Columbia Heights Public Schools district officials accused ICE officers of using the 5-year-old “as bait.” A 10-year-old and her mother were also detained.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota have detained at least four children from the same school district this month, including a 5-year-old boy, school officials in a Minneapolis suburb said Wednesday.

The events have inflamed tensions between residents and ICE officers, sparked by the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renée Good by an ICE officer this month. The Trump administration has sought to justify the presence of ICE agents by saying that the officers are detaining immigrants convicted of violent crimes.

“Why detain a 5-year-old?” Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of the Columbia Heights Public Schools district, located just north of Minneapolis, said at a news conference. “You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, whom the Department of Homeland Security identified as Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias in an emailed statement, were detained in their driveway Tuesday afternoon, just as they were returning from the child’s preschool, according to a news release from Columbia Heights Public Schools.

The father fled on foot when ICE officers approached him, DHS said. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias,” it added.

After detaining the father, ICE officers then asked Liam to knock on the door to see if any other people were inside the home, “using a 5-year-old as bait,” according to the school district.

Another adult living in the home who was outside at the time, “begged the agents” to leave the child with them, the school district said. ICE agents refused.

Liam’s middle-school-aged brother returned home 20 minutes later to find that his younger brother and father had been taken away.

Liam and his father are now in San Antonio in the custody of Homeland Security authorities, the family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, said in an email. They are not U.S. citizens but “have been following the legal process perfectly, from presenting themselves at the border to applying for asylum and waiting for the process to go through,” he said.

DHS said it was not targeting Liam and that ICE’s policy is to ask parents if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person designated by a parent.

It was not immediately clear why ICE officers had not left Liam in the care of the adult whom school officials say had begged the officers to leave Liam there.

Ella Sullivan, Liam’s teacher in the district’s prekindergarten program, said at the news conference that Liam is “a bright young student.”

“He’s very friendly. He comes into class every day, and he just brightens the room,” she said. “His friends haven’t asked about him yet, but I know that they’ll catch on.”

Three more students at Columbia Heights have been detained this month by ICE officers, according to school officials.

A 17-year-old high school student on their way to school was removed from their car earlier Tuesday and taken by armed and masked agents, believed to be ICE agents, according to the news release. “No parents were present,” it said.

Last week, “ICE agents pushed their way into an apartment and detained a 17-year-old Columbia Heights High School student and her mother,” the school district said.

A week before that episode, a 10-year-old fourth-grader was detained by ICE agents with her mother. “During the arrest, the child called her father to tell him the ICE agents were bringing her to school,” the district said. “The father immediately came to the school to find that both his daughter and wife had been taken.” The girl and her mother are in a detention center in Texas, according to the school officials.

Mary Granlund, the chair of the Columbia Heights Public Schools board of education, expressed exasperation at a meeting this week.

“I have spent the last few weeks trying to make sure that our students and staff and families and everybody in our community are safe,” she said.

“I saw the power of community,” she continued. “But at the end of the day, we have whistles and they have guns.”