Topics: Immigration, GoFundMe, Minnesota
The fury growing among residents in the Twin Cities is showing no sign of stopping, as the number of children being detained by immigration agents continues to rise.
Minneapolis city council member Jason Chavez has confirmed that a two-year-old girl and her father were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Thursday, as they were returning from a trip to the grocery store.
Images captured by MinnPost reporter Ellen Schmidt, who was also at the scene of mom Renee Nicole Good's killing at the hands of an ICE agent, shows masked officers surrounding the man's car while he held his daughter close.
While ICE agents detained the dad and his two-year-old daughter, a few of the many thousands of protesters that have flooded the streets of Minneapolis-St Paul surrounded the car and showed their outrage by blowing whistles and hurling insults at the immigration officers.
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The identities of the father and daughter, confirmed by a GoFundMe set up by relatives to help 'keep this family together', are Chloe Renata Tipan Villacis and Ecuadorean-native dad Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria.
The GoFundMe appeal, which has smashed its funding target of $75,000 by a further $18,000, reads: "With the permission of the mother, we are reaching out to community to help us raise funds for lawyer fee’s, food, bond requests, rent, livability, and resources to keep this family together.
"She would appreciate the help from community in reuniting their family."
Facing growing backlash over the number of children being detained by ICE agents, a Department for Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson described Echeverria as an 'illegal immigrant from Ecuador who committed felony reentry and broke the laws of this nation'.
They claimed to the Daily Beast that the father had been 'driving erratically with a child in the vehicle'. As to the location of his young child, they said that agents 'attempted to give the child to the mother who was in the area, but she refused.'
They claimed again: “DHS law enforcement took care of the child who the mother would not take. Child and father are now reunited a federal facility.”
But politicians on the ground are telling a different story.
Councilman Chavez, who raised the family's plight, described the arrest differently, saying: “A suspicious vehicle followed her father’s vehicle home, broke his window and kidnapped them.
He added: “No judicial warrant was provided.”
But with Villacis and Echeverria still in their custody, the family just want to be reunited.
Their GoFundMe adds: "We hope that community can come together to bring Chloe and Elvis back home. No family should ever go through this."
You can donate here.
