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WELCOME TO THE RESISTANCE, PUBLIC SCHOOL PARENTS  
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Jessica Grose
February 4, 2026
The New York Times
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_ Fear and disruption is touching nearly every parent and child in
places like Minnesota and Maine. And everyday people who otherwise
describe themselves as not especially political are stepping up for
their fellow parents and children. _

, Eleanor Davis

 

The terror for children, parents and teachers in Minnesota started
even before Operation Metro Surge sent thousands of heavily armed,
masked federal agents into the streets. The school year began with a
shooting
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at Annunciation Catholic School in South Minneapolis, where two
children died and at least 24 others were injured. Local families
barely had time to process those deaths — only five years after the
killing of George Floyd rocked their city — before their daily lives
were upended by the chaotic presence of federal officers harassing
citizens under the guise of immigration enforcement.

A teacher named Sarah in the Twin Cities told me that her school
received a bomb threat after Renee Good’s killing, ostensibly for
being too supportive of immigrants. “I kind of forgot about it
because we went on with our day, teaching,” Sarah, who is a mother,
told me, acknowledging how absurd it was that lockdowns and the shadow
of violence were now unremarkable fixtures of the public school
experience in Minnesota. (Like many people I spoke to for this story,
she requested that I use only her first name because she feared
retaliation against or further targeting of her school.)

Two things became clear as I talked to parents, educators and school
board members in Minnesota and Maine, where there was an Immigration
and Customs Enforcement crackdown called Operation Catch of the Day in
January
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targeting immigrants from Somalia.

The first is that the fear and disruption touch nearly every parent
and child in these places. A Minnesota woman named Alli, who has a
child on the autism spectrum, told me that because she and her child
are not white, she is worried about him having a meltdown in public
and attracting immigration enforcement. She wondered aloud to me,
“Can we go to swim class tonight,” or should they just stay home
to avoid being hassled and potentially traumatized?

The second is that everyday people who otherwise describe themselves
as not especially political are stepping up for their fellow parents
and children. We know public schools are often a hub of local
connection, but what stands out is how far schools have extended their
care into the community. Fellow parents are offering rides, food,
grocery delivery and money to the families affected. They’re
patrolling the sidewalks in front of schools to keep an eye out for
ICE vehicles in the deep northern freeze.

Educators like Valley View Elementary School’s principal, Jason
Kuhlman, are taking students
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to visit their detained parents at the Whipple Federal Building in
Minneapolis. Valley View is where Liam Conejo Ramos — the
prekindergartner
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in a bunny ears hat whose photo while being detained by federal agents
has become an icon of the crackdown’s cruelty — is a student and
where at least 25 other families
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have had a parent or guardian apprehended.

“We gave them hugs,” Kuhlman told my newsroom colleague Sarah
Mervosh, of two children he took to see their detained mother.
“We’re crying; they’re crying.” Later he found out that the
three were taken to a detention center in Texas.

It struck me that these parents and teachers, mourning together, are
treating all children as their own.

When parents across the country leave the house for school drop-off or
errands, they have to figure out whether the route they are taking is
safe by checking Signal and WhatsApp chats and social media posts and
recalculate if they think agents are lingering. If they are immigrants
or the relatives of immigrants, they are afraid of being targeted and
detained even if they are here legally.

Alexandra, a stay-at-home mother of two children in a suburb of
Minneapolis, is married to an immigrant from the Caribbean. Though her
husband is naturalized, she explained that he will no longer do
pickups and drop-offs at school, and she doesn’t take her children
to places like Mall of America because she is afraid they will be
targeted because of the color of their skin. “I’m terrified when
he leaves by himself that he won’t come home,” Alexandra said of
her husband. “He travels anywhere he goes with his passport. It’s
like my body is on constant alert, knowing that anywhere I turn,
something could happen and my kids could see that and it would affect
them for the rest of their lives.”

Even the littlest children notice that their friends are missing from
class and have questions. On Jan. 27, 21.3 percent of public school
students in Portland, Maine, were absent, according to Sarah Lentz,
the chair of the city’s school board. That’s about three times the
average for a typical day in January. Attendance dropped so much
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in the Twin Cities that public schools are now offering remote
learning as an option for children too scared to go in person.

A few years ago, I wrote an article about how public school is for
care [[link removed]]:
that so many educators and counselors are going above and beyond their
job descriptions to give children whatever they may need when they
walk through the door, from food to clothing to emotional stability.
That is part of the mission of public schools — to take the children
as they are, whoever they are. Lentz told me that Portland schools
have long served recent immigrant communities and that the school
district has worked with multiple food organizations for decades.
“We send bags of culturally relevant food home on the weekends for
kids and their families that need it,” she said, including halal
options.

Among the greatest critics of public schools seem to be
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members of the Trump administration
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who have not set foot in them for decades, if at all. They do not
acknowledge that schools, for all their imperfections, are highly
functioning civic centers providing so much more than academics. It
also occurs to me that the organizing on behalf of all children in
Minnesota and Maine schools might be one reason the people running the
Education Department want to defund public schools
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The heroism of ordinary people helping one another is profound and a
silver lining of this preventable tragedy. But we should not lose
sight of the real fear and anxiety, which won’t disappear overnight,
even as the federal government claims to be backing off
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in Maine and Liam and his father have been returned
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to Minnesota from their detainment in Texas.

Every person I spoke to in Minnesota and Maine said that the
disruption to their children’s lives was much worse than with Covid.
At least then they knew that they would be safe when they were inside.
The parents I spoke to who were organizing grocery drop-offs and
driving other people’s children to school were afraid of being
followed by ICE agents to immigrants’ homes or back to their own.

“These actions are going to have lifelong impacts on our kids,
whether they’re experiencing it, whether they’ve witnessed it
firsthand or they just saw it on social media,” said Anil Hurkadli,
a Minneapolis-based independent educational consultant who served in
the Department of Education under President Joe Biden. Whenever this
ends, Hurkadli said, it’s going to take the entire community to help
the children recover.

In an essay he wrote for The Minnesota Star Tribune, Hurkadli pointed
out that
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during immigration crackdowns in Florida and California in the past
few years, test scores fell
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among children who were affected. It’s nearly impossible to learn
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when students are afraid that their parents will be taken away.

For those of us who do not live in Maine or Minnesota, the past two
months should serve as a warning. The targets are ultimately arbitrary
— far from the southern border and hardly the states and cities
where the most undocumented immigrants live. ICE raids continue all
over the country, even if the presence of federal officers is not as
disruptive or violent as it has been in these states.

Just because it’s not our children today doesn’t mean it won’t
be tomorrow.

End Notes

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There was a public education bright spot last weekend when Leigh
Wambsganss — a Texas Republican who was a proponent of book-banning
efforts
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and far-right school board takeovers in Texas — lost a state
legislative special election
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in the Fort Worth area to a Democrat, Taylor Rehmet. Wambsganss far
outspent Rehmet in the district, which President Trump won by 17
points in 2024. This suggests to me that even in heavily Republican
districts, parents do not want a far-right agenda in their public
schools and are sick of the divisiveness.

_JESSICA GROSE NEWSLETTER.  A journalist and novelist offers her
perspective on the American family, culture, politics and the way we
live now._

* schools
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* intimidation
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* Minnesota
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* Maine
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