Minnesota superintendent on 'fearful' students being followed by masked ICE agents

Here & Now Anytime

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2026

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

In one suburban school district outside Minneapolis, at least four students have been picked up by federal immigration agents over the last few weeks. Columbia Heights Public Schools Superintendent Zena Stenvik talks about the mood in her district.

Then, White House border czar Tom Homan says he will "draw down" the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota if state officials cooperate with the Trump administration on their immigration crackdown. Minnesota Public Radio's Brian Bakst explains how Homan's message is being received in Minnesota.

And, the Brennan Center’s Lauren-Brooke Eisen discusses how a huge increase in ICE spending in the past year is fueling what she calls the "detention-industrial complex" for migrants arrested in the United States.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at MathWorks.com.
0:17.5	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:21.8	I know for a fact right now behind our high school.
0:25.3	In the park, there are ICE agents looming,
0:27.9	and they've been circling my schools again this morning,
0:30.8	parked outside of my middle school.
0:32.7	The superintendent of the Minnesota school district
0:35.6	where federal agents detained a five-year-old boy
0:38.5	says ICE is harassing her students on a daily basis.
0:51.6	It's Thursday, January 29th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR.
0:57.3	I'm Chris Bentley.
1:01.6	Today on the show, Borders are Tom Homan promises to rain in ice tactics in Minnesota,
1:08.0	but will swapping out the face of the administration's immigration agenda
1:11.9	change anything on the ground? Also, ICE is already the biggest federal law enforcement agency
1:18.9	by funding. A lot of those tax dollars are going to detention centers, expanding what the Brennan
1:25.1	Center calls a deportation industrial complex.
1:28.5	And as the government is building up this infrastructure to increase the nation's ICE detention
1:34.4	capacity, the Trump administration has also attempted to reduce oversight of these detention
1:39.7	facilities. But first, the five-year-old boy detained by ICE in Minneapolis is not doing well after being sent to Texas, according to Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro, who visited him yesterday.
1:53.0	His dad said that he hasn't been himself, that he's been sleeping a lot because he's been depressed and sad.
2:01.7	You've probably seen a picture of Liam Conejo Ramos, whose middle name means
	...

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