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.”