ICE detained 10-year-old Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano and her mother on the way to school and held them a month at Dilley, Texas

Before dawn on January 6, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents blocked a family car with their own vehicles on a residential street in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, and detained 10-year-old Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano and her mother, Rosa Elena Caisaguano Cajilema, as the two drove to the girl's school bus stop. A witness recorded the encounter. During the arrest Elizabeth telephoned her father, Luis Zuna, at his construction job and told him that agents were going to drop her at school. Zuna went to Highland Elementary and waited outside with school staff for hours; his daughter never arrived. By that afternoon she and her mother had been flown roughly 1,200 miles to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, a CoreCivic-operated family detention facility where hundreds of children were held.

Elizabeth was the first Columbia Heights student taken into ICE custody during Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement deployment to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that began in early January 2026; by early February the district said six of its students had been detained, and school officials believed all were at Dilley. She was held there for nearly a month. In the final days of her detention federal officials confirmed measles cases inside the facility; CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd declined to comment on her case or the outbreak, saying the company's medical staff "meet the highest standards of care."

The Department of Homeland Security defended the detention of the child, stating that after her mother's arrest "officers allowed her to make phone calls to place the child in the custody of someone she designated" and that "she failed to find a trusted adult to care for the child, so officers kept the family together for the welfare of the child." That account is contradicted by the girl's father, who reached her by phone during the arrest and was waiting at her school that morning, and by school officials who said agents made it difficult or impossible for arrested parents to hand their children to another adult. DHS also said the mother had a final order of removal; Bobby Painter, managing attorney at the Texas Immigration Law Council, said an immigration judge had denied the family's asylum claim but the family filed a timely appeal that remained pending, so no final removal order existed. The family, from Ecuador, had presented at the border as asylum seekers and been admitted. "They did everything they were supposed to do and still found themselves detained and separated," Painter said.

Updates

2026-02-02 — Judge blocked removal after a habeas petition was filed [1, 3]

Attorneys filed a habeas corpus petition for Elizabeth and her mother in federal court in Texas. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, the same judge who had ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Dilley, issued an order barring the government from removing or transferring the pair and gave it five days to respond to the petition.

2026-02-03 — ICE released Elizabeth and her mother from Dilley [1, 3]

The two walked out of the Dilley facility on Tuesday night, before the government's response to the petition was due. Their attorney called the timing a surprise. They were moved to a Texas shelter and prepared to return to Minnesota to rejoin Elizabeth's father.

2026-02-04 — School officials reported both were ill and unassessed [1, 3, 4]

Carolina Gutierrez, principal secretary at Highland Elementary, said Elizabeth was experiencing flu-like symptoms and her mother had broken out in hives, and that neither had yet received a medical assessment. Superintendent Zena Stenvik said their return to Minnesota might be delayed by a possible quarantine period tied to the Dilley measles outbreak.