Columbia Heights students homeless due to ICE operations; community trying to keep up with need
In Columbia Heights, a small city that made national headlines after ICE detained a five-year-old during Operation Metro Surge, community groups are working daily to keep up with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of need.
Families are trying to dig themselves out of a hole that their government put them in," Columbia Heights School Board Chair Mary Granlund said.
According to Granlund, multiple students are now homeless because of ICE operations. She said that people had to make a choice based on safety to remain home, fearful that they would be detained or otherwise targeted. It's a story echoed across the metro, with Minneapolis grappling with how best to address what advocates describe as a housing and rent crisis.
Enter Nick Zeimet, a man who simply wants to be described as a "community member." The district parent helped start multiple GoFundMe campaigns tailored to each individual school, an effort that drew the attention of local non-profit HeightsNEXT.
He said that when the effort to help people with rent first started, they had just under ten families who reached out for assistance. That was January; now, he said that there are more than 550 families making requests that exceed the available cash raised by at least $800,000, according to Zeimet's estimates.
"That is the challenge right now, many families are behind and probably behind several weeks. We are trying to help as many as we can and again oftentimes it is with partial payments," Zeimet said.
That's a strategy that Zeimet said they are finding success with; triaging cases. It means getting money to those most in need, even if it means just keeping people afloat for weeks at a time instead of covering an entire month's worth of rent.
"The least we can do is write a check out to someone give them another couple weeks," Zeimet said.
The Wilson Foundation, a privately operated philanthropic engine, is now matching donations in Columbia Heights. The foundation is planning to do the same for proposed funding from the City of Minneapolis for its residents.
Both Zeimet and Granlund said that neighbors in Columbia Heights are at times waiting until the last minute to ask for assistance, with some anxious about needing to ask for help. Zeimet said that he has gotten an outpouring of thank you messages from people stating that they had never had trouble with the bills prior to Operation Metro Surge.
The money troubles are one of several outstanding ripple effects still hitting Columbia Heights. On Wednesday, an attorney for 5-year-old Liam Ramos revealed that a judge had denied the asylum claim for him and his family in February.
The legal team made a legal appeal, which is set to be reviewed by a judge with the Board of Immigration Appeals. It's a process that attorney Paschal Nwokocha said could take weeks or months.
"What they seek is for the government, U.S. government, to be very considerate, look at the humane face, the humane quality, the due process rights that we are all entitled to," Nwokocha said, "Having obeyed the laws, having done everything that is asked of them, that this country will give them a chance to live out the rest of their life here, peacefully."