How many high schools have ice agents entered to make arrests

1. What the local reporting actually documents: specific Minnesota episodes

Local and national outlets describe ICE activity touching high schools in the Twin Cities: Columbia Heights school officials said an ICE vehicle drove onto a high‑school property and was told to leave, and the district reported multiple students detained in recent weeks including two 17‑year‑olds and a 10‑ and 5‑year‑old ^{[1] [3]}. Separately, reporting on Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High depicts Border Patrol or ICE agents detaining a school staffer outside the school and deploying in ways that disrupted dismissal and prompted citizen observers to document activity around campuses ^[2]. Those are concrete, named episodes in the reporting; they establish that agents have been physically on or immediately adjacent to at least these two high schools ^{[1] [2]}.

2. What counts as “entering” a high school — legal claims versus lived experience

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have publicly denied a policy of “raiding” schools and emphasize that agents do not go into classrooms to make arrests, noting legal and operational restraints and saying arrests inside schools would be rare and tied to public‑safety exceptions ^{[4] [5]}. Journalistic accounts and school administrators, however, describe agents moving onto campus property, approaching loading docks or parking lots, stopping buses and pulling over contracted vans — actions that school communities experience as incursions even if DHS frames them as limited or lawful enforcement activity ^{[5] [3]}. Those competing framings reveal a gap between the technical legal standard DHS cites and how educators and parents perceive safety and access on school grounds ^{[4] [6]}.

3. Why a national count is absent from the reporting

None of the sources provides a central dataset or national inventory of schools where ICE has entered to make arrests; reporting focuses on clusters of incidents (notably in Minnesota) and on aggregate numbers of arrests tied to Operation Metro Surge, which DHS says has arrested thousands but does not break that down by location type such as “high school entered” ^[5]. Academic work on immigration enforcement’s educational impacts underscores that large administrative datasets rarely register the micro‑level, school‑specific actions that matter to communities, which complicates any attempt to produce a definitive national count from public records alone ^[6].

4. Minimum known instances and broader context

Based on the available reporting, there are at least two named high‑school–related incidents in Minnesota documented by Reuters, The Guardian, BBC, NBC and local outlets: Columbia Heights (ICE vehicle onto high‑school property and multiple student detentions) and Roosevelt High (a staffer detained outside school and agents present at dismissal), plus multiple reports of high‑school‑age students detained in the same time frame ^{[1] [2] [3] [7]}. These local episodes occur amid a larger enforcement sweep that DHS says has resulted in more than 2,500 arrests in Operation Metro Surge, a figure that illustrates scale but not site‑type breakdown ^[5].

Conclusion — honest limits and the cautious answer

The cautious, evidence‑based answer is: reporting documents at least two specific high‑school–linked incidents (Columbia Heights and Roosevelt High) and multiple arrests of high‑school‑age students in the same period, but no source provides a comprehensive national count of how many high schools ICE agents have entered to make arrests; DHS denies a policy of raiding schools while local officials say agents have been on or adjacent to school property, a tension that underscores the need for a systematic, transparent accounting ^{[1] [2] [4] [5] [3]}.