This article is a good example of the widespread popular resistance to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown in Minneapolis, its suburbs, and across Minnesota over the last two months. A resistance that forced the federal government to back down and announce on February 12 it is ending its “Operation Metro Surge” by beginning to withdraw most of the 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents it unleashed against the state’s working people.

We are publishing this report that first appeared in today’s Washington Post for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, and photos that follow are from the original.

— World-Outlook editors

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This small school district kept losing students to ICE. So, it mobilized.

Outside of Minneapolis, the five schools in Columbia Heights have taken an aggressive approach to protecting the immigrant families of their students.

Today, February 15, 2026, at 5:00 a.m. EST

By Karin Brulliard

COLUMBIA HEIGHTS, Minn. — First period was about to begin Tuesday when the phone rang at Columbia Academy. The parent of one of the middle school’s students had been detained by immigration authorities, and the family needed help finding a lawyer.

It was one more in a steady stream of daily crises that had confronted Leslee Sherk, Columbia Academy’s principal, in this immigrant-heavy Minneapolis suburb every day for more than two months. They arrived in dings on her phone, in scratchy dispatches on her walkie-talkie, in frantic calls to the office, in whispers from children in hallways, in emails on her sticker-covered laptop, tallying the latest number of students with at least one parent detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: 16, up from 10 the week before.

Every day felt like “triage,” Sherk said.

The impact of the surge had saturated every aspect of the school day in Columbia Heights’ district of fewer than 3,400 students — half of them English-language learners — and seeped deeply into the hours beyond it. Seven students had been detained, including Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old whose photo became a global symbol of the crackdown’s sweep. Dozens of parents across the district were in custody. Hundreds more had decided school was too risky and enrolled their children in online classes. One was Liam’s older brother, a Columbia Academy student.

Over the weeks, Columbia Academy, like the district’s four other schools, had taken on an entirely new identity. It was still a place of learning, even if 210 of its 700 students were now studying at home. But now it was also a food bank, a counseling hotline, a missing persons task force, an immigration resource center and a refuge.

“We are the first call,” said Sherk, a first-year principal who has worked in the district for two decades. “They don’t call the police. They don’t even sometimes call their neighbors or different organizations. They call the school.”

The district had prepared for the moment, but only to a degree. Following President Donald Trump’s 2024 election, it held know-your-rights presentations for staff and families, said Superintendent Zena Stenvik. It created protocols for the possibility of ICE officers showing up at a school with a warrant, she said. But they did not anticipate a surge that would bring teams of masked agents to the streets outside, raids to their neighborhood and ICE vehicles to their parking lots.

As stories mounted of parents and students with pending immigration cases being detained, district employees worked to track down missing students — in some cases, to a detention center in Texas. Staff were trained to drive vans to transport children to school, and in one case to drive two students to their mother, who was being held at the Whipple Federal Building south of Minneapolis.

For a while, the district did these things quietly, adopting the low-profile approach most schools have taken. Families were fearful, and Stenvik did not want Columbia Heights schools to become a target.

That changed the morning of Jan. 20, when a car peeled into the high school parking lot outside Stenvik’s office and two teens jumped out and ran inside. They had been stopped by federal officers, they explained, and their 17-year-old classmate had been briefly detained.

Then, after elementary school dismissal that afternoon, Stenvik was patrolling in her car — she had heard that ICE was targeting bus stops — when she got an urgent phone call. Liam’s mother, panicking, had called Columbia Academy as officers were detaining the boy and his father outside their house. She needed to make sure someone would care for the boy’s older brother if she were also taken.

Stenvik and Sherk rushed over, as did the school board president and Liam’s elementary school principal. The district spokeswoman dropped off the older brother once the officers were gone.

“I was there when they told him what happened, that dad was taken and Liam was taken, and then I sat there with him on his bunk bed while we both just cried,” Sherk said. “And that was probably the worst day of my career.”

For Stenvik, it was galvanizing. A community ICE monitor had provided the district with the now-famous photo of Liam, standing in his bunny hat next to a federal officer. Liam’s mother pleaded that his story be shared, which the district did at a news conference the next day.

“We couldn’t have any bigger of a target on our backs at that point,” Stenvik said. “I woke up the next morning and I just thought: Justice for 5-year-olds and every other child.”

Since then, the sense that Columbia Academy and the rest of the district were under siege has grown. A bomb threat in early February forced schools to close for a day. Administrators received threatening emails. Stenvik suspected federal officers had monitored her home.

That anxiety had not abated in the week since Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced a partial drawdown of the aggressive immigration enforcement operation that sent 3,000 federal officers to the area. Homan’s Thursday announcement that the surge was ending would also not quell the sense of emergency. Families were still too scared — and too scarred — to celebrate, Sherk said.

School officials knew of two students and many parents still in immigration custody.

“I think about our families who are sitting inside of their homes or apartments, who are afraid to even go out,” Stenvik said. “Anything I can to do to help them, that’s what I’m going to do.”

‘i super okay’

On Tuesday, Sherk walked past Columbia Academy’s blue lockers, greeting boys who chatted in Spanglish and girls who wore hijabs. The hallways were lively, but they felt emptier to her.

She stopped by the upstairs classroom of English language teacher Abby Olson, where just eight of 15 students were present. To the sound of calm instrumental music — and some giggles — they began class by describing a photo of a carousel in their journals.

Recent weeks had not felt so calm to Olson. In December, a former student who still came to visit her every day was abruptly pulled out of school, and Olson learned days later that she had returned to her home country. Today, Olson was worrying about a student whose family had a routine immigration appointment — the kind at which some immigrants had been detained.

One interaction haunted her. On Jan. 18, Liam’s older brother emailed to ask if there was school on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. No, she responded, and was everything all right? He messaged back: “yes ms i super okay.” Two days later, Liam and his father were detained.

“We have so many kids, and yes, they’re super okay right now,” Olson said, tearing up during her planning period. “And then tomorrow, they might not be.”

For some students, the stress had become almost unbearable. Chris, a 14-year-old eighth-grader with spiky dark hair, said his three younger siblings regularly asked him to explain the news. He described it to them as “different things happening in the world that can be dangerous to our parents,” who came from Mexico 20 years ago.

Now Chris, who carries his U.S. passport in his school-issued bookbag each day and makes sure his younger siblings have theirs, said he thinks his family should move to Mexico, a country where he has never lived. “Then they wouldn’t get scared,” he said of his siblings. “They wouldn’t get panic attacks.”

In the hours before the school day ended, ICE vehicles had been spotted nearby. The principal at the adjacent elementary school called Sherk on her radio to let her know that he and community watchers were heading out to urge them to leave.

By the time Columbia Academy’s 3:15 p.m. bell approached, the ICE vehicles had moved on, and Sherk set about making sure no student left the building alone. For weeks, the 25 or so kids who walk home had been escorted by adults. But the week before, the walking groups had encountered ICE vehicles. So the school had organized carpools.

The next afternoon, still on guard, Sherk tried to persuade a bespectacled boy not to walk home. “It would make us feel better, since we’re already going by your house, if you just got a ride,” she said.

‘We were happy’

One day after dismissal, Olson headed to the school basement. She walked past rooms packed with canned goods, halal meat, dog food and birthday cake kits for students who would be celebrating at home.

A squad of volunteers loaded paper bags full of food and supplies into cars outside. The bags were labeled with numbers, part of a detailed system to keep recipients’ identities secret if drivers were pulled over by ICE.

Olson, her red station wagon’s trunk packed with food for four families, had been instructed to call before she knocked at her first stop. She tried a few times and ended up leaving a voicemail. “It worries me when they don’t answer,” Olson said. “Where are they?”

Olson’s last stop was the beige house of one of her eighth-grade students, who shared one tidy bedroom with her mother and 8-year-old sister. The mother, 46, thanked Olson for the food and welcomed her into the room.

They had arrived from Ecuador and sought asylum in late 2024, after the country had fallen into the grip of drug gangs. She cleaned houses. Her daughters learned English. “That is a source of pride for me,” she said. “We were happy.”

But she had not left the house for the past two months, for fear that she would be detained and her girls left alone. Community groups had been helping her pay rent, but she was not sure what would happen this month. “We can’t do anything,” the mother said, beginning to weep.

Olson sat next to her on the bed, then hugged her.

‘How do we rebuild trust?’

After school on Wednesday, the sounds of salsa music echoed in a cavernous, nearly empty gym at Columbia Academy. Cristian Pillajo Vasquez, an English language teacher, moved his hips and called out steps to the members of his Latin Rhythms Dance and Culture Club, an activity nearly 40 children signed up for this year.

But just one 11-year-old boy danced alongside Pillajo Vasquez. Fifteen others were online, following along at home. Pillajo Vasquez knew the show they were preparing for, scheduled for late February, would have to be pushed back. “We would like to have you back,” he said into his laptop. “And I think that it’s going to happen sooner than later.”

Homan’s Thursday announcement that ICE would wind down operations in the Twin Cities suggested life might soon return to normal. In a statement Thursday, the school district said it was “cautiously optimistic.”

No matter what, winding down online school, after reorganizing staffing to accommodate it, would take longer. So, Columbia Academy’s halls and classrooms would stay quieter for some time.

Even before the announcement, Sherk was already thinking about what would come after two months of crisis.

“We’re doing everything we can to teach and to care for our students,” she said. “How do we help families rebuild trust?”

She paused, thinking.

“They were coming to all these school events. How do we get them to come back again?”

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