Minneapolis
—
Marlon Batres is not OK.
The assistant principal says he is in constant fear for his students, staff and even himself in his Minnesota community.
His sense of security disappeared when federal agents swarmed the streets around his Minneapolis high school in December.
It doesn’t matter that White House border czar Tom Homan drew down the number of officers since then — Batres says he still sees immigration officers out on Minneapolis streets.
STREAMING NOW: Minneapolis kids still reeling in wake of anti-immigration surge. Upgrade to watch the full report.
It doesn’t matter that Batres is a US citizen. He says he’s seen one of his US-born students detained and taken to a federal facility before she was let out with no explanation and no recourse for the terror and confusion caused to her and her family.
What does matter is turning fear to strength by focusing on holding his school and his community together, Batres told CNN — and that is unrelentingly hard.
His concerns echo those of parents, educators and officials who fear there will be a long-term impact on children of the mass detention operation and fear that it spawned.
“It’s never over, and it’s never going to be over for us,” he said. “We’re going to take care of our students in different ways. It’s going to be hard. My worry is not now. It’s what comes after this, what effect is it going to have on our students and our families?”
For now, the aggressive tactics deployed by then-top US Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino that led to protests and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have largely morphed into more targeted operations involving fewer officers.
But Minnesotans like Batres are used to false springs, when conditions ease briefly before a new round of brutal weather crashes in. And they worry the same may happen with immigration action in their battered city.
Batres remembers smiling every day as he came through the doors of Hiawatha Collegiate High School, southeast of downtown. Now, he steels himself just as he exits the highway to a school where his job increasingly feels like running a crisis center.
The stress at Hiawatha High is so close to the surface that it seems hard for it not to spill over.
After answering “Are you OK?” with a straightforward “No,” Batres had to pause. He put his hands to his mouth as his eyes welled with tears. His voice wavered when he finally continued.
“This isn’t OK,” he said, even while expressing gratitude and pride for a supportive school whose response has included transporting students to and from school as well as running food donations and deliveries. “The things that these teachers are doing — this isn’t an administrative thing; this isn’t a school thing. This has been collectively the neighborhood … That’s the spirit of our school and our community here. But … this isn’t OK, and I have to be strong,” he said. “It’s tough.”
When the Department of Homeland Security launched “Operation Metro Surge” on December 1, the impact was almost immediate.
Batres said agents detained three people in 15 minutes within a couple of blocks of the school, as protesters also gathered.
“As you were driving, every other block, you hear the whistles,” he said. “You hear honking. It was surreal. It’s only stuff that you would imagine seeing in movies.”
Video shown to CNN captured federal officers following students onto campus. Signs are now posted at the public charter school to restrict access.
Agents’ actions affected the classroom as well: Online lessons were launched after Hiawatha’s daily attendance plummeted as four out of five students stayed home out of fear, Batres said. And the school auditorium stage is now a pantry stocked by donations that teachers and volunteers deliver at the end of the workday to families too nervous to go out.
Some children will never return. Batres said students, even those with asylum papers, had left the country rather than risk detention and being deported. He said some of his school families had been detained and knew of 14- and 16-year-olds whose parents were held by ICE, who now have to rely on aunts and cousins.
The atmosphere in the hallways is different, too. “It’s been silent. It’s been empty,” Batres said. “It’s been hard to come to work and be OK for the students.”
The Department of Homeland Security said in a news release last month that more than 4,000 undocumented immigrants “including murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists” had been arrested in the Minneapolis operation, which at its height saw about 3,000 federal agents surge into the Twin Cities. And when he took charge, border czar Homan said operations would be targeted, but “if you’re in the country illegally, you’re never off the table.”
Minneapolis suffered more than $203 million in losses just for the month of January, including lost wages and business revenue, city leaders said. Mayor Jacob Frey said in a news release: “The damage caused by Operation Metro Surge doesn’t disappear just because the operation is ending. Families were torn apart, small businesses lost millions and students had their learning disrupted. That impact is real.”
Batres is a native of El Salvador. He is living the American dream. He found a country and a community that supported him. He followed all the legal steps to naturalize as a citizen, and said he believes in the promise of the United States. But that belief has been shaken.
“This is not what America is supposed to be,” he said.
His mind races back to a time in his country of birth. To the stories and history of his grandparents in the El Salvador of the 1980s when a horrific civil war raged. That long ago reality felt like it had returned on the first day he saw the detentions around the school.
“That day in particular, it felt like the death squads in El Salvador in the ’80s, when they were just taking people — people, not criminals, just people — and it felt too familiar, too much of what my grandparents feared of when we were in El Salvador. Never did I imagine that we would have that feeling here in America.”
But that feeling has become a constant concern, he said. He carries his US passport with him to prove his citizenship — something he had never felt necessary before.
“I had to create a document for my team here that says, ‘If I’m detained, contact my wife, contact my mother-in-law. Here’s who’s responsible for my girls at daycare.’ That was harder to do than work on a will for my girls.”
Hiawatha is just one of the schools across the Twin Cities experiencing a new level of fear.
It’s striking how frequently Batres and his colleagues use the language of war and domestic attacks as they discuss life in their school and their community. Almost every day the school operates on “lockdown.” Teachers talk about being on the “front lines,” and keeping colleagues who are immigrants or not White hidden away inside and “safe.” Shelter-in-place protocols designed to protect children from active shooters are activated when ICE agents are in the school parking lot.
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violently resisted” when agents tried to disarm him. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said videos show that account to be “nonsense” and “lies.”” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”3335″ width=”4701″ loading=’lazy’/>
detained by federal agents after arriving home from preschool in a Minneapolis suburb on January 20. He is being held with his father at an ICE facility in Texas, according to school district officials and a family attorney. The boy and his family are originally from Ecuador and presented themselves to border officers in Texas in December 2024 to apply for asylum, the family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, said during a press conference. The Department of Homeland Security said the father was the intended target of the operation.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”2048″ width=”1536″ loading=’lazy’/>
told CNN she was confused by conflicting commands from officers and that she was just trying to go to a doctor’s appointment.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”2000″ width=”3000″ loading=’lazy’/>
the crowd chased him off before he could carry out his plan to burn a Qur’an and march to the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, home to the city’s highest concentration of Somali American residents.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”2000″ width=”3000″ loading=’lazy’/>
was killed when an ICE agent shot into her vehicle during an encounter on January 7. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good tried to “weaponize her vehicle” and that the agent opened fire out of self-defense. State and local officials have disputed that claim.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”2000″ width=”3000″ loading=’lazy’/>
he told the Reuters news agency. “I was praying. I was like, God, please help me, I didn’t do anything wrong. Why do they do this to me? Without my clothes on,” Thao, a Hmong man born in Laos, told Reuters.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”1868″ width=”3000″ loading=’lazy’/>
Target is headquartered in Minneapolis and has roughly 50 stores in the metro area. Two Target employees were arrested by immigration agents at a store in Richfield.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”2000″ width=”3000″ loading=’lazy’/>
fatal shooting in Minneapolis on January 7.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”3000″ width=”2298″ loading=’lazy’/>
In pictures: The Minneapolis immigration crackdown
Staff say they try to keep things normal and calm for the students still coming to class, but the strained atmosphere envelops everyone. During arrival and dismissal of students, staff and volunteers take up positions around the school on patrol, and school officials have now covered the windows with dark green construction paper to block federal agents from seeing in.
Grace, a bilingual English teacher at Hiawatha who asked that CNN not use her last name for fear of facing retaliation, said: “It feels hard to pretend that we can just keep having school when everyone is experiencing so much trauma and there’s so much need above and beyond the classroom.”
She said she still gets calls every day from families in crisis and was worried about the long-term effects on the mental health of students, and herself.
“I close my eyes sometimes and I hear the screaming sobs of my students finding out their parents were detained, and imagining my students sitting in cells, because I’ve had multiple who have been detained,” she said.
Some of the immigrant children — whose parents may or may not be documented — are showing ways to cope, to classmates and teachers.
Stephanie, a teacher at a middle school visited by CNN who did not want her last name published also fearing retaliation, said: “Students who are immigrants or refugees are inherently so resilient. For a lot of them, this isn’t their first experience with some level of occupation or civil unrest … There is a level of fear but also an incredible level of resilience.”
Batres takes heart from that resilience and embraces it. He calls the mass detentions of people with no criminal records in the United States “the most un-American thing I’ve ever experienced.” But with the very next breath, he talked about the good he had seen, too.
“On the flip side, the neighbors that are reaching out, military members, members of every other political party are reaching out and saying, ‘What do you need? How can we help?’ It’s human and that is what this country is about.”
