Love your neighbor as yourself.
~Mark 12: 31, the second greatest commandment.
Our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.
~President Ronald Reagan
Across the country, emboldened by the Trump administration and groups like the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, attempts to push religion into public schools have skyrocketed. But children often learn by observation. And that includes seeing Christian behavior in others’ actions.
Many want vouchers to send children to religious private schools, or to post the 10 Commandments and have Bible readings. Others fight to establish religious nonprofit charter schools despite community pushback.
The Interfaith Alliance writes: Project 2025 hopes to remake the United States into a so-called Christian nation, repressing diversity and difference and imposing one extreme religious worldview on all of us. Lindsey Burke, who wrote the education plan for Project 2025, works at the U.S. Department of Education.
This ignores the Separation of Church and State, recognizing that children arrive at school with diverse religious backgrounds. Or no religion, and they’re still welcome in public schools.
Public schools are open to every child, regardless of religion or where they come from (See: Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982)).
We’ve watched public schools across the country rise to assist students, to shelter them from ICE, like Fridley, Minnesota (Mervosh, 2026). These educators and citizens may not be thinking of the Bible or the 10 Commandments; they may be Christian or not, but they act in accordance with what Jesus commanded.
Also, clergy from various religions from across the country have traveled to Minneapolis to protest in solidarity with local communities and have penned a letter in support of peace.
Educators at Valley View Elementary School and the Columbia Heights School District, in Minnesota, jumped into action when ICE detained Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, a PreK student, with his father, sending them to an ICE facility in Texas, after he arrived home from school on January 20, 2026.
Liam and his father returned home on February 1, 2026, after a U.S. District Judge ordered their release, ruling their detention was unconstitutional. But according to the Daily Beast the Department of Justice, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, are signaling that they will appeal.
The Daily Beast claims figures reveal that the number of children in ICE detention has jumped more than sixfold since the start of Trump’s second term.
This is hard to imagine! Especially considering the serious order to release Liam.
In his order granting the release, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery blasted the administration, writing, “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.”
The superintendent, principal, and teachers at Valley View and the Columbia Heights School District work to protect students and families, what great educators and school boards do. They’re deeply embedded in helping the community, caring deeply for everyone at the school, the children, and their families.
In Liam’s situation, first, there was the school board chair, who witnessed the incident.
School board Chair Mary Granlund said she was driving to pick up her own children when she saw activity near the family’s house. She insisted that she saw Liam’s mother inside the home and that her husband yelled that she shouldn’t open the door, fearing that immigration officers would go inside.
Granlund said someone referred to her in saying a representative from the district was there and could assume responsibility for Liam.
“There was ample opportunity to be able to safely hand that child off to adults,” Granlund said.
Ramos said neither she nor her husband have a criminal record and that the two entered the country legally under the Biden administration’s CBP One program, which was later undone by the Trump administration.
Superintendent Zena Stenvik arrived on the scene quickly and provided a different account than from ICE officers. Later she stated:
He’s in a detention center. A 5-year-old is being held in a detention center. I have a real problem with that. I know that his preschool classroom is a beautiful, wonderful environment. I have been in his home, where it was — he has a backyard where he can play and build snowmen with his older brother.
And when I was in the home, there were plenty of toys around and just a really nice environment for a child to live in. It was a far cry from — I just — I hate to think about where — what he’s actually experiencing right now, what the conditions could possibly be, given the lawsuit that’s out there.
And:
They’re bursting through into apartments, apprehending people. They’re even breaking down doors and leaving broken doors or no doors now. So, opening the door with ICE agents looming, it’s not as easy or as clean of a statement as one might suggest.
Later, Liam’s principal also became alarmed:
“We got word that he was sick. That scares me,” Jason Kuhlman, principal of Valley View Elementary School in Columbia Heights, told CBS News. “How is he being treated? What medical attention is he getting?”
The school has returned to offering online instruction and delivering meals to families:
“We’re seeing [absence] levels comparable to COVID,” Kuhlman said. “A quarter of our school is not with us … We’re talking at one point in time, almost 200 kids are gone.”
It hasn’t only been Liam who has been taken by ICE agents. According to school officials, three other students have been taken.
According to the officials, two weeks ago, a 10-year-old fourth grader was detained by ICE agents on her way to elementary school with her mother. During the arrest, officials said, the child called her father to tell him the ICE agents were bringing her to school.
“The father immediately came to the school to find that both his daughter and wife had been taken,” officials said. “By the end of the school day, they were already in a detention center in Texas, and they are still there.”
Even though Liam and his father recently returned home, the fiasco turned out to be unnecessary, painful for the family, who have tried in good faith to become citisens, and traumatic for a little boy too young to understand what happened.
When Liam and his father were in detention his teacher and classmates made a supportive video showing the love from the children.
From The New York Times Opinion and The New York Times:
Don’t overlook all the non-school personnel the citizens who rally behind our undocumented immigrant population, especially and sadly Renee Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti who lost their lives.
As public education is dismantled, privatized for profit, and pressured to add religion, ask why when so much good comes from educators and public education, when real Christianity shines through?
America’s public schools are reflecting the best of the best and their message is clear: Bring all children in detention home and help their families find a pathway to citizenship. It’s the American way.
As Mary Granlund said: Our children should not be afraid to come to school or wait at the bus stop. Their families should not be afraid to drop off or pick up their children from school.
Reference
Mervosh, S. (2026, January 31). A Minnesota School District Guards Against ICE, From Dawn to Dusk. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/us/minneapolis-school-district-ice-agents.html.
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