By HALLIE GOLDEN

A 5-year-old boy arriving home from preschool in Minnesota was taken by federal agents along with his father to a detention facility in Texas, school officials and the family’s lawyer said, making him the latest child caught up in the immigration enforcement surge that has riled the Twin Cities in recent weeks.

Federal agents took Liam Conejo Ramos from a running car while it was in the family’s driveway on Tuesday afternoon, Columbia Heights Public Schools Superintendent Zena Stenvik said during a news conference Wednesday. The officers then told him to knock on the door to his suburban Minneapolis home to see if other people were inside, “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait,” she said.

Stenvik said the family has an active asylum case and has not been ordered to leave the country.

“Why detain a 5-year-old?” she asked. “You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that “ICE did NOT target a child.”

She said Immigration and Customs Enforcement was conducting an operation to arrest the child’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, who McLaughlin said is from Ecuador and in the U.S. illegally. He fled on foot without the boy, she said.

“For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias,” McLaughlin said, adding that parents are given the choice to be removed with their children or have them placed with a person of their choosing.

Stenvik said another adult who lives at the home was outside when the father and son were taken, but agents wouldn’t leave Liam with that person. DHS didn’t immediately to respond an email Thursday asking if Conejo Arias had asked to keep his son with him.

Liam and his father were being held in a family holding cell in Texas, Marc Prokosch, the family’s lawyer, said during the news conference.

“Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do,” Prokosch said of the family’s asylum claim. “So this is just cruelty.”

Minnesota has become a major focus of immigration sweeps by DHS-led agencies. Greg Bovino, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol official who has been the face of the crackdowns in Minneapolis and other cities, said 3,000 “of some of the most dangerous offenders” have been arrested in Minnesota in the last six weeks.

Julia Decker, policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said advocates have no way of knowing whether the government’s arrest numbers and descriptions of the people in custody are accurate.

Liam is the fourth student from Columbia Heights Public Schools who has been detained by ICE in recent weeks, said Stenvik. A 17-year-old student was taken Tuesday while heading to school, and a 10-year-old and a 17-year-old have also been taken, she said.

The district is made up of five schools and about 3,400 students from pre-K to 12th grade, according to its website. The majority of the students come from immigrant families, according to Stenvik.

She said they’ve noticed their attendance drop over the past two weeks, including one day where they had about one-third of their students out from school.

Ella Sullivan, Liam’s teacher, described him as “kind and loving.”

“His classmates miss him,” she said. “And all I want is for him to be safe and back here.”

___

Associated Press reporter Kathy McCormack contributed to this story.

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A woman who led an anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a Minnesota church has been arrested, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday.

Bondi announced the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong in a post on X days after protesters during Sunday service entered the Cities Church in St. Paul, where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement serves as a pastor.

The Justice Department quickly opened a civil rights investigation after the group interrupted services by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” referring to the 37-year-old mother of three who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis earlier this month.

“Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” the attorney general wrote on X.

Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and prominent local activist, had called for the pastor affiliated with ICE to resign, saying his dual role poses a “fundamental moral conflict.”

“You cannot lead a congregation while directing an agency whose actions have cost lives and inflicted fear in our communities,” she said Tuesday. “When officials protect armed agents, repeatedly refuse meaningful investigation into killings like Renée Good’s, and signal they may pursue peaceful protesters and journalists, that is not justice — it is intimidation.”

Prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention have come to the church’s defense, arguing that compassion for migrant families affected by the crackdown cannot justify violating a sacred space during worship.

This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.

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By CLAUDIA LAUER, Associated Press

Data collected from 35 American cities showed a 21% decrease in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, translating to about 922 fewer homicides last year, according to a new report from the independent Council on Criminal Justice.

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The report, released on Thursday, tracked 13 crimes and recorded drops last year in 11 of those categories including carjackings, shoplifting, aggravated assaults and others. Drug crimes saw a small increase over last year and sexual assaults stayed even between 2024 and 2025, the study found.

Experts said cities and states beyond those surveyed showed similar declines in homicides and other crimes. But they said it’s too early to tell what is prompting the change even as elected officials at all levels — both Democrats and Republicans — have been claiming credit.

Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the council — a nonpartisan think tank for criminal justice policy and research — said that after historic increases in violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, this year brought historic decreases. The study found some cities recorded decades-low numbers, with the overall homicide rate dropping to its lowest in decades.

“It’s a dramatic drop to an absolutely astonishing level. As we celebrate it we also need to unpack and try to understand it,” Gelb said. “There’s never one reason crime goes up or down.”

The council collects data from police departments and other law enforcement sources. Some of the report categories included data from as many as 35 cities, while others because of differences in definitions for specific crimes or tracking gaps, include fewer cities in their totals. Many of the property crimes in the report also declined, including a 27% drop in vehicle thefts and 10% drop in shoplifting among the reporting cities.

The council’s report showed a decrease in the homicide rate in 31 of 35 cities including a 40% decrease or more in Denver, Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington. The only city included that reported a double-digit increase was Little Rock, Arkansas, where the rate increased by 16% from 2024.

Gelb said the broad crime rate decreases have made some criminologists question historic understandings of what drives trends in violent crime and how to battle it.

“We want to believe that local factors really matter for crime numbers, that it is fundamentally a neighborhood problem with neighborhood level solutions,” he said. “We’re now seeing that broad, very broad social, cultural and economic forces at the national level can assert huge influence on what happens at the local level.”

Republicans, many of whom called the decrease in violent crime in many cities in 2024 unreliable, have rushed to say that tough-on-crime stances like deploying the National Guard to cities like New Orleans and the nation’s capital, coupled with immigration operation surges, have all played a role in this year’s drops.

However, cities that saw no surges of either troops or federal agents saw similar historic drops in violent and other crimes, according to the Council’s annual report.

Democratic mayors are also touting their policies as playing roles in the 2025 decreases.

Jens Ludwig, a public policy professor and the Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, stressed that many factors can contribute to a reduction in crime, whether that’s increased spending on law enforcement or increased spending on education to improve graduation rates.

“The fact that in any individual city, we are seeing crime drop across so many neighborhoods and in so many categories, means it can’t be any particular pet project in a neighborhood enacted by a mayor,” Ludwig said. And because the decrease is happening in multiple cities, “it’s not like any individual mayor is a genius in figuring this out.”

He said while often nobody knows what drives big swings in crime numbers, the decrease could be in part due to the continued normalization after big spikes in crime for several years during the pandemic. A hypothesis that stresses the declines might not last.

“If you look at violent crime rates in the U.S., it is much more volatile year to year than the poverty rate, or the unemployment rate; It is one of those big social indicators that just swings around a lot year to year,” Ludwig said. “Regardless of credit for these declines, I think it’s too soon for anybody on either side of this to declare mission accomplished.”

By MATT OTT, Associated Press Business Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits inched up last week but U.S. layoffs remain historically low despite signs of a softening labor market.

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U.S. filings for jobless aid for the week ending Jan. 17 rose by 1,000 to 200,000, up from 199,000 the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s fewer than the 207,000 new applications that analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet were expecting.

Applications for unemployment benefits are viewed as a proxy for layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.

Earlier this month, the government reported that hiring remained sluggish in December, capping a year of weak employment gains that have frustrated job seekers even though layoffs and unemployment remained low.

Employers added just 50,000 jobs last month, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, its first decline since June, from 4.5% in November, a figure also revised lower.

The Labor Department also recently reported that businesses posted far fewer jobs in November than the previous month, a sign that employers aren’t yet ramping up hiring even as growth has picked up.

Businesses and government agencies posted 7.1 million open jobs at the end of November, down from 7.4 million in October. Layoffs also dropped as companies seem to be retaining workers even as they are reluctant to add staff, a trend economists refer to as “low hire, low fire.”

Recent government data has revealed a labor market in which hiring has clearly lost momentum, hobbled by uncertainty raised by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to rein in a spike of pandemic-induced inflation.

In an attempt to stabilize a softening labor market, the Federal Reserve last month trimmed its benchmark lending rate by a quarter-point, its third straight cut. Fed officials meet again next week, with most analysts and traders expecting central bank officials to keep the benchmark lending rate where it is.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said members of the committee are increasingly concerned that the job market is even weaker than it appears. Powell suggested that recent job figures could be revised lower by as much as 60,000, which would mean employers have actually been shedding an average of about 25,000 jobs a month since the spring, when the Trump administration rolled out its sweeping import taxes.

Companies that have recently announced job cuts include UPS, General Motors, Amazon and Verizon.

Thursday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the four-week average of jobless claims, which softens some of the week-to-week volatility, fell by 3,750 to 201,500.

The total number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the previous week ending Jan. 10 declined by 26,000 to 1.85 million, the government said.