By Phillip Sitter, Des Moines Register
A northern Iowa school district issued a shelter-in-place order after it received information about federal immigration enforcement activity in the area.
Belmond-Klemme Community School District Superintendent Jenn Peter told the Des Moines Register in an emailed statement Wednesday that the district gave the brief order “out of an abundance of caution after school officials received reports of two men presenting as immigration officials and contacting families in our community.” The Wright County Monitor first reported the news Tuesday, Sept. 9 in a post on its Facebook page.
Peter said there was no direct threat and classes continued while the district “temporarily tightened entry procedures and verified all visitors through the front office.”
“Student and staff safety is and will always be our top priority,” she said. “We made this decision in coordination with local law enforcement based on the information available at the time.”
Wright County Sheriff Jason Schluttenhofer said Wednesday that U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials were in the area conducting welfare checks on minors who had previously crossed into the country unaccompanied and had been placed with sponsors.
“There’s a task force going around doing that,” making sure those children are safe, Schluttenhofer said of the investigative effort. He said it was not an enforcement operation.
Schluttenhofer said he did not know how many people or how many vehicles may have been involved with the welfare checks.
Belmond is located in Wright County, northeast of Clarion and southwest of Mason City, though the school district extends into Hancock and Franklin counties. More than one-third of Belmond-Klemme’s 643 students in 2024 were Hispanic or Latino, according to state data.
Belmond Police Department Chief Dario Gamino said in an email Tuesday police had not received any reports of ICE in town. In a follow up Wednesday, Gamino said he had been given the same information from the sheriff’s office about Homeland Security officials doing welfare checks.
ICE announced in a news release in June that Homeland Security launched an initiative to locate and verify the safety of unaccompanied migrant children.
“In many cases, these vulnerable children were released to sponsors in the United States without proper vetting — some of the sponsors had paid smugglers to bring the children into the country or fraudulently claimed familial relationships. As a result, these children were subjected to physical abuse and sexual and labor exploitation,” the news release said.
ICE said the welfare checks assess whether children are receiving appropriate care, attending school, complying with immigration proceedings and are not being trafficked, exploited or abused.
“These welfare checks are not primarily immigration enforcement focused, but if ICE agents or officers encounter individuals who are in the United States illegally, they take them into custody and process them for removal in accordance with federal immigration law. Likewise, unaccompanied children in the U.S. illegally are transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s custody,” the release added.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or ICE answered questions Wednesday about the department’s operations in Iowa and how many unaccompanied minors had previously been placed with sponsors in the state.
But the department said in an emailed statement from Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that President Joe Biden’s administration “lost” many unaccompanied children “who were placed with unvetted sponsors or released into the country.”
McLaughlin said President Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “take the responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to reunite children with their families.”
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Aug. 31 blocked the Trump administration from deporting 10 unaccompanied migrant Guatemalan children, aged 10 to 17 years old, according to USA TODAY.
The 10 children had been boarded onto planes when the 14-day halt came through and were returned to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Reuters reported.
As Trump’s administration has stepped up immigration raids across the country, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said in August that 20 Iowa National Guard soldiers would be deployed to offer “administrative and logistical support” to ICE beginning in September.
Reynolds said in a statement the move would help free up local ICE officials to “continue their work outside the office to enforce the law and keep our state safe.”
ICE has offices in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
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