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This story was originally published by Rewire News Group, a national, nonprofit media organization exclusively dedicated to reporting on reproductive and sexual health, rights, and justice.

Vera Swanson is like many 5-year-olds.

Her favorite colors are purple and sparkly blue. She loves strawberries. Art is her favorite subject in school. She really likes drawing axolotls.

“They’re so cute. I made them today,” Vera said while sitting on her couch in St. Paul with her parents nearby, just days after federal immigration agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

She’s bubbly and extroverted. She can’t help but say hello to everyone she sees while running errands with her mom, Stacy.

She’s well-liked at her French immersion school and is proud she can count to 20. Her teachers enjoy having her in class. Other parents come up to Stacy Swanson instantly knowing who she is by hearing their children’s stories of Vera, even if their kids aren’t in Vera’s class.

Since President Donald Trump’s surge of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents became a constant presence in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Vera’s heard her friends say something is happening.

And Vera’s taken up a new hobby: setting traps at home.

“I do need to make one because the bad guys are taking mommies and daddies,” she said.

Vera and Stacy, like thousands of other children and parents in the Minneapolis metro area, are grappling with the reality of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement operation. Since December 2025, ICE, whose campaign, Trump has said, is ostensibly about combating fraud, has not only resulted in fear, mass protests, unlikely community organizing, and two deaths — it has also wreaked havoc on school-age children, parents, and teachers in the Twin Cities.

Parents are figuring out on the fly how to tell their children about and protect them against armed federal agents, who are occupying the city and ripping people haphazardly off the street. Teachers are scrambling to instruct half-empty classrooms and keep students sheltering at home caught up. Students are facing an “unprecedented” disruption to their education for the second time in six years. And kids are wondering when they might see their friends again.

In an upheaval reminiscent of the coronavirus pandemic, federal agents have completely upended schooling in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, which has a combined population of more than 3 million people. Local news outlet MPR News has reported that in districts with significant Border Patrol presence, as many as 40 percent of students have been absent in recent weeks.

Some teachers are instructing half-empty classrooms as students attend online for fear of going outside. Parents worry their child might be taken, especially after ICE grabbed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos on Jan. 20 from his Columbia Heights driveway and used him as bait to capture his........

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