On the top floor of a Spanish immersion elementary school in St. Paul, Minn., a fifth-grade classroom is studying Don Quixote. The teacher, identified only as Ms. A (NPR is using first names or initials because staff fear federal targeting), asks students to discuss the meaning of “enchantment.” Most of the children are Latino; flags from Latin American countries hang from the ceiling.
Ms. A sees the novel as a way for students to connect literature to life. “With Don Quixote, it’s like seeing how this knight, it’s not just that he is crazy and out of his mind, but also that he just wants to do good in the world,” she says.
This winter, thousands of federal immigration officers carried out a mass deportation and detention operation in Minnesota. Families hid in their homes, neighbors delivered groceries, nonwhite citizens began carrying passports in case of stops, protesters faced tear gas and pepper balls — and many children stopped going to school. The surge has ended, but its effects remain.
During the height of the operation, the school offered a virtual option and more than a third of students chose it. Ms. A noticed an immediate difference: “In person, they would talk and participate and ask questions and all of that. They went online and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t do anything. Their faces were not the same.”
Hopewell Hodges, a researcher at the University of Minnesota who studies children’s developmental resilience, explains why. A child’s world, she says, is like the rings of a tree: the child at the center needs stable caregiving, classrooms and neighborhoods. When those systems are disrupted, stress ripples inward. “The young ones are often developmentally bearing the brunt of conflicts and tensions and stresses that originate in the adult world,” Hodges says.
Not all students returned when in-person classes resumed. Some families left the area or the country: one is now in El Salvador; others moved to Mexico, Nebraska and California; another plans to return to Venezuela. Many families still fear ICE; reports of agents in neighborhoods continue, though less frequently than at the operation’s peak. On NPR’s visit, a school district security vehicle idled outside after a community member reported an ICE vehicle nearby.
About half the school’s staff are Latino. Amanda, the principal, who is from Mexico City, began carrying her passport. Ms. A, who is Puerto Rican, spoke with her seven-year-old daughter about what to do if detained. Amanda says some children refused to come back to school: “They are fearful that their parents are going to be taken while they are in school… levels of stress are just really spiking in our kids.” She adds that it feels like the school is starting over, as if half the year didn’t happen.
The community has mobilized to protect and support families. Volunteers stand guard at recess in neon vests; one classroom functions as a grocery delivery hub, stocked with cereal, beans, masa, cleaning supplies, diapers and backpacks filled with books and toys. Katherine, a parent volunteer, says, “The pantry will continue to go for as long as we can fund it… These are our friends, our neighbors. And they need help. So we help.”
Hodges emphasizes the importance of that community support as a protective barrier for children: “Kids are going to be alright if our community is able to be alright. The most important thing that the grownup world can do to protect children’s development in light of ICE surges is to prevent this from happening again.”
On the first day back after weeks of online learning, many students were visibly happy. Ms. A recalls children running into the hallway to greet her. Eleven-year-old Ellah, the principal’s daughter who stayed in school throughout, says it “feels a lot better. Like, there’s a lot more people in our class and it feels like how it was.”
Camila, an 11-year-old who returned after weeks online, describes feeling scared, especially for her parents who go to work. She says she feels safest at the end of the day when everyone is home, but being back in school helped: “It felt good because I got to see my friends again. They help me feel safer.”
Ms. A says her goal is to make the classroom a place of normalcy and care: “You know, we’re good. I love you. I care about you. I’m here for you. We’re all here for you. I think that that’s the way we move forward.” Signs at the school also assert protections: postings bar federal immigration agents from entering without a judicial warrant.
As the school rebuilds routines, staff and families continue volunteer efforts, mutual aid and vigilance, trying to restore stability for children whose worlds were unsettled by the ICE operation.