean water is scarce and detainees report limited access to medical care. The day after Liam and his father were released, officials reported two active cases of measles at the facility. Second grader Crespo-Gonzalez is still there. She, along with almost a dozen other children at Dilley, described the misery of their detainment to ProPublica’s Mica Rosenberg in a recent report.

“Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” one girl wrote to Rosenberg.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is seeking legal cover to continue locking up children in unlivable conditions. Since May of last year, the administration has been fighting in court to axe the decades-old Flores Settlement Agreement, which set (already oft-violated) standards for the treatment of minors in immigration detention.

Detainees like Liam are not the only young victims of ICE’s terror campaign. Students are skipping school in order to work while their undocumented parents stay home to avoid detention and deportation, or because they fear abduction themselves. In October, at the peak of the administration’s ​“Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, Chalkbeat noted a marked dip in school attendance, particularly in areas with large Latino or immigrant populations. Within a month of taking office, the second Trump administration revoked a 15-year-old rule that prevented ICE and DHS from operating in ​“sensitive locations” like hospitals, churches and schools. Now, Chicago residents are forming ​“walking school buses” and corner watches during school drop-off and pickup times.

In Minneapolis, on the same day that an ICE agent murdered Renee Good, public schools shuttered after Border Patrol agents tackled people, handcuffed a staffer and pepper-sprayed protestors outside of Roosevelt High School.

“Our classrooms are sacred spaces, places of refuge and possibility,” said Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. ​“This government is defiling them.”

In a continuation of the Trump administration’s long history of separating families, there are also the children who are left without parents to care for them as a result of immigration enforcement operations. In September, CNN identified at least 100 of them. One 15-year-old boy died of cancer just two days after ICE abducted his mother, Arlit Maria Martinez, on her way to work. Johny Merida Aguilara, the main caregiver of his five-year-old son with brain cancer, spent five months in a detention center in Pennsylvania before ending his attempt to remain in the United States after his wife ran out of money for rent, water and heat. He and his family will move to Bolivia, interrupting the five-year-old’s treatment at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and forcing the family to start anew in a country where accessing quality medical care can be difficult.

The Trump administration’s most recent immigration crackdown is one more episode in this nation’s centuries-long history of state violence against Black and brown children and families. As much as the president may insist that his policies target ​“the worst of the worst” — immigrants who ​“hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for,” as Trump recently claimed in a social media post — these claims are belied by the experiences of children like Liam, who will likely be left with lasting scars from the Trump regime.

On February 6, a judge granted Liam’s family a continuance in their case, countering DHS’ motion and giving them more time to build their legal case for asylum. But as their fight drags on, it has left the preschooler struggling to sleep through the night, his father told Telemundo, fearing that his family might be separated once again.