Community Response to ICE Enforcement
When federal immigration agents pounded on the door of his Minneapolis home, the oldest son in a family of 10 knew he had to move his siblings to a safer place. Their mother, a 41-year-old Indigenous Ecuadorian office cleaner, had been detained in early January. Her eldest children feared they would be next, potentially leaving behind their 5-month-old brother and six other children under 16.
“The immigration agents were knocking on our door very late at night, and that’s when I became afraid,” said the 20-year-old son, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear additional family members could face deportation. “I’m afraid that I’ll be taken and my brothers and sisters will be in the hands of the government.”
The family contacted Feliza Martinez, a friend from church, who rallied a group of volunteers to quietly move them to a safe house in south Minneapolis. The move was part of a growing volunteer effort across the Twin Cities as residents respond to what they describe as aggressive federal immigration enforcement operations.
The Scale of Operations
More than 2,000 federal agents have been deployed to scour Minneapolis-St. Paul for immigrants to detain, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported more than 3,000 arrests since early December. Residents have organized to monitor, disrupt, and protest the enforcement in the streets and through less visible means.
The volunteers working with people like the Wampash Tuntuam family have paid rent for immigrant families whose primary wage earner is afraid to go to work, delivered home-cooked meals, and arranged for emergency custody documents to ensure children are cared for if their parents are detained. Christian nonprofit Source MN expanded its food bank program to provide for hundreds of sheltering immigrant families.
“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,” said Martinez, a mother of five who has been taking time off her job on a factory assembly line to volunteer. “I just try to bring hope — like, ‘We’re here with you.’”
An Account of Separation
The Wampash Tuntuam family arrived at the safe house on a snow-covered street. A stream of visitors brought snacks, baby supplies, and coloring books for the children. Volunteers assembled bunk beds and carried in mattresses.
The younger siblings settled in quickly, nestling on the couch in pajamas. But Wampash Tuntuam’s older children remained worried about their future. They said their mother gave the address of their rental home to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who said they wanted to 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 Wampash Tuntuam’s 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 Wampash Tuntuam’s family, their mother had been planning to self-deport but was preparing custody documents for her infant son. The older children said their mother did not want her children to be deported because they would end up living on the streets in their hometown in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as they had before coming to the United States.
Changing Perspectives on Enforcement
Martinez, a devoted Christian, voted for Donald Trump in three previous elections based on his hard-line stance against abortion and gender-affirming care for youth. The granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant supported deporting violent criminals and had not closely followed reports of family separations during Trump’s first presidency.
Over the past two months, after watching videos of federal agents aggressively detaining her neighbors and working directly with children separated from their parents, her perspective shifted.
“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.”
Official Response
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that “ICE does not separate families,” noting that parents are asked whether they want to be removed with their children or place them with a designated person. McLaughlin said Wampash Tuntuam entered the country illegally in 2022 via the Texas border and later received a final order of removal from an immigration judge. She said Wampash Tuntuam received due process and the administration is enforcing the law.
The Uncertainty Ahead
The older children expect their mother will be deported at any moment and worry about what will happen to her five youngest children. The 20-year-old son quit his restaurant job to watch over his child siblings and is learning to care for his infant brother, who has struggled to sleep without his mother.
“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 20-year-old said he once saw Minneapolis as a “beautiful city” offering opportunities for immigrants until the 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’s 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.”