When federal immigration agents pounded on his door Minneapolis At home, the eldest son in a family of 10 knew he had to move his siblings to a safer place.
Their mother, a 41-year-old indigenous office cleaner in Ecuador, with no known criminal record and minor traffic violations, was arrested in early January because she had entered the country illegally. Her eldest children fear their turn will come, leaving behind their 5-month-old brother and six other children under 16.
“The immigration agents were knocking on our door very late at night, and that’s when I got scared,” said the 20-year-old son, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that additional family members could be deported. “I fear that I will be taken and that my brothers and sisters will be in the hands of the government.”
That’s when the family called Felisa Martinez, a friend from church, who rallied a group of volunteers to quietly take them to a safe house in south Minneapolis.
Martinez is one of countless Twin Cities residents who are helping immigrants like Melida Rita Wambach-Tontoum’s family, driven by word-of-mouth pleas for help — most of them ordinary people appalled by the aggressive tactics of federal agents who… Broken doors without warrants and They clashed violently With the demonstrators during Trump administration campaign.
While more than 2,000 federal agents comb the Minneapolis-St. Paul to detain immigrants, and the US Department of Homeland Security has reported more than 3,000 arrests since early December, and residents have organized surveillance, disruption and Protest against oppression On the streets and in less visible ways.
These Minnesotans paid rent for immigrant families whose breadwinners were afraid to go to work, delivered home-cooked meals, and arranged regular check-ins and emergency custody arrangements to make sure children were taken care of if their parents were detained. Christian nonprofit Source MN has expanded its food bank program to provide for hundreds of immigrant families.
“I get calls every day from families and they’re terrified, and we’re trying to help them as much as we can,” said Martinez, a mother of five who took time off from her job on a factory assembly line to volunteer at Source MN. “I’m just trying to bring hope, like, ‘We’re here with you.’”
Snow covered the street when the Wambach-Tontowam family arrived at the safe house. A stream of visitors brought snacks, baby supplies and children’s coloring books. They assembled bunk beds and carried mattresses.
The younger siblings quickly settled down, sitting on the couch in their pajamas to share a bag of Cheetos and open a coloring book to draw butterflies. Soon the house seemed like any other, filled with the cries and laughter of little children playing.
But the older Wambach-Tontowam children, fidgeting on the couch, still worry 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 young children. Instead, armed, masked immigration officers showed up and surrounded the house twice.
“That’s when we learned they weren’t sending a social worker but agents to arrest us,” recalled Wambach’s 22-year-old daughter, Wambach-Tontoam, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she and three other family members had final removal orders. Her 20-year-old brother and other siblings are working to obtain legal status. The two youngest children are US citizens.
Martinez, a devout Christian, said she voted for President Donald Trump in the past three elections because of his hardline stance against abortion and foster care. The granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant supported the deportation of violent criminals and paid little attention to reports of family separation in Trump’s first presidency.
But over the past two months, after watching videos of federal agents and aggressively detaining its neighbors By working directly with children separated from their parents, she changed her views.
“Being on the front lines and what I experienced and witnessed, I wish I had never voted for him,” Martinez said. “What he is doing is not Christian. These are not my beliefs.”
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not separate families,” Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, noting that parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or placed with a specific person.
Wambach-Tontoam entered the country illegally in 2022 through the Texas border and later received a final order of removal from an immigration judge, McLaughlin said. She said Wambach-Tontum received due process and that the department was enforcing the law.
According to the Wambach-Tontoam family, their mother was planning to self-deport but was preparing custody documents for her infant son. The older children said their mother did not want her children deported because they would all end up living on the streets in their hometown in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as they did before coming to the United States.
The older children expect their mother to be deported at any moment, and worry about what will happen to the five youngest.
“If they found out the child was alone, they might take him away,” the 22-year-old daughter said. “We’ve all grown up together. I saw the birth of my little brother. I’m so afraid they’ll take him away and I’ll never see him again.”
After their mother was arrested, the 20-year-old son left work in a restaurant to take care of his younger siblings. He is still thinking about how to care for his baby brother, who has had to switch from breastfeeding to formula and is struggling to sleep without his mother.
The 20-year-old said he once saw Minneapolis as a “beautiful city” that provided opportunities for immigrants like him until federal agents showed up. There are still good people here, he said, referring to the volunteers who sheltered his family.
But his younger siblings still wonder when their mother will return. He consoles them by saying that she is in the hospital and will come home soon.
He added: “I keep telling them that she will come back, and that she is already on her way.” “They think so.”