When immigration enforcement agents came on to her Minneapolis high school’s grounds on 7 January, Lila Dominguez was in the school’s basement working on an article about an ICE agent shooting Renee Good earlier that day.

The high school junior was glued to her phone watching videos from outside the school.

“I was kind of pacing around. My hands were really shaky,” she said. “I was just very overstimulated, and not really sure what to do in that moment for the people that I was with, or the people outside or my family.”

Dominguez is one of the city’s tens of thousands of students living in the middle of ICE’s surge into their communities. Soon after agents came on to school grounds at Roosevelt, Minneapolis Public Schools announced it would cancel school for two days and give students the option to attend virtually through mid-February.

Dominguez started Roosevelt high school’s digital newspaper a few months back. Her instinct after ICE came to campus on the same day as the shooting: write about it, tell her classmates what was happening. Agents had used chemical irritants outside the school and detained a staffer. The school had locked the doors to protect those inside during the chaos, but staff and students saw agents in action.

“ICE Needs To Get Out Of Minneapolis” read the headline of a column Dominguez wrote that day, which pinged around the internet, far beyond her school community and her expectations. She called for ICE agents to leave town, a frequent refrain in the Twin Cities where thousands of federal agents now roam.

“It’s hard to process these things, especially when they are happening at our front doors,” she wrote on 7 January. “The second I got home from Roosevelt today at 5[pm] the first thing I did was hug my dad tight. It is so important to be with the people you love during this time.”

As ICE agents have moved further into the suburban communities surrounding Minneapolis, their presence has affected more young people. A parent was detained at a bus stop in the suburb of Crystal, Minnesota while waiting to get their child on the bus. The Robbinsdale school district confirmed the detention and said all students, including the student involved, were able to safely get on the school bus and get to school.

“We recognize this news can create fear, confusion, and anxiety for students and for adults across the district, not just at the school this incident involved,” the school said in a statement.

Schools districts throughout the metro area have reported lower attendance. Some are allowing remote learning. They’re working on protocols for what to do when ICE comes on campus. One public charter school in another suburb, Richfield, said it would temporarily move to remote learning after its attendance had dropped below 40%.

Collin Beachy, the chair of the Minneapolis Public School Board, said at a press conference on Wednesday that the district has been focused on providing support for students, staff and families affected by the fear and anxiety of ICE’s enforcement.

“Schools and school districts exist within communities, and what happens in the community affects our learning environment,” he said. He called for ICE to “leave our kids alone”.

Students at Roosevelt were among the many schools that held walkouts to protest ICE in the days after Good’s killing. Dominguez said that some of her classes have been missing a lot of students. It’s difficult to focus on learning when the community is going through a crisis.

It “doesn’t feel normal at all” at school right now, she said, though she noted that the school’s leaders and staff have been great at helping students at this time. During the two days school was closed, no new work was assigned, but it was still difficult to go about daily tasks without getting preoccupied with ICE, she said.

“Being a student in Minneapolis right now can be really scary, because going to school is something that kids are so lucky to have,” she said. “The fact that our own government is keeping us from the schools that they provide and they want us to be at is scary, and it’s sad and it’s angering.”

A family trying to get home from their son’s basketball game in Minneapolis on Wednesday found themselves between protesters and federal agents, before they were tear gassed in their car and the mother had to administer CPR to her infant.

Destiny Jackson, 26, tells CNN her family of eight pulled over because protesters and parked cars were making it difficult to drive past. The family said they did not know about the protest, which erupted the same evening an immigration agent shot a man in the leg.

But Jackson and her family suddenly found themselves face-to-face with the charged political climate in Minneapolis, where tensions have continued to mount after an ICE agent fatally shot a mother of three earlier this month.

Since then, thousands of immigration agents have been sent to the Twin Cities, and they’ve been met with demonstrators, most peacefully protesting, in the street. Still, state and local officials in St. Paul and Minneapolis have been bracing for more protests.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison later told CNN the family was “caught in the middle of” the situation.

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, agents responding to protests had “followed their training and reasonably deployed crowd control measures.”

They were not, she said in a statement to CNN, targeting the family.

A federal judge placed new restrictions on immigration agents, ruling agents carrying out a sweeping operation in Minnesota can’t deploy certain crowd-control measures against peaceful protesters or arrest them.

But in the car, Jackson said she heard somebody say “it’s about to go down.”

“Oh, what’s about to go down?” she said.

She started to see federal agents and knew it wasn’t safe for the family, which included her husband and six children ranging from a 6-month-old to an 11-year-old, to be there anymore.

Her husband attempted to back the car up, but realized there were federal agents on either side of the car. They were trapped.

“An ICE agent, one of them like yells in my window like ‘get the F out of here.’ And my husband’s like ‘we’re trying,’” Jackson said.

She told her husband not to move their vehicle until the federal agents were gone, so they didn’t accidentally hit one of them.

“We’ve seen what happened to Renee (Good),” she said, referring to the woman who was killed when an ICE agent shot into her vehicle during an encounter earlier this month.

The next few moments played out quickly, Jackson said. She started to see flash bangs out her window and then watched as a tear gas canister flew through the air and dropped to the ground, before rolling under her car.

Within three seconds, she felt her car go up in the air and slam back down. All the air bags in her car went off and everything went “blurry.” Tear gas quickly started filling the car while the doors auto locked, trapping them inside.

Jackson and her husband tried to break open their windows, but couldn’t get them to budge. She couldn’t see anything through the black smoke, so she flung her body to the backseat to try to unlock the doors for her children.

“I was feeling around, like I was hitting my son’s window and I worked my way to his lock, and then I reached over all my other two younger kids and I unlocked that lock,” she said.

Her husband’s door in the driver’s seat opened, so he went out that way and Jackson followed. She grabbed her two-year-old and passed him to a bystander, as others helped get the remaining children out of the vehicle.

“I couldn’t breathe. And I’m pointing at the car and I’m saying, ‘I have more kids, I have more kids,’” she said, as a bystander pulled her into a house nearby.

Dramatic video shows the moment the family evacuated their car and fled into a nearby home.

The baby was the last to make it out of the car, as the bystanders struggled to maneuver the car seat. When someone brought Jackson her baby into the house, she said he wasn’t breathing and his eyes were closed.

She screamed for a wet towel and gave the baby mouth-to-mouth while people poured milk on her other children’s eyes.

“In the midst of like doing mouth-to-mouth, I stopped and I looked at my baby and I was just like ‘wake up, you have to,’” she said. “I just felt like I’m gonna give you every breath I have.”

DHS said “hundreds of rioters and agitators surrounded law enforcement, began assaulting them and even launching fireworks at them.”

Jackson went to the hospital with her baby and two of her children who have severe asthma. They all still have cold-like symptoms, but she said they are managing and providing the baby with treatments to clear his airways.

The city of Minneapolis said in a statement the tear gas caused “a 6-month-old infant inside the vehicle to experience breathing difficulties,” according to initial reports.

When police and the fire department were able to reach the family, “the infant was breathing and stable, but (in) serious condition,” according to the statement.

Jackson said she hasn’t been able to sleep since Wednesday, as the incident has triggered her existing panic disorder. Their car is also not usable, and she said her two oldest children keep asking if their next car can be an “armored vehicle” in case this happens again.

But she was very thankful to the bystanders who helped her and the home where her family took refuge.

One small coincidence Jackson realized after her baby opened his eyes: The house was the very same home the family almost purchased two years ago.