ICE Detains 2-Year-Old Girl Days After Using 5-Year-Old as Bait

ICE detained a 2-year-old girl in Minneapolis on Thursday, just two days after using a 5-year-old as bait—once again proving that claims that federal agents are only going after the worst of the worst are outright lies.

A district court judge ordered that the child be released by 9:30 p.m. on Friday after she and her father were detained by ICE at a traffic stop. They have been identified as Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria and Chloe Renata Tipan Villacis, following a GoFundMe effort to bring them home.

“Respondents have taken a 2-year-old into custody—an escalation of violence that is unspeakable, cruel and without any legal basis or justification,” their attorneys said in court filings.

Their attorneys claim that their clients, both from Ecuador, are asylum-seekers who were arrested without warrants.

“On January 22, 2026, Chloe who is 2 years of age, and Elvis who is her father, were detained in South Minneapolis by ICE. They were driving back home from the grocery store when immigration officials decided to detain them,” the father and daughter’s GoFundMe reads. “With the permission of the mother, we are reaching out to community to help us raise funds for lawyer fees, food, bond requests, rent, livability, and resources to keep this family together. She would appreciate the help from community in reuniting their family.”

While the judge’s ruling raises hope that the toddler will return home soon, her arrest only adds to the bleak deluge of news coming out of Minnesota. ICE continues to terrorize people, often brutalizing and wrongfully detaining them in the process. And they’re preparing to potentially move on to Maine, Wisconsin, and maybe your town next.

Dozens of faith leaders were arrested during a massive peaceful protest Friday at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

A group of clergy members were among thousands who gathered at the airport to urge airlines working with ICE to stand with them against the Trump administration’s sweeping deportation operation in the Twin Cities.

One video shared to X by Workday Magazine’s Sarah Lazare showed a line of clergy members assembled in the road outside of Terminal 1 departures, singing. “Before this campaign fails, we’ll all go down to jail, everybody’s got a right to live,” the clergy members sang.

Another video showed the large crowd of protesters—including striking workers and union members—cheering: “Our streets!”

A third video shared on X by Labor Notes’ Luis Feliz Leon showed faith leaders kneeling in the road, saying a prayer for the immigrants arrested by ICE as police officers assembled behind them. Organizers of the action said that “roughly 100” clergy members were arrested during the protest, according to CBS News.

Protesters specifically called on Delta Airlines and Signature Aviation to stop contracting deportation flights to the Department of Homeland Security. Organizers claimed that roughly 2,000 people had been deported through the airport.

Around 200 clergy members, hailing from a range of faiths and traditions, dispersed across Minneapolis Thursday in order to monitor federal agents’ interaction with protesters and civilians.

Tensions between residents and law enforcement in Minneapolis continued to mount this week as ICE agents proceeded to violently arrest protesters, carry out warrantless raids, and chase down immigrants who are already in custody. Earlier this week, ICE agents used a 5-year-old boy as bait for one of his relatives after arresting the child’s father—who had no criminal record. The father and son were then both removed to Texas for deportation.

The Trump-appointed head of the federal panel that recommends vaccines is saying that polio and measles vaccines—and perhaps every vaccine—should be optional.

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, who heads the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on a podcast Thursday that possibly every shot should be optional, saying that while he had “concerns” that some children might die of measles or become paralyzed from polio, a person’s right to refuse a vaccine supersedes all medical concerns.

“If there is no choice, then informed consent is an illusion,” Milhoan said. “Without consent, it is medical battery.”

Milhoan made the comments in an episode of Why Should I Trust You? released Thursday, claiming that polio and measles are not the threats they used to be because of medical advances and sanitation, not vaccination. His comments are in line with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-vaccination views and his recent decision to reduce the number of recommended vaccines from 17 to 11.

Kennedy’s decision, however, is not being followed by leading medical organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, and every single state plus the District of Columbia still requires most, if not all 17 vaccinations, for an individual to attend public schools. But the measles and polio vaccines have prevented countless deaths and injuries in the United States and worldwide for the past several decades, and changing that could lead to more dangerous and deadly outbreaks.

Medical experts told The New York Times that Milhoan’s decision was completely unfounded and dangerous.

“These vaccines protect children and save lives,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee at the American Academy of Pediatrics. “It’s very frustrating for those of us who spend our careers trying to do what we can to improve the health of children to see harm coming to children because of an ideological agenda not grounded in science.”

A person no longer needs to commit a crime in order to be considered a criminal in Donald Trump’s America.

A masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent warned a woman in Portland, Maine, that her information would be entered into a “nice little database” that would label her a domestic terrorist. Her infraction? Peacefully filming the immigration agency’s street activity.

“It’s not illegal to record,” the woman can be heard saying in a video posted Friday by self-described activist Nathan Bernard.

“Exactly, that’s what we’re doing,” the agent responds.

“Yeah, why are you taking my information down?” she asked.

“Because we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist,” he responded, sending her laughing.

“For videotaping you? Are you crazy?” she snarked.

But that is the current reality under the rule of the Department of Homeland Security. A leaked security threats assessment, obtained and published Wednesday by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, revealed the department’s intention to shift the definition of domestic terrorism toward a much broader one, encompassing a new subset of individuals acting on “class-based or economic grievances.”

As Klippenstein pointed out in his Substack, that could refer to any American.

Meanwhile, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents have been granted sweeping authority to operate under DHS with impunity, effectively giving them free license to interact with the American public however they see fit. In Minneapolis alone, agents have been brazen enough to kill a 37-year-old mother by shooting her several times point-blank, arrest a 5-year-old child in his driveway, arrest U.S. citizens at their jobs, and regularly infringe on the public’s First Amendment rights by brutalizing protesters.

Part of the rush to violence could be because of the agency’s lackluster recruitment tactics. Federal officers have historically been recruited from smaller law enforcement departments with years of experience already under their belts, but that tradition has essentially been eradicated in order to satisfy the agency’s “wartime recruitment” hiring spree, which aims to take on as many as 10,000 new officers over the coming year.

ICE plans to spend $100 million on online advertisements in hopes of drawing gun rights advocates and military enthusiasts into its ranks. To do so, they are using software that allows them to “geofence” people within the so-called manosphere, identifying those who have recently attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear.

Last week, law enforcement officials told NBC News that ICE’s AI software had “sent many new recruits into field offices without proper training.”

ICE agents in Maine arrested a Black law enforcement officer, even after he repeatedly told them he was a legal immigrant.

Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce confirmed to reporters Thursday that a viral cell phone video of a man being detained by ICE agents in a Portland neighborhood Wednesday was a corrections officer recruit from the county. In the video, the man can be heard shouting “What’s wrong? I’m just coming from work. What’s wrong, guys? I don’t understand this. I don’t have any violations.”

An eyewitness who recorded video of the arrest, Ben Bozeman, told the Portland Press Herald that while taking a walk nearby Wednesday night, he saw five cars swarm the man and that ICE agents threatened him with a Taser before detaining him. Bozeman that the agents left the recruit’s car still running on the side of the road, with his corrections uniform sitting in plain sight in the back seat.

“It’s very dark, just jarring and threatening,” Bozeman told the newspaper, saying that witnessing ICE’s violence had shaken him.

“They all took off, leaving his car with the windows down, the lights on, unsecured and unoccupied,” Joyce said in a press conference. “They left it right on the side of the street. Folks, that’s bush-league policing.”

The sheriff excoriated the agents for their conduct, saying the arrest had changed his mind about the federal government’s immigration actions.

“We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring or what occurred [Wednesday] night,” Joyce said, noting that the recruit had passed the county’s application process to qualify as a corrections employee, and was cleared to work in the United States until April 2029.

“In fact, he was squeaky clean. Squeaky clean,” Joyce said. “I guess if you’re not the card-carrying, you know, U.S. citizen, then you must be illegal, because that’s what they told me is he’s illegal, and he’s definitely not a criminal. So what part of him is illegal? I don’t know.”

Law enforcement officers across the country have been caught up in ICE’s violence, including in Minneapolis, where local police have complained that officers of color have been questioned and detained on multiple occasions. ICE’s leadership has proclaimed that nearly everyone is considered fair game in their mass deportation agenda, as it becomes increasingly clear that the Trump administration is deploying a racist goon squad.