Minneapolis residents are sheltering immigrant children separated from parents and sought by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in the Twin Cities. A 41-year-old Indigenous Ecuadorian office cleaner was detained in early January after entering the country illegally, prompting her oldest children to move their seven younger siblings to a safe house in south Minneapolis with help from church volunteers including Feliza Martinez.
“The immigration agents were knocking on our door very late at night, and that’s when I became afraid,” said the family’s 20-year-old son, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I’m afraid that I’ll be taken and my brothers and sisters will be in the hands of the government.”
The community effort reflects a broader mobilization as more than 2,000 federal agents scour Minneapolis-St. Paul and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported more than 3,000 arrests since early December. Residents have paid rent for families whose breadwinners fear deportation, delivered meals, and arranged emergency custody plans to ensure children are cared for if parents are detained.
A family in hiding
Snow covered the street as the Wampash Tuntuam family arrived at the safe house. A stream of visitors brought snacks, baby supplies, and coloring books for the children. They assembled bunk beds and carried in mattresses.
But the older children fidgeted on the couch, worried about their future. According to the family, their mother had given her address to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who said they would send a social worker to check on the younger children. Instead, armed masked immigration officers appeared and surrounded the house twice.
“That’s when we knew they hadn’t sent a social worker but agents to detain us,” recalled the 22-year-old daughter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she and three other family members have final orders of removal. Her 20-year-old brother and other siblings are working on obtaining legal status. The two youngest children are U.S. citizens.
According to DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, Wampash Tuntuam entered the country illegally in 2022 via the Texas border and received a final order of removal from an immigration judge. McLaughlin said the mother received due process and that the administration is enforcing the law.
According to her family, Wampash Tuntuam had been planning to self-deport but was preparing custody documents for her infant son. The older children expect their mother will be deported at any moment and worry about what will happen to her five youngest children.
“If they found out that the baby was alone, they may take him away,” the 22-year-old daughter said. “We have all grown up together. I saw my baby brother’s birth. I am very scared they will take him away and I will never see him again.”
The cost of displacement
After their mother was detained, the 20-year-old son quit work at a restaurant to watch over his child siblings. He is still figuring out how to care for his infant brother, who switched from breastfeeding to formula and struggles to sleep without his mother.
The needs of families like his have prompted community action. Christian nonprofit Source MN expanded its food bank program to provide for hundreds of sheltering immigrant families. Feliza Martinez, a mother of five who works on a factory assembly line, has been taking time off to volunteer.
“I do receive calls every single day from families and they’re terrified, and we’re just trying to help them as much as we can,” Martinez said. “I just try to bring hope — like, ‘We’re here with you.’”
A changed perspective
Martinez previously voted for President Trump in three elections because of his hard-line stance against abortion and gender-affirming care for youth. She said she voted for him in part because she believed his position on deporting violent criminals was right. She did not closely follow reports of family separations during the first Trump presidency.
But her experience over the past two months has shifted her thinking.
“Being on the front line and what I have experienced and seen, I wish I would’ve never voted for him,” Martinez said. “What he’s doing, it’s not Christian. It’s not my beliefs.”
The 20-year-old who moved his siblings to safety said he once saw Minneapolis as a “beautiful city” offering opportunities for immigrants like him until the visible surge of federal agents. There are still good people here, he said, referring to the volunteers who sheltered his family.
But his younger siblings continue to ask when their mother will return. He comforts them by saying she is at the hospital and will be home soon.
“I keep telling them that she is going to come back, that she is already on her way,” he said. “They think that.”