With the bright hope of 1776 turned to the expected cruelty of 2026, a woman dashed from her home in east Minneapolis, cellphone at the ready, as a black pickup truck with a burly Caucasian man at the wheel pulled up next to a Hispanic woman who was standing on the street with two young boys.

In Minneapolis, people being snatched from the streets has gone from frighteningly rare to horrifically routine, and residents now rush toward such abductions to record videos, which are their only weapon against the rule of ICE.

But the man in the truck was not part of the routine of a city under occupation.

The truck’s windows were open, and the boys and their mother recognized the driver as Jason Kuhlman, principal of Valley View Elementary in suburban Columbia Heights. Kuhlman assured the woman with the phone that he, and a man with him, were not who she assumed them to be.

“She was ready for war,” Kuhlman told the Daily Beast. “We’re like, ‘No, no, no, no, I’m from the school, I’m here to pick them up. I’m helping them, we’re not ICE.’”

It was a reunion with the boys, which he had come to fear would never happen.

Kuhlman had last seen the boys—a fifth grader and a second grader who have not been named—on Jan. 29, which he counts as the worst day of his nearly three decades in education. That included Jan. 20, the day Valley View pre-schooler Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were detained by ICE as the boy arrived home from school. A photo of the 5-year-old with a restraining hand on his shoulder as he stood in the snow outside his home in a knit blue bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack became the defining image of the Trump immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

The two brothers had been in class when their mother called the school office to report that ICE had arrested her at a scheduled court appearance in her ongoing asylum claim. She said she had no relatives who could take custody of her boys and asked the school to deliver them to the local........

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