As soon as Sheletta Brundidge heard the news about the drowning of a 4-year-old boy who was autistic and nonverbal, she knew had to do something to help.

Brundidge, a Cottage Grove mother of three children with autism, has long relied on keyless smart door locks as a way to keep her children safe, and she wanted other parents of children with autism to learn about the locks and have a chance to get one for free.

“I was trying to think of what I could do to lift their spirits while educating parents about how to keep their special needs kids safe in the home,” she said of last week’s tragedy in Hopkins.

A close up of an interior door lock that has been installed in Sheletta Brundidge’s house in Cottage Grove, seen June 17, 2024. As a mother of children on the autism spectrum, Brundidge said the locks provide an added layer of protection for children who are prone to wandering. (Courtesy of Sheletta Brundidge)

Brundidge, who runs ShelettaMakesMeLaugh.com, reached out to Amazon, the online retailer, which is donating locks that will be given away at a community event from 1-3 p.m. Tuesday at Hopkins City Hall. The free event also includes an ice cream truck, face painting and book giveaway.

A volunteer assisting with the search effort found Waeys Ali Mohamed, 4, who was last seen June 9, in Minnehaha Creek around 10:40 a.m. June 10, about 500 yards downstream from his family’s apartment building in Hopkins, officials said.

“My heart just breaks for any family who loses a child, especially a family who has a child with autism who wanders or elopes from the home because I know how scary it can be,” Brundidge said. “… If I had that mother sitting in front of me right now, I would hug her and tell her, ‘It is not your fault. You did not do anything wrong. Don’t judge yourself too harshly because you know, this is what these children do, and we are doing everything within our knowledge and power to protect them.’”

When Brundidge’s son Daniel was 4 or 5 years old, he wandered outside on a below-zero night in the middle of winter, she said.

“The doors were locked and they were still closed, but I couldn’t find him anywhere in the house,” she said. “He found some kind of way to get out of the house, and I couldn’t figure out how. Well, he went out the sliding glass door in the back. He was in the back and he was on a trampoline jumping on top of the ice. It was like minus-8 degrees outside. My heart was pounding because I literally had picked up the phone to call 911. It wasn’t nothing but Jesus that had me look out there.”

Brundidge started looking for additional safety measures and discovered the interior keyless door locks on Amazon. When she recently decided to have a free giveaway of the locks, she contacted officials at the Amazon facility in Shakopee. They immediately signed on to help, she said.

The keyless door locks also are a great option for people caring for people with dementia, she said.

“I had somebody tell me last week that they were getting them for her grandmother who has dementia and is always wandering outside the home,” she said. “People did not know that these were available. Fences are expensive.”

The locks can be programmed with codes that are 6 to 15 digits long. Each lock has a bypass key, so “there is a way to get in and out of the lock using a key in case of a fire,” she said.

Brundidge is an Emmy-winning comedian and activist. She runs ShelettaMakesMeLaugh.com, a podcast network which features weekly shows hosted by Black subject experts from Minnesota.

She also is the author of three children’s books about autism, including “Brandon Spots His Sign,” which was published in 2022, “Cameron Goes to School” and “Daniel Finds His Voice.”

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Members of the St. Paul school board are set to vote Tuesday on a $1 billion budget for the coming year that leans on big cuts and deficit spending.

While it’s roughly the same size as last year’s overall budget, the spending plan includes about $114 million in cuts to school programs. Those include cuts to teaching and other positions that threaten programs like arts and music, as well as special-education interpreters.

The cuts are mostly tied to the expiration of pandemic-era federal aid, $128 million of which was included in last year’s budget and supported programs and positions beyond what the district typically would be able to offer.

Other cuts in the proposed budget include:

Reductions for school lunches that will result in menu changes
Potential school bus route cancellations
Loss of additional custodial staff supported by federal aid
Credit recovery programs for students at the four high schools with the lowest graduation rates would be available only after school or in the summer.

Amid the cuts, the district also plans to increase spending on pre-K and early-childhood family education with the goal of preparing students for elementary school so they can meet third-grade literacy standards.

Board members first saw the 2024-25 budget proposal at last week’s meeting. While district administrators have shared information with the board over multiple meetings, that was the first time members saw what they’d be asked to approve before the end-of-June deadline.

Major cuts have been on the horizon at St. Paul Public Schools and other districts for a while. About 70% of metro-area school districts faced shortfalls this year, according to the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, and St. Paul had one of the largest.

“There’s a lot of things I think, that the board, administration and parents and students are really disappointed that we’re having a cut in this budget session,” board member Chauntyll Allen said. “But we all knew that it was coming.”

An original projected deficit of more than $150 million shrank to around $108 million this year, but the district still required cuts to balance the budget.

The proposed budget still tops a billion dollars, despite the cuts, because of what budget chief Tom Sager described as “favorable bond sales,” which grew spending on previously approved construction and renovation projects by close to $90 million.

This is a breakdown of the overall budget members are set to vote on Tuesday:

General fund: $707.5 million — $114.6 million less than last year
Food service: $29.3 million — $5.4 million less than last year
Community service: $32.7 million — $2.8 million less than last year
Building construction: $204.4 million — $89.7 million more than last year
Debt service: $63.2 million — $9.7 million more than last year

The 2024-25 budget also marks another year where the district is tapping into its reserve funds to minimize program cuts. The district is spending $37 million from its reserves, leaving a projected $36.4 million — slightly more than the 5% minimum set by school board policy.

Last week, interim Superintendent John Thein told board members that this year’s proposed budget was built around community input. That input led to three main themes in building the budget:

Increasing school communities’ sense of belonging and feeling of safety
Ensuring students are respected and reflected in their curriculum and classrooms
Making literacy a priority in instruction

Some board members last Tuesday raised concerns about transparency in the budget process. The plan presented by district staff grouped many spending areas together, sometimes in ways different from the current year’s budget, presenting a challenge for comparing the two spending plans.

Allen said she appreciated district efforts to present the budget in an easier-to-understand format, which she called an improvement over past budget cycles. Still, more work is needed, she said, noting the board continues to push for greater budget transparency.

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“President Biden’s failure to divest from for-profit detention centers during his presidential term should urge New York leaders to use their constitutional powers to stop state and local facilities from continuing to profit from ICE detention.”

Josh Denmark/DHS

ICE’s Batavia-Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in upstate New York.

CityViews are readers’ opinions, not those of City Limits. Add your voice today!

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, originally intended to meet administrative hearing purposes, has devolved into a system marked by unnecessary deaths and family separation. This year alone, ICE has already reported several deaths in its custody. Their names were Chirino Peralta (32 years old), Ousmane Ba (33), Subash Shrestha (34), Frankline Okpu (37), Carlos Juan Francisco, (42), and  Charles Leo Daniel (61 ).

In Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to end for-profit detention centers because “no business should profit from the suffering of people fleeing violence.” In complete opposition to that promise, when presented with the opportunity to divest, Biden sided with private prison operator CoreCivic, and supported their demand to keep running an immigration detention center in New Jersey, despite state legislation prohibiting private detention facilities from entering into agreements to detain people for ICE.

Moreover, Biden’s most recent executive order bars and criminalizes undocumented migrants who cross the Southern border from a legal pathway to asylum, putting immigrant New Yorkers seeking shelter and asylum at a higher risk of being detained and at risk of death in detention. In the last year, the city has welcomed over 100,000 new arrivals seeking asylum.

President Biden’s failure to divest from for-profit detention centers during his presidential term should urge New York leaders to use their constitutional powers to stop state and local facilities from continuing to profit from ICE detention. Last year, immigrant New Yorkers detained at Orange County Correctional Facility (OCCF), New York’s second largest for-profit immigration detention center, sued ICE and Orange County officials for retaliation after protesting abuses they experienced while in detention, including severe medical and mental health neglect, racist and xenophobic harassment, and physical assault. Advocates report that the facility has failed to address the deplorable conditions in detention, while people there face continuous challenges in accessing legal counsel.

While inhumane conditions in detention persist and cause irreparable harm to immigrant families in New York, a self-proclaimed sanctuary city, this complicity with ICE detention is a deep betrayal. Furthermore, according to ICE, detention is meant to ensure that people in immigration removal proceedings appear in court. ICE’s contract with OCCF, which The Bronx Defenders obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, states, “all persons in the custody of ICE are Administrative detainees. This term recognizes that ICE detainees are not charged with criminal violations and are only held in custody to assure their presence throughout the administrative hearing process.” 

However, studies show that most people attend all of their immigration court hearings, and have more just outcomes while at liberty to pursue their case alongside a legal team. This should conclude that the costs of detention are too harmful just to meet ICE’s stated administrative needs and objectively unnecessary, so why does New York continue to allow state and local jails to contract with ICE? They are executing a business plan at the expense of people and collective safety. 

In 1997, Orange County Officials purchased 249 acres of farmland in the town of Goshen, New York (traditional territory of the Munsee Lenape) to build OCCF. Local groups opposed the plan, emphasizing that the small rural county did not need such a big jail and feared the county may attempt to make it a “moneymaker, and hold prisoners for ICE, State and Federal prisoners.”

They were right. Today, ICE pays OCCF $133.93 a day for each person detained there, totaling millions in 2021 alone. No amount of profit will ever justify or rectify the immense and irreparable harm that detention causes to a person’s mental and physical health, let alone their survival; or the emotional and financial impact on their loved ones, and entire communities across the state. 

New York leaders have an obligation to end this state’s long history of complicity in the profiting of the pain, oppression, and suffering of immigrants. Other States that have answered the call and passed legislation ending their complicity include New Jersey, Maryland, California, Illinois, and Colorado. New York State needs to be next and pass the Dignity Not Detention Act to get New York out of business with ICE. 

People power is about channeling our love for ourselves and each other into action. Until we free them all, please consider materially supporting people who are in ICE detention by checking out, donating, and sharing the Dignity Not Detention: A Fund for Detained Members. 

Carol Larancuent is an immigration policy advocate at The Bronx Defenders.

The post Opinion: ICE Detention Kills. New York Must End Its Complicity. appeared first on City Limits.