This article is published in partnership with Foster Advocates.
At Foster Advocates, our team has been holding grief and anger over the indiscriminate arrests and surveillance of our communities and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. While their deaths brought nationwide attention onto Minnesota, the impacts of the ICE surge on our state and its Fosters started last fall, and are continuing despite federal announcements of a drawdown. Fosters from across Minnesota have reported — and continue to report — ICE engaging in racial profiling and disruption of their communities. Fosters in our network have been on the ground documenting impacts to community, have had to leave their homes due to tear gas set off on residential streets, have sheltered in place due to fear of being targeted due to the color of their skin, and have struggled over whether to send their kids to school or keep them home and risk truancy calls. We also recognize that for any Foster, in Minnesota and across the country, witnessing this pattern of family separation likely resonates deeply with their own experiences in foster care.
These impacts are not abstract for Minnesota Fosters. We know our whole network is experiencing fear, distress, and disruption, regardless of the immigration aspects of their own foster care journey. To that end, we created a new Know Your Rights Immigration & Documentation guide for Minnesota Fosters to provide some support for understanding rights and resources related to immigration and documentation. We encourage readers to learn about Foster and immigration rights in your own state, and explore how you can uplift the recommendations from the National Foster Care Youth & Alumni Policy Council on supporting immigrant children in foster care.
Fosters deserve to be seen within all the other systems child welfare overlaps with, which includes the immigration system and supported pathways to citizenship. We are honored to partner with Youth Voices Rising to highlight reflections from Minnesota Fosters in order to bring more attention and action at this intersection.
In Solidarity,
Foster Advocates Team
Unlike ice, which is commonly used to reduce swelling and inflammation, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has done quite the opposite by intensifying fear, trauma and instability within many immigrant communities. For many Americans, conversations on immigration are a chronic debate. For immigrant families, however, it’s a daily reality shaped by stigma, shame and the constant fear and threat of family separation. As a former foster youth, I understand the fear of adults with authority to remove and separate one from one’s family “for their own good” all while underestimating the trauma that separation itself inflicts.
I often say “history repeats itself,” but now I am physically watching it occur. My partner himself is a first-generation American. He now carries any and every form of identification he has everywhere he goes, fearing our family may be separated based on his skin tone alone. My daughter was bullied at school and told her daddy and baby brother should go back to where they came from, all because of the color of their skin and the language they speak. This is not the future I saw myself bringing a family into.
The parallels between foster care and immigration enforcement are impossible to ignore. In both systems, family separation is normalized and often framed as being in the best interests of the children. Meanwhile, the children are the ones often left to absorb the fear, grief and confusion long before they even understand policy or legality. And in both, the harm often lingers generations after the case is closed.
This isn’t about dismissing the need for a functional immigration system. It’s about asking whether enforcement, rooted in power and fear with a lack of accountability, truly reflects our values or whether, like untreated intergenerational trauma, it continues to swell, harming generations to come.
Anonymous
As a second-generation refugee to a Liberian native and as a foster youth, the ICE surge has impacted me tremendously. At first, you’re told that you’re safe because you yourself haven’t committed a crime and are a legal citizen. But then you realize, when has a Black woman in America ever been “safe?” You realize that this is misinformation as you witness your neighbor’s blood splattered in their vehicle. You think, if she’s white and a citizen, what does that mean for me?
You then begin to lock yourself in your house. You stop using public transportation in the fear that they’ll be waiting for you. You stop doing normal activities. Your therapist tells you that you cannot let them control your life, and you cannot live in fear. So when you do find the courage to finally go out and enjoy yourself, that enjoyment is immediately shut down when you remember Renee Good and Alex Pretti. You think of Keith Porter, a Black man who was murdered by an off-duty ICE agent, who has less media coverage than both Renee and Alex.
Your heart then begins to ache for your one-year-old daughter who is oblivious to the world around her. Will she too have to witness a classmate disappearing? Where will she go if I get taken? Will she too end up in the same foster care system that destroyed my inner child?
I must say that as a foster youth, a wave of anxiety hits me every day. I feel out of control yet again. I am reminded of the younger me who had to submit to authority. It feels like I am screaming, but nobody is listening. To live in hypervigilance, a constant state of anxiousness, is horrible. I mourn the lives that we’ll never get back from this tragedy and the lives that are locked away in the inhumane detention centers. I can only hope that the loss of their blood and tears will not go in vain.
Vi*
As I look around at 2026, I never could have imagined that America, which once was a safe haven for my family, would leave us and our community in a state of terror. I have lived in America for 23 years as a peaceful law-abiding citizen. In today’s age, the idea of being uprooted from the only place I know as home has run rampant in my mind because of one thing and one thing only: I am still only a permanent resident. With the oversaturation of ICE agents in our community, tearing families apart no matter the status, contribution or alleged criminal history, it has left us in a state of grief — from the adversities we left behind and for the adversities we are currently facing. As a youth in foster care, I found out I had very little proof of being in America legally, so much so that I required a special juvenile immigrant status just to stay in America to evade deportation. No one took the time to secure my status while I was in care, oftentimes leaving me feeling unimportant and invisible. Even after 11 years of aging out of care, I am still dealing with obtaining my citizenship which I was so close to. The last step would have been to be sworn in at my naturalization ceremony. All that came to a halt due to the presence of ICE agents; it was no longer safe for anyone not born here to be freely walking around.
Similar to my experience living through a genocide in the country I was born in, it felt like deja vu seeing people persecuted, watching neighbors, friends and family murdered, and being under a government that was focused on dividing and conquering based on people’s birth rights again. Despite what has been unfolding in our communities, I have also witnessed the same community come together to pick each other up and support one another. When I was locked inside of my job for hours due to the protests and ICE agents on our property, it was my community who rallied around me to take shifts in making sure I got home safe. “ICE OUT” posters hung proudly on the doors of neighboring establishments. Not even negative degrees in temperature were going to stop the solidarity.
As much as our communities held on to keep everyone together, families were still shattered. If I could say one thing to all ICE agents, I would tell them that when they see us, they are encountering human beings with families and careers and contributory society members. When they see us, may they see the same hunger and drive for a better life that drove their own ancestors to settle in this beautiful land. When they see us, may they also remember we, too, are pursuing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Isaiah Sampson
ICE has been given $85 billion in total. This is what they’ve done so far with it. A lot of the people being detained/bothered are actual citizens. It has affected someone I know. I never thought I’d be saying that as a Black American. I saw a video of a friend’s family member getting pepper sprayed with a gun by an ICE agent. The agent shot him in the face with it. Two days later, they start showing up at schools. There were videos of the same stuff going on but with kids as they started coming out. Stuff got so bad they had to close down schools in Minnesota because kids are scared. They’re scared of ICE. They’re scared ICE will break up their family. They’re scared because of how they conduct the raids. The schools had to choose to protect the children. That should never happen. So many kids have gone into foster care as a result of this. I want you all to think about the effects this will have on the future of those kids and families affected. Hate breeds hate.
Renee Good had a family. She was a mother. Children lost their mom, and the government is on the news saying she’s a terrorist. For those kids, this is not a game for them. They will live without a mom. I want you all to think about the effects this will have on those affected and their families and just say the numbers will continue to grow. Kids are seeing these videos of people being killed. Stress will affect how kids sleep, which then will affect their mental health and how they interact with other people. ICE is detaining hundreds of kids and sent 600 immigrant kids to federal detention shelters, setting a record this year. Within the past year, at least 32 children have been placed in foster care after their parents were deported. I want you all to think about the effects this has on a community.
Anonymous
As a Foster who had experienced an extremely broken system as a child, I don’t usually vote. However, this last presidential election hit too close to home. As a wife of an immigrant and mother to two Hispanic boys, I made the point to go out and vote. I’ve never really felt like my voice was heard as a child, so casting my vote was heartbreaking. I remember bawling as I walked to my car afterwards, a sinking feeling of despair looming over me. When I found out Donald Trump was elected, I immediately feared for my husband and kids, despite the “You’re dramatic” and “Your family will be fine” lectures I heard left and right. When my husband completed his green card interview last year, we sat in the parking garage, clinging to each other in terror. We’d heard all the stories of people being taken into custody at these meetings, and we didn’t know what we’d be walking into. Though the meeting went great and he was approved, the fear still hasn’t gone away six months later.
Just a few weeks ago, ICE was sitting outside of a strip mall, where one of the businesses was the clinic where my child received therapy due to his autism diagnosis. Despite all of this, I’m one of the lucky ones. My husband does not work in the heart of the ICE surge chaos. My boys could pass as white. I’m an educated white woman with a birth certificate, social security card, and passport.
However, many of my fellow Fosters are not so lucky. I have a friend who told me she was terrified to bring her child to daycare because of all the ICE activity in the area. Another person I know asked if she had to get a passport and was panicking because she didn’t know the steps or the requirements. A colleague at work has had two family members stolen by ICE. We all live in fear. Whenever my husband isn’t home right on time, I immediately assume it was ICE. Every time I drop my child off at his therapy sessions, I fear that he’ll be taken and become lost in the system, just like many Fosters I know. This needs to end now! We do not need to spread fear and hate to deport the “worst of the worst.” Because how is a full-time working dad of two a criminal?
Allyson Moorhead*
As a former foster youth with a spouse from Ghana, these ICE raids are petrifying. Are my kids going to lose their dad? Are we going to be separated forever? Though we are currently living separately, we still care deeply for our children. I find myself often watching over my back. Is it safe to go? Hypervigilance doesn’t even explain it correctly. I have currently lost three friends to the deportations. It destroys me inside seeing comments online saying, “Well, if they were here legally, they wouldn’t be deported.” Two of my friends were citizens that had dual citizenship and were deported anyway, so that rhetoric doesn’t stand. Most of my friends, other Fosters, and people I spend my time with are refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers. I find myself constantly checking in with them to make sure they are safe, if they need anything, and if they are on the radar or been bothered by ICE. I have been delivering food boxes, hygiene products, and smiles as much as possible, even though we are all scared and hurt inside.
*Names have been changed for safety and privacy reasons.
