Ilhan Omar To Spotlight ICE’s Recklessness With SOTU Guests

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) will bring four guests to Tuesday's State of the Union address who were either violently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, or who have been fighting to protect immigrant families from them.

Omar, whose Minneapolis district has been a target of the Trump administration’s surge of federal immigration enforcement agents into the state, is bringing Mary Granlund, chair of the Columbia Heights School Board. This is the heavily Latino district where five-year-old Liam Ramos goes to school, and where at least five other children have been nabbed on the street and shipped off to a nightmarish ICE facility in Texas.

Granlund has spent months leading school principals, teachers, social workers and community members in conducting ICE patrols, providing legal aid to families and organizing food deliveries for people too scared to leave their homes. ICE agents have responded by trying to intimidate Granlund, parking their cars in her schools’ parking lots and even outside of her home.

Omar will also bring Aliya Rahman, a Bangladeshi-American and a disabled person with autism who was driving to a doctor’s appointment on Jan. 13 when federal agents smashed in her car window, dragged her out and detained her at the Whipple Federal Building detention center in Minneapolis, where she claims she experienced severe medical neglect and violence at the hands of ICE agents, requiring hospitalization for assault.

Mubashir Hussen and Gerardo Orozco Guzman will also join Omar at the president’s address.

Hussen, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen, was detained on the street by masked federal immigration officers on Dec. 9, despite telling them repeatedly he is a U.S. citizen. He was shackled and fingerprinted at the Whipple facility and was only released after showing a photo of his passport card to someone in that building.

Guzman is the son of Eustaquio Orozco Verdusco, a workers’ rights organizer in Minnesota who has been leading efforts against ICE’s detention of construction workers from job sites. Federal immigration agents detained Orozco Verdusco on Jan. 9 and flew him to a detention facility in Texas before taking him to a privately owned correctional center in New Mexico, where he is still detained.