Sylvia Davidow 06/11/26 (whowhatwhy.org)
Identifying vehicles ICE may be using to snatch students or their parents off the streets isn’t in the normal job description of the superintendent of a school district. However, as Brenda Lewis found out, these are not normal times.
This is the second article in a four-part series investigating the impact of Operation Metro Surge on Minnesota schools and students. You can find the first here and the next installment tomorrow.
Superintendent Brenda Lewis of Fridley Public Schools near Minneapolis never expected to find herself a leader in the resistance against ICE. But after Renee Good, a local mom, was killed by an immigration enforcement agent in January, and one of Lewis’s teachers was pulled over and held at gunpoint just hours later, the superintendent was spurred into action.
That teacher, who is an American citizen, was first tailgated and later followed for several miles. When Lewis found out what happened, something shifted in her mind.
“I was trying to understand the motivation around it, but then you are also in this mode of ‘Hey, we have to keep our children, our students, our family safe, our staff safe,’” she told WhoWhatWhy.
One of the reasons she felt the need to do something is that Fridley, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis, has a large population of Somali immigrants — one of the groups the Trump administration vowed to especially target as part of its “Operation Metro Surge.” This resulted in many students missing classes, which culminated in more than a third of students being absent from their classrooms in the week after Good’s deadly shooting.
Starting in mid-January, Lewis gave Fridley students the option to participate in their classes remotely for the winter quarter. More than 400 out of 2,800 students chose to take advantage of the opportunity. To protect those who still came to school, the superintendent arranged for district-wide patrol duty which took place during arrival and dismissal times until the end of February.
Lewis found herself spending most of her waking hours managing the crisis. In the mornings, she went on patrol, during which she shared information about suspicious vehicles that could be ICE, did walkabouts at each school, and addressed situations involving students or faculty members.
In what would ordinarily be her lunch break, Lewis contacted food delivery pantries working in the schools, and she checked in with students who were learning virtually to find out if they were absent due to ICE interference, whether direct or indirect. Some students chose to remain at home in order to stay safe, and some had been detained or deported by federal agents.
At the end of each school day, Lewis would go back on patrol duty to ensure that everyone — students and faculty alike — got home safely. Later in the evening, she would speak at press conferences and testify on behalf of the Minneapolis school community, revealing the shocking stories that detailed why ICE needed to stay out of schools. Finally, the superintendent would end her evening by updating her board members, staff, and families on the events of the day and communicating messages of reassurance.
At the peak of ICE’s engagement in Minneapolis, she went to the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul to speak on behalf of her schools at Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) press conference on February 3.
“Their presence is harming children, it is disrupting learning and it’s eroding trust. I will continue to be transparent, I will continue to speak up. And I am asking urgently for action,” Lewis said at the event. “Get ICE out of schools, out of our parking lots and out of our bus stops. Our children deserve to feel safe when they come to school. This is not political, this is all of our responsibility.”
The following morning, Lewis was reminded of how serious the situation had become. A mother was followed by two ICE vehicles as she tried to bring her child to school; she sat in the parking lot until she felt safe to drive again. Her child saw the whole thing. Another mother was followed by ICE as she took her three-year-old child to daycare. At yet another school, six ICE vehicles circled the roundabout during morning drop-off, and agents heckled the principal and staff. Crossing guards were scared because they didn’t know what to do, and children were blocked from crossing the street as ICE recorded the entire encounter. Lewis later calculated that all these events took place in the same 15-minute time span.
“It’s not my job to interfere with ICE operations,” Lewis told WhoWhatWhy in March. “However, it is my job to ensure that ICE does not interfere with school district operations.”
And interfere they did.
According to Lewis, at the beginning of the 2025–2026 academic year, Fridley Public Schools had been on track to continue its trajectory of growth in literacy and math. This was a big deal considering how Fridley schools are so heavily populated with children of immigrants. However, due to the upheaval caused by ICE, a significant number of these students missed attending school during the winter months.
“We still will continue, we’ve just taken some backsliding,” Lewis said.
The Two Types of Trauma Children Carried Through Metro Surge
According to Katie Lingras, an associate professor with the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, there are two types of kids who were impacted by ICE: those who were directly affected, and those who were indirectly affected.
The children who were directly affected were the ones who feared being deported themselves, had family members detained, or who were separated from their families because they were deported by ICE.
The kids from families most at risk of ICE encounters generally stayed away from school and hid in their homes. These kids are the most impacted by this experience, but they can also be the most resilient.
“There’s lots of skills and characteristics that families can build that can get kids through hard times,” said Lingras, who specializes in early childhood mental health and trauma.
She noted that kids in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area specifically have witnessed a series of stressful events over the past seven years, ranging from the pandemic and the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, which took place a few months before ICE was deployed to the city.
“Each and every one of those can trigger all of those same types of feelings of fear and grief,” Lingras said. “And then you take that foundation and add on this, this kind of lawless show of power among federal law enforcement officers, and this intentional cruelty, this intentional fear-inducing behavior. And it’s a lot for all of these kids to manage.”
She also said that many kids were indirectly affected by ICE, such as the elementary classes that didn’t have playground recess throughout the winter due to fear for the students’ safety, or the children who saw armed and masked ICE agents around town everywhere they went.
There was no safe place in Minneapolis that was “ICE free.”
“The most challenging thing was that there was not really an area you could avoid — you know, ‘I wanna keep my kids sheltered and safe from this, so we’re not gonna go to x place,’” Lingras said.
The Fallout Continued Long After the Surge Ended
The staff at Fridley Public Schools did their best to track if students moved out of state, self-deported, or were forcibly deported or detained by ICE. But Lewis noted that she only knows for sure that a student’s residency status has changed when a member of their family communicates with her or school staff. Although the virtual learning program Lewis helped maintain kept the school district stabilized during the height of the surge, the superintendent believes it’s going to take another five years for the district as a whole to get their missed learning time back.
While in the midst of the mass ICE raids, Lewis missed the simplicities of an abundantly filled school, such as classrooms with children sitting at every desk or table, crowded hallways during passing periods, and loud lunchrooms with students engaged in conversation.
“I will never again complain about overcrowding in a hallway,” she said. “I felt what that’s like when 400 of our kids are remote learning and 122 of our kids aren’t with us that were with us in December.”
When WhoWhatWhy spoke with Lewis, she said it had been a long time since she’s sent a message about an issue other than ICE.
In the early spring, however, some of her district’s students started coming back to school. The superintendent believes the experience of losing and then seeing friends of her own kids return has been “renewing.” She was always relieved when her children told her excitedly, “So-and-so’s back, Mom!”
In the next article, you’ll learn about two middle school teachers in Columbia Heights who organized meal deliveries for community members in hiding and worked to minimize the trauma experienced by their young students.
This story was written by a member of our Mentor Apprentice Program (MAP). It gives aspiring journalists an opportunity to hone their craft while covering national and international news under the tutelage of seasoned reporters and editors. You can learn more about the MAP and how you can support our efforts to safeguard the future of journalism here.
