By Christian Pena Velez — Columbia Heights, Minnesota

Minnesota is made up of about 23.4% people of color, making up about one-fifth of the state’s population. In our city of Columbia Heights, a suburb of about 22,000 lying just outside of Northeast Minneapolis, 46.6% of the population identifies as people of color—significantly above the statewide percentage. Due to this increased diversity, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (more commonly known as ICE, a federal organization that focuses on making sure immigration laws are properly enforced) has been spotted in and actively terrorizing Heights at much higher rates than other Minnesota suburbs.

Ever since the first inauguration of President Donald Trump, ICE has been under public scrutiny as President Trump calls for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, whom the administration considers “illegal.” According to White House Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, President Trump planned for ICE to target “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” later claiming that 70% of ICE arrests have been convicted or charged with a crime in the United States. However, according to the most recent self-reported ICE statistics, 71.7% of detainees have no criminal convictions at all.

Less than two months ago, in response to a viral video about child care fraud investigations in our state, President Donald Trump made racist remarks about the Somali community in Minnesota, referring to them as “garbage” and saying that the Trump Administration doesn’t “want ‘em in  our country.” He even went to the extent of calling out U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, who is Somali and serves Minnesota’s fifth district, which includes Columbia Heights. President Trump’s harsh language puts a lot of pressure on the communities being talked down to, stoking racism and propagating hatred. Many local Minnesota communities are feeling real fear how the President’s crackdown will affect them. 

This has directly led to several families in the Hispanic and Somali communities in Minnesota being too scared to leave home — especially after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, children in Columbia Heights and surrounding areas are missing school, parents aren’t commuting to work and businesses are struggling due to the lack of customers.

Reports of ICE patrolling, harassing and detaining residents in Columbia Heights have exploded too. On December 12, a video was uploaded to Facebook of ICE officers taking two people into custody on 49th and Central Avenue. On January 20, one of Columbia Heights Public Schools’ own Pre-K students, Liam Conejo Ramos, was taken into ICE custody alongside his father. 

These ongoing events and more led the student staff of The Heights Herald to make the difficult but necessary decision to self-censor and pause all reporting about ICE and immigrant populations in Heights. After our Co-Editors-in-Chief Skylen Raleigh and Mya Vutthikrai surveyed the staff, it was nearly unanimous that pursuing any further leads related to these topics would jeopardize our students’ families and put a target on our city even more than what we were already experiencing. 

According to Columbia Heights Public Schools (CHPS) Superintendent Zena Stenvik, ICE has also reportedly taken three other students into custody: a 17-year-old boy on his way to school, a 17-year-old girl from her apartment and a 10-year-old girl being driven to school by her mother. Dozens of parents and family members of students have been reportedly detained by ICE too. Columbia Heights is a very diverse community, and it’s evident that the presence of ICE in our city is tearing many families apart and making day-to-day life traumatizing and uncertain, to say the least.

Students having to worry about their families and loved ones while at school makes it harder for them to focus on learning and succeeding in their education. With the current state of constant fear, it hasn’t put any of our minds at ease—including allies of other ethnicities and backgrounds who just want ICE to leave. 

Luckily, within our community, there has also been a group that seeks to keep these problems at bay and help strengthen our efforts for a safer and more secure environment for all our residents. A widespread group of concerned citizens has stepped up using the mutual aid model, which is basically when other members of a community step in to help each other during times of crisis. Their main goal is to protect people who are targeted by ICE by delivering groceries, patrolling school drop-off and pick-up zones, observing and documenting ICE’s actions wherever and whenever possible and much more. The volunteer network does this through community outreach online and in person, teaching each other how to safely deal with these situations and provide direct relief and support to affected neighbors. 

Superintendent Stenvik, along with Valley View Elementary Principal Jason Kuhlman and School Board Chair Mary Granlund (whose son, full disclosure, is an editor for the Herald), also led by example in the days following Conejo Ramos’s detainment and spoke out to the press many times about the damaging impact of ICE’s presence and actions in our community. The Herald commends these efforts from our district’s leaders and now wants to follow suit in speaking out against and asking for a swift and peaceful resolution to the current occupation of our city by federal agents.

With these efforts and more in place, the community is protected by people who go out of their way to safeguard their community against interlopers whose only goal seems to be to terrorize and reach a detainment quota without consideration of due process or basic humanity. This reached a fever pitch on February 2 when, the day after Liam Conejo Ramos returned home following a federal judge’s order, a bomb threat was called into our district in the early morning, leaving CHPS with no choice but to cancel school at all buildings “out of an abundance of caution.” 

The presence of ICE in Columbia Heights has undoubtedly frightened a lot of people in our community, and understandably so. Recent events have planted fear into residents who want nothing but to live a peaceful life and to ensure their children get an education. But as has been seen by the world, Minnesotans are not an easy group to rattle, and the protests and vigilance of neighbors looking out for neighbors will continue. Times can get scary, but letting oneself fall victim to the fear is the first mistake that it seems President Trump and ICE want us to make. Fear is natural, but we here in Columbia Heights and all across Minnesota will not let it control us. We will continue to Be Good.

By Sage Gilliland — Mount Prospect, Illinois

Before “Make America Great Again” there was Langston Hughes. Hughes was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, present at the very forefront of the blossoming of Black American literature, art, music and culture. But America, even a century ago, had a penchant for longing for the “good old days” of its past. So Hughes addressed this head-on in his poem “Let America be America Again.”

First, it seems he’s one of many people waxing nostalgia. “Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain,” he writes, “seeking a home where he himself is free.”

But in the next stanza, with a single line tucked in restrained parentheses, he brings the fantasy crashing down: “America never was America to me.”

Some like to imagine American-ness as an absolute quality — like you’re either a “full,” “true-blooded” American or no American at all. But as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweeps the country and invades Minnesota, the lines between American and non-American have begun to blur.

ICE has detained US citizens, green card holders, people with temporary protected status, people who have lived here for decades and people who have committed only the crime of following the law and showing up to immigration court like the government wants them to. ICE, in fumbling through who is and isn’t “okay” to deport, is being forced to navigate what “American” means.

But what does “American” actually mean?

Americans live in a country that says “bring me your tired, your poor,” but deports them when they get here. America says it values protest and freedom of speech, but has repressed it from the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts to the 2025 ICE detention of Mahmoud Khalil. America is supposed to be a nation brought together by the protection of life, liberty and property — a nation held together not by blood, but by mere belief in itself.

But the same values that are supposed to bring us together have always — even in America’s vaunted and idealized beginnings — been inconsistently applied.

“There’s never been equality for me,” Hughes’ poem continues. “Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’”

Yes, maybe some of the same founding fathers who pontificated on universal rights went home to wives who were 15 when they met and a mansion of the enslaved. Maybe a few of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, even as they put pen to paper as proof of their rebellion, signing their own death warrants in case of British victory all for the idea that “all men are created equal,” didn’t, in their heart of hearts, actually believe it.

But long-dead leaders and current despots don’t get to determine what America means. They are not the ones who make America.

You are.

In Minnesota, you are standing up. In the freezing cold, through pain and terror, at risk of being gunned down by masked men with no training or conscience, you are standing up. Even as Vice President JD Vance says you should only want to live near people who don’t “have a totally different culture,” you look at who the White House calls “garbage” and call them “neighbor.”

Because you know that a birth certificate doesn’t make someone an American.

To be an American is to believe in America.

And protesting and standing up against injustice because you believe in this country and believe it can be better? That’s as American as it’s possible to be.

So keep going, Minnesota. Keep going and know that America is not the steel of the batons against your skulls or the leather of the federal boot on your back. It is the shriek of a whistle in the blue of the cold, the fire of a vigilside candle in thick-gloved hands, the strength in the shoulders of protestors with millions of times more bravery than armed thugs hiding behind the barrel of a gun.

In short, it is you. And as long as you are surviving, it is too.

We, KnightMedia, believe Minnesota is proving to immigrants everywhere that they can be protected by a loving community, that there are still those who will accept them with open arms, echoing the Statue of Liberty’s exhortation: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore; / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me!”

We believe you are the embodiment of the promise near the end of Hughes’ poem: “O, yes, / I say it plain, / America never was America to me, / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!”

Please share this pair of stories with whomever you can, it really helps us out. This is a pairing of pieces of staff at the Columbia Heights Herald in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, and ProspectorNow.com, in Mount Prospect, Illinois.