ICE detains 2-year-old and her father in Minneapolis after outrage over 5-year-old’s arrest

A two-year-old girl and her father are in federal custody after immigration officers broke the man’s car window and arrested them on their way home from the grocery store, according to Minneapolis officials.

The detention of Chloe Renata Tipan Villacis and Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria has fueled outrage in an city that has seen a dramatic surge of federal law enforcement officers who have arrested hundreds of people, including a five-year-old boy pictured in a viral image wearing a Spider-Man backpack and blue cap as officers arrested him on his frozen driveway.

Two-year-old Chloe and five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos are among at least five Minneapolis-area children swept up in Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign in recent days.

Chloe and her father “were coming back from grocery shopping when a suspicious vehicle followed her father’s vehicle home,” according to Minneapolis City council member Jason Chavez.

“When the father pulled into his private property, ICE agents got out of the vehicle, broke his window and kidnapped them,” Chavez said. “No judicial warrant was provided.”

The councilman said he has started a GoFundMe and shared the family’s story with the permission of the girl’s mother, Deicy Villacis Ruiz. The fundraiser has collected more than $61,000 as of publication.

“No family should ever go through this,” Chavez wrote.

A spokesperson for Homeland Security said the girl’s father was stopped by Customs and Border Patrol officers who accused him of “driving erratically with a child in the vehicle.”

“He refused multiple lawful commands to open his door or lower his window,” the spokesperson said.

Homeland Security claims that the girl’s mother “refused” to take custody of her child, and Chloe and her father are now “reunited” at an immigration detention facility, according to the spokesperson.

Minneapolis schools and families are reeling after a wave of recent child detentions. At least four students from the Columbia Heights Public Schools system were detained by immigration officers within the last week alone, according to the district.

Two weeks ago, a 10-year-old 4th grader was “taken by ICE agents on her way to one of our elementary schools with her mother,” the district said in a statement.

“During the arrest, the child called her father to tell him the ICE agents were bringing her to school,” according to the district. “The father immediately came to the school to find that both his daughter and wife had been taken.”

The same day Liam and his father were arrested, a 17-year-old Columbia Heights High School student was arrested by “armed and masked agents” on the way to school without any parents present, according to the school.

In another alleged incident last week, immigration officers “pushed their way into an apartment and detained a 17-year-old student and her mother.

The now-viral image of five-year-old Liam standing in the snow during his arrest is fueling outrage in a city that has emerged as the latest backdrop to Trump’s mass deportation efforts, which have drawn several lawsuits and demonstrations across the country..

“Why detain a 5-year-old?” asked Columbia Heights schools superintendent Zena Stenvik during a news conference Thursday.

The boy and his father are originally from Ecuador and seeking asylum in the United States.

“These are not illegal aliens. They came legally and are pursuing a legal pathway,” family attorney Marc Prokosch said at the briefing.

Vice President JD Vance and ICE officials said they had no choice but to detain the preschooler and his father, claiming that the boy’s mother “refused to take custody of her child.”

Sweeping immigration enforcement operations have interrupted schools in communities across the country and put families, teachers and administrators on edge as they brace for agents showing up on campus and at home.

In Chicago, thousands of students were marked absent as federal officers swarmed the city last year, according to school officials.

Officers were also filmed dragging a teacher out of daycare, reportedly in front of children, and traumatized high schoolers who were “beat up” by officers before they arrived homeroom, their teachers said.

Parents have also been arrested near schools in at least 10 states last year, according to a review of incidents from The Washington Post. School attendance plummeted in Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina, in the days after the Trump administration surged agents in the Democratic-led cities, schools said.

Immigration agents have also fired tear gas, joined car chases and shot at least one person in areas nearby schools, prompting campus lockdowns and alarm among students, their parents and school staff.

After taking office, the Trump administration abandoned previous policy to prevent enforcement operations near so-called “sensitive” areas such as school campuses. Homeland Security has repeatedly stressed that schools are not being targeted in the operations, but the operations have derailed class schedules and forced some schools to shut down entirely.

“Taken in total, this enforcement activity is injecting chaos and trauma in the lives of children regardless of their immigration status,” more than 70 Democratic members of Congress wrote to Education Secretary Linda McMahon in November. “It is undeniable that it will have a harmful and lasting impact on whole communities of school aged children.”