The brothers’ mother was taken by ICE and Minnesota educators were forced to bring the children to her
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has taken custody of two children who attend the same Minnesota elementary school as Liam Ramos, the detained five-year-old, according to school officials.
The superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, told the Guardian that two brothers, in second and fifth grades, were detained with their mother on Thursday. The mother has a pending asylum case and the family has since been transported to a Texas detention facility, the school official said.
Their detention comes amid growing outrage over the government’s continued holding of Liam, a pre-schooler, who is at the same Texas facility with his father and was reported this week to be in a “depressed” state.
The mother of the two boys was first taken into custody during a court appointment for her ongoing immigration case on Thursday, said Zena Stenvik, the superintendent. The mother called school leaders from detention asking that they bring her children to her at the Whipple federal building, a local facility where immigration officers have been holding people arrested during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration operation in the region.
