Minneapolis Community Provides Safe Haven for Immigrant Children Separated from Families Amid Federal Pursuit

In a quiet Minneapolis neighborhood, an unsettling knock on the door changed everything for a family of ten. The eldest son, aware of the potential threat to his siblings, quickly decided it was time to move them to safety. This urgency arose when federal immigration agents came calling at their home, creating a climate of fear.

Their mother, a 41-year-old Indigenous Ecuadorian who worked as an office cleaner, had been detained earlier in January. Her crime? Entering the country illegally. Despite her only legal infractions being minor traffic violations, the shadow of deportation loomed large over the family, especially her eldest children, who feared they could be next. They worried about leaving behind their five-month-old brother and six other siblings, all under the age of 16.

“The immigration agents were at our door very late at night, and that’s when the fear set in,” the 20-year-old son recounted, choosing to remain anonymous due to concerns about further deportation threats. “I’m scared that if I’m taken, my brothers and sisters will end up in government care.”

In their moment of distress, the family reached out to Feliza Martinez, a trusted friend from church. Martinez swiftly mobilized a group of volunteers who helped relocate them to a safe house in south Minneapolis, away from the prying eyes of immigration authorities.

Martinez is among many in the Twin Cities stepping up to aid immigrant families like that of Melida Rita Wampash Tuntuam. Fueled by grassroots appeals, these individuals are often ordinary residents unsettled by the federal agents’ aggressive methods, which have included door-breaking raids without warrants and violent confrontations with protesters during the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies.

With over 2,000 federal agents combing through the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and more than 3,000 arrests reported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security since early December, local communities have been galvanized. Residents are organizing to monitor, disrupt, and protest these immigration crackdowns, both out in the open and through more discrete channels, demonstrating solidarity and resistance in the face of fear.

These Minnesotans have paid rent for immigrant families whose breadwinners are afraid to go to work, delivered home-cooked meals and arranged for regular check-ins and emergency custody arrangements to make sure children are cared for in case their parents are detained. Christian nonprofit Source MN has expanded its food bank program to provide for hundreds of sheltering immigrant families.

“I do receive calls every single day from families and they’re terrified, and we’re just trying to help them as much as we can,” said Martinez, a mother of five who has been taking time off her job on a factory assembly line to volunteer for Source MN. “I just try to bring hope — like, ‘We’re here with you.’”

Leaving home to stay safe

Snow covered the street as the Wampash Tuntuam family arrived at the safe house. A stream of visitors brought snacks, baby supplies and coloring books for the children. They assembled bunk beds and carried in mattresses.

The younger siblings settled in quickly, nestling on the couch in pajamas to share a bag of Cheetos and opening a coloring book to draw butterflies. The house soon sounded like any other filled with the shrieks and giggles of small children at play.

But Wampash Tuntuam’s older children, fidgeting on the couch, still worried about their future. They told The Associated Press that their mother gave the address of their rental home to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who said they wanted to send a social worker to check on the younger children. Instead, armed masked immigration officers appeared and surrounded the house twice.

“That’s when we knew they hadn’t sent a social worker but agents to detain us,” recalled Wampash Tuntuam’s 22-year-old daughter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she and three other family members have final orders of removal. Her 20-year-old brother and other siblings are working on obtaining legal status. The two youngest children are U.S. citizens.

Martinez, a devoted Christian, said she voted for President Donald Trump in the past three elections because of his hard-line stance against abortion and gender-affirming care for youth. The granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant supported deporting violent criminals and had not paid much attention to reports of family separations in the first Trump presidency.

But over the past two months, after watching videos of federal agents aggressively detaining her neighbors and working directly with children parted from their parents, she has changed her views.

“Being on the front line and what I have experienced and seen, I wish I would’ve never voted for him,” Martinez said. “What he’s doing, it’s not Christian. It’s not my beliefs.”

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that “ICE does not separate families,” noting that parents are asked whether they want to be removed with their children or place them with a designated person.

McLaughlin said Wampash Tuntuam entered the country illegally in 2022 via the Texas border and later received a final order of removal from an immigration judge. She said Wampash Tuntuam received due process and the administration is enforcing the law.

Facing an uncertain future

According to Wampash Tuntuam’s family, their mother had been planning to self-deport but was preparing custody documents for her infant son. The older children said their mother did not want her children to be deported because they will all end up living on the streets in their hometown in the Ecuadorian Amazon, like they did before coming to the U.S.

The older children expect their mother will be deported at any moment and worry about what will happen to her five youngest.

“If they found out that the baby was alone, they may take him away,” the 22-year-old daughter said. “We have all grown up together. I saw my baby brother’s birth. I am very scared they will take him away and I will never see him again.”

After their mother was detained, the 20-year-old son quit work at a restaurant to watch over his child siblings. He’s still figuring out how to care for his infant brother, who has had to switch from breastfeeding to formula and struggles to sleep without his mother.

The 20-year-old said he once saw Minneapolis as a “beautiful city” offering opportunities for immigrants like him until the surge of federal agents. There are still good people here, he said, referring to the volunteers who sheltered his family.

But his younger siblings continue to ask when their mother will return. He comforts them by saying she’s at the hospital and will be home soon.

“I keep telling them that she is going to come back, that she is already on her way,” he said. “They think that.”