message from the school’s principal and assistant principal. A video posted on social media shows ICE agents at the apartment building across the street.
Parents described a growing ICE presence outside the school and the apartment building across the street since early December.
“This is not how Minnesotans behave. This is not how St. Louis Park residents behave,” said St. Louis Park Mayor Nadia Mohamed, the first elected Somali American mayor in the country, opening the news conference. “This entire thing has been un-American.”
Rep. Larry Kraft, DFL-St. Louis Park, said that ICE presence by the school had been building for the past several days and escalated today.
“ICE agents all over this area, staging on one side of the school, going to the other side, pulling people out of apartment buildings, just swarming this place,” he said. “The teachers weren’t able to open the blinds in the classrooms to let some natural light in, because they’re afraid that the students would see what’s happening across the street.”
“What are we doing?” he continued. “This feels like we’re being occupied by folks who don’t have our best interest at heart, that feel like they can do whatever they want. They’re giving law enforcement a bad name. And they’re terrorizing this community. They need to leave.”
School board chair Virginia Mancini praised the school community and its teachers.
When students are “feeling scared and they’re terrorized, they can’t live to their full potential,” she said. “They can’t learn if they are scared to go to school.”
Marcus Penny, a parent-teacher organization member, also decried the continued ICE presence outside the school.
“Aquila teaches its kids to be kind, to be tolerant, to be thoughtful, to keep their hands to themselves, and none of those attributes are being modeled for them in the world outside their school,” he said. Though many kids count on school as a place to be safe and eat a good meal, right now many can’t, he said. “Kids are missing school because ICE keeps cracking down on this city, this community, and specifically this neighborhood, these few blocks here, almost every day.”
The presence of ICE agents near the school did not feel random, he said.
“It really feels like their presence around this school seems to ramp up kind of at arrival and dismissal,” he said. “Frankly, it feels like they’re trying to target this school to make us afraid, to antagonize us.”
He said students watched from school on Wednesday as ICE agents kicked down doors across the street.
“Students saw them, and they’re afraid, and they should be,” he said. “They have these strange masked men showing up in their streets, pulling out their guns, firing their guns, sweeping up people of color indiscriminately, protesters indiscriminately.”
Kraft asked the crowd to stay hopeful. Though ICE sent 2,000 agents to the Twin Cities, and is now sending 1,000 more, he noted that 1,000 people had signed up for a rapid response network in St. Louis Park alone.
“We have more of us than them,” he said.
Mohamed, an Aquila Elementary School alumna, also encouraged her residents to remain hopeful. She praised the community for continually showing up to protect their neighbors.
“It is the love that we have for each other and the protection that we show up with for each other that keeps us going,” she said.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a message to families Friday, St. Louis Park Superintendent Carlondrea Hines acknowledged the “disheartening” news of the death of Renee Nicole Macklin Good and the detention of an educator outside Roosevelt High School.
“The presence of ICE is causing harm, fear and anxiety, and it is detracting from our primary goal,” she wrote. “While immensely difficult, we continue to focus our energy on our mission.” She reminded families of St. Louis Park’s procedures to keep families safe, including restrictions on visitors and weapons, and reiterated that ICE could not interview a student at school without a judicial warrant.
Parents who spoke with Sahan Journal after the news conference said the constant federal activity by the school had created a heightened awareness of ICE in their elementary children that they found unsettling.
“My second-grader is very worried about his friends and feels like he wants to do something,” said Missy Bender, an Aquila parent. “We wrote letters to Trump last night. He’s terrified.”
“My son asks, ‘How do we get ICE out?’ And I don’t think a second-grader should really know or be asking that question,” said Whitney Penny, who is married to Marcus Penny. “But they know that kids are missing in their classes, and I think they know why.”
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