As thousands of ICE agents arrived, kids started staying home from school. A local principal, teachers, and parent volunteers have banded together to keep the families safe.

One recent afternoon, in a linoleum-floored room at an elementary school in Minneapolis, the mother of a first grader and third grader sorted through sacks of potatoes and oranges. These and other groceries would be distributed to families who’d been too afraid to send their children to school in the weeks since an influx of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement began operations in the city, in December. The day before, a group from a local fitness studio—“a bunch of, like, hot, ripped spinning instructors,” the mom called them—had arrived with eight carloads of donated food. The most vulnerable part of the process, she explained, is the home delivery: “You can just imagine that it’s super sensitive, because you’re getting people’s addresses.” She recalled the first time she did a drop-off. “I see a literal ICE agent walking around, and he just walks right past me. I’m just not on his radar,” she said. She is white, and had on a red University of Wisconsin T-shirt. “But, yeah, I go up to this apartment, and this mom was on the verge of tears, who’s been at home with her kids in a stuffy apartment for, like, a month, you know?”

A couple of weeks before winter break, a teacher noticed that a student with immigrant parents had stopped showing up. “That was the first sign that something bigger was happening,” the teacher recalled. The school, which has around five hundred students, does not ask parents to report their immigration status, but more than half the kids are classified as English-language learners. “We have students who are from many different Latin American countries, and then Somali students, African American students, and a small group of white students,” the principal, who asked that the school remain anonymous, said. “We are serving students who are mostly experiencing poverty, so we spend a lot of time with missing learning and making sure that we’re filling that in. Back before this all started, we could really focus on instruction. That’s what we’d like to focus on again.”

Instead, Donald Trump ordered an additional two thousand immigration agents into the city in the new year, bringing the total to three thousand. After January 7th, when a federal agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, and other agents swarmed the grounds of a local high school, metro-area school districts began offering a distance-learning option. As of late January, around forty per cent of the elementary school’s students have been staying home, and many of their families no longer leave the house. School parents have been detained, the principal said, but even those with legal status are staying home, out of fear. “We’ve had a family self-deport,” the principal said. “We’ve had families move out of state just to get away from this level of enforcement here.”

The school began formulating its response to the crisis in December. Meetings were held to figure out how best to assist the families. Laptops and mobile hot spots were distributed. Parents began volunteering their time. A toy drive was arranged to make sure the homebound kids got Christmas presents. A GoFundMe was initiated to cover rent and groceries for families who have stopped going to work; parents and other volunteers are connecting detained parents with legal assistance. Teachers are driving kids to and from school, and have access to an A.I. translation app to convey offers of help to families in their native languages. The mobilization is both semi-organized and overwhelming; the cafeteria’s walk-in refrigerator is stuffed with gallon jugs of milk and cartons of eggs.

The other day, the school was unusually quiet. Its corridors, colorful with children’s art, had phrases of encouragement (“together is always better”) painted on the walls. One hallway had a line of bikes for kids to learn how to ride; a corner had a bin full of cross-country skis for their use. On a lobby bulletin board, photos introduced the members of a “Volunteer Piano Ensemble,” most of them gray-haired, who come and play the piano as children arrive at school.

In a second-floor room bright with winter sunshine, two teachers had consolidated their diminished classes into one. “I see lots of you cleaning up,” one of the teachers said, in a voice indicating a deep reservoir of patience. “I need to see everybody cleaning up. Look at the timer. Just a sliver of time left.”

After the children settled on a rug for a math lesson, one of the teachers stepped out into the hall. “I spoke to a mom on the phone yesterday,” the teacher, who is fluent in Spanish, told a visitor. “Her husband was picked up at the courthouse, and he’s in El Paso, Texas.” The family was from Ecuador, and the mother had decided that they would return there. “I mean, her son is a student in my class, and he doesn’t know how to read in his native language, and now he doesn’t know how to read in English, either, because his year has been interrupted,” the teacher said. “And now they’re going home, and I’m scared for them.”

She said she had begged another parent, who works as a maid at a downtown hotel, not to risk going to work; another mother who worked as a hotel maid had already been detained—“by an ICE agent staying at the hotel,” the teacher said. The mother who worked at the downtown hotel would not be dissuaded, even when several others from school intervened. “I said, ’We will pay your rent. We will bring you groceries. Please do not go to work. It is not safe,’ ” the teacher recalled. “And she just said, ’I need this job.’ ” The teacher insisted on driving her. “She had us drop her off at a side door of the building,” she said.

Another family with a child at the school was stopped by ICE agents on the way to a prenatal appointment. The mother, who is eight months pregnant, was let go, along with the child; the father, who had a work permit and a pending asylum case, is now being held in El Paso. The school helped connect the family to an immigration lawyer.

A Spanish teacher, an immigrant herself, has been trying to set up a system whereby local families with citizenship make a four-week commitment to be the primary point of contact for one of a hundred and fifty families who are sheltering at home. “This has become an obsession for me,” she said, sitting in a small office, poring over a spreadsheet on a laptop. “My husband says that I’m manic, you know? I don’t sleep.” She pulled up, on her phone, a group text in which two families had been exchanging photos. “When I saw this, I just cried the whole day,” she said. “Just seeing this exchange of, like, this family that could not be any whiter with this adorable Latino family. I mean, this is who our President wants to kick out.”

On January 29th, Tom Homan, the Trump Administration’s “border czar,” announced that the number of federal agents in the state would be reduced, on the condition that state and local law enforcement coöperate with federal immigration enforcement, which local politicians have largely resisted. (Minneapolis and St. Paul have laws restricting such coöperation.) Distance learning is scheduled to end, but the school staff expects that it will be extended. The adults have tried to explain the situation to the children the best they can. The principal said that teachers have incorporated lessons about boycotts and protest. “So they can kind of connect it to that,” the principal said. “The kids know that there’s a way to respond when you feel like something is unjust.”

Down in the linoleum-floored room, the mom in the Wisconsin shirt sorted the donated food into categories. She owns a winter-clothing company, and the post-holiday lull is typically her downtime. But, she said, at the school, the number of “type-A white parents that have some money or flexibility or whatever” is small. “I’m already seeing the burnout in some of the other parents,” she said. Two bundled-up women arrived pushing a cart of groceries, including canned goods. “There’s a little tomato section over there,” the mom said, guiding them. Each family gets fresh produce, shelf-stable items, and a bag of hygiene and cleaning products. “I keep thinking, if I was trapped at home, what I would want,” she said. “And it’s, like, I’d want LaCroix water, and coffee, and, I don’t know, some good popcorn.”