School of Minneapolis 5-year-old detained by ICE closes due to bomb threat

The Minneapolis school district attended by 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, the Ecuadorian preschooler who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Jan. 20, shut down Monday after receiving a bomb threat.

Columbia Heights Public Schools, a district spanning suburban Minneapolis, said it had canceled all classes and programs Monday “out of an abundance of caution” after a bomb threat was emailed to several schools in the district, according to a school district spokesperson.

The bomb threat to the school district “definitely didn’t help with with our sense of safety and security,” schools superintendent Zena Stenvik told MS NOW. As of Monday afternoon, authorities had swept all schools in the district and determined there was no active threat, she said. Classes are slated to resume Tuesday.

The threat came the day after Liam and his father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, returned to their home in Minneapolis after spending more than a week at an immigration facility in south Texas. Photos of Liam wearing a fuzzy blue bunny beanie and a Spider-Man backpack when he was detained on his way home from school circulated online, igniting nationwide anger over ICE’s detention tactics.

A federal judge on Saturday ordered the release of Liam and his father in a scathing court order that called their detention an “imposition of cruelty” by the Trump administration.

“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, an appointee of former Democratic President Bill Clinton, wrote in the order.

Liam and his father were released from Dilley family detention center in Texas on Sunday before returning to their home in Minneapolis home.

Stenvik told MS NOW she spoke with Liam’s mother after the boy arrived in Minneapolis. He will return to school with a support plan when he has recovered, she said.

Four other children from Liam’s school district are being held at the Dilley detention center. They have all been detained since the administration launched the sprawling federal immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, according to statement from Columbia Heights Public Schools.

Ten-year-old Elizabeth Caisaguano, a fourth-grade student at Highland Elementary School in Columbia Heights, Minn., was detained alongside her mother, Rosa Caisaguano, while commuting to school, according to Carolina Gutierrez, the school’s principle secretary. Within hours the pair were taken to Dilley, where they are still being held.

“Some of our youngest students are very aware of what is happening. They see it with their own eyes, as well… the kids are coming to school asking about it because they see it,” Stenvik said.

“I am confident that this will have long lasting negative impacts on children, and I really just find it to be senseless again,” Stenvik added. “Cases that we’re working with, like Liam’s family’s case, they entered the United States legally. They were following the rules.”

The Texas Department of State Health Services confirmed to MS NOW Monday that there are two cases of measles at the Dilley detention center.

“We are aware of the cases and are assisting by providing doses of measles vaccine as requested by ICE,” said Chris Van Deusen, a spokesperson for the health services department.