At a May 31 ceremony at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, Mass., four individuals accepted the 2026 John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award on behalf of the Twin Cities.
Zena Stenvik, Superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, was among the four honored. The other three were Imam Yusuf Abdulle, co-founder of the Somali American Leadership Table; Natalie Ehret, founder of Haven Watch; and Carolina Ortiz, associate executive director of Communities Organizing Latine Power and Action.
The award was in recognition of “Citizens risking their lives to protect their neighbors and immigrant community members from an unprecedented federal law enforcement operation, peacefully defending the human rights and values that serve as the foundation of our Constitutional democracy.”
Host Caroline Kennedy said, “This year we honor the courage of those who didn’t seek elected office but have demonstrated moral courage across our society.”
The Profiles in Courage Award was accepted by Imam Yusuf Abdulle, Carolina Ortiz, Zena Stenvik and Natalie Ehret. Stenvik is Superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools. (Provided)
Columbia Heights and ICE
In a phone interview, Stenvik recalled the beginnings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities in Columbia Heights. On the last week of January, 2025, school officials began training their staff on ICE protocols, “knowing at that time that that schools were no longer going to be protected spaces, and so we trained our staff on what to do if an ICE agent showed up with a judicially signed warrant, and what everyone’s rights were at that time.”
The district began working with the Wilson Law Group, a bilingual law firm, which gave “Know Your Rights” trainings to school staff and families of students, and posted the information on the district website. “We began planning and preparing for what we thought would be someone showing up with an actual legal document, which obviously never happened.”
Stenvik said the district’s schools are locked facilities “with signs on every single door in the district.” Those signs say ICE cannot access them without a judicially signed warrant. She noted that parents began bolstering the school’s food pantry, anticipating that SNAP benefits would be reduced, and the district wanted to continue to be a resource hub for people in need. On January 3, the last day of the schools’ winter break, an ICE vehicle was spotted on school property for the first time.
The following Tuesday, January 6, a female student was taken away by ICE agents. She was the first student in the district to be taken in such a manner. Stenvik recalled, “She and her mother were on their way to elementary school, and they were stopped and detained by ICE agents. All of these events were awful, but in this case ICE had the 10-year-old child call her dad, and they told her they would drop her at school. The dad came racing up to the school, but his child never showed up. By the end of the day they both were already at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas.”
Two weeks later, the actions of ICE produced a nationwide image when 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, a student at Valley View Elementary, was detained with his father by federal agents after being used as “bait” to draw family members out of their home. In March 2026, an immigration judge denied the family’s asylum application. The case is on appeal, which is expected to take months to resolve; meanwhile, Liam and his father have returned to their Minnesota home.
Community support
At that time, the schools didn’t have a list of immigration attorneys to call. As such, they connected with community watch groups, mutual-aid organizations, Parent-Teacher organizations and their funding streams for donations for food and for local food shelves. Stenvik said, “Groups like SACA (Southern Anoka Community Assistance) delivered tons of groceries because no one was shopping at the food shelves by then.”
Stenvik called the local community “Highly connected and collaborative, and is a show of force to support the schools and local businesses, too. We had people volunteering to stand on every corner of every school, morning and afternoon, watching our schools, people driving their own and other children to school, volunteers to deliver meals and wash clothes. The school board, the city council, the mayor, the faith-based and service organizations all came together to care about what was going on.”
Asked about what the ICE presence has done to school enrollment, Stenvik said that there were 3,400 students in the district at that time, all of whom were affected. Seven students were detained by ICE and 800 students moved to online learning. There are now around 200 fewer students in the district than there were a year ago.
Regarding current anti-immigrant activities, Stenvik noted that the surge is gone, but ICE is still operating.
“What’s happening now is family members who entered this country legally seeking asylum are getting picked up when they go to their immigration check-in meetings, and they’re putting ankle monitors on these young moms who have not committed any crimes. I and my staff have taken parents to their check-in meetings and driven families to their court dates. We are continuing to support our families and we are still providing mutual aid, food and resources, but we are talking about human beings here,” Stenvik said. “Not criminals, not the worst of the worst. So much damage has been done here to really good families.”
She said that while the district organized food and resource delivery and other new systems quickly and effectively, “We asked people to never normalize what was happening. Every single day, every morning, every afternoon, ICE agents were all around us.”
Stenvik brought Columbia Heights School Board of Education Chair Mary Granlund to the award ceremony, saying she wanted to be on the same page with Granlund when dealing with the press, with protecting the students, the staff, and the community.
She added, “The day Liam was taken was the day it became glaringly obvious that staying silent was no longer helping. I called Mary the next morning and said, ‘I’m ready to talk, I’m ready to talk publicly,’ and she agreed. She was with me at the press conference later that day. We have been partners in this thing the whole time.”
When announcing the awards, the JFK foundation wrote that Twin Cities’ residents responded to the January 2026 surge of federal immigration agents “With extraordinary courage and resolve. Across religious, racial and political lines, a broad coalition of residents of the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs united in peaceful resistance despite violent confrontation and real personal risk, defending their neighbors’ rights and strengthening the national movement to protect American democracy.”