North Lake Processing Center | Mary Minnick photo

Four individuals were arrested in Ypsilanti on Tuesday, a spokesperson for ICE confirmed, after information from Ypsilanti Community Schools Superintendent Alena Zachery-Ross and Washtenaw County Sheriff Alyshia Dyer was shared Wednesday morning with community members about ICE arrests in the area.

Christine Sauvé, the Policy, Engagement, and Communications Manager for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, confirmed to the Michigan Advance that three parents of Ypsilanti Community Schools students “were arrested by immigration agents while waiting to pick up their children at a bus stop when coming home from school.”

A spokesperson from ICE wrote in a statement that bus stops were not targeted in the arrests made, and that the arrests were made during a targeted vehicle stop. 

“ICE does not target schools for enforcement actions or bus stop locations. To be clear, no children were present during these arrests,” the ICE spokesperson wrote.

Dyer wrote in an email to the Advance, “I have now been able to confirm after talking with immigration enforcement leadership they will not and do not target bus stops or schools and while they did make arrests in Washtenaw on Tuesday, they never did any of this intentionally near any school bus stop areas nor were they targeting bus stops.”

A Wednesday statement from Dyer on her Facebook page said, “Based on the information we currently have, ICE activity did not occur on any school grounds. However, it did take place near bus stops in the Ypsilanti community, and it appears that parents connected to local schools were targeted at a bus stop in Ypsilanti during student drop-off times.”

Sauvé said that the three individuals arrested in the first vehicle stop — two women from Honduras and one from Mexico, the latter of whom had a final order of removal, according to the ICE statement — are all currently detained at the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Mich., and the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center has scheduled time with each to provide free legal services to them. Michigan Advance was able to independently confirm based on ICE data that one of the individuals was listed as detained at the center in Baldwin.

“Parents should be able to take their children to school without fear, and children should not have to worry their parents will be arrested at a bus stop,” Sauvé wrote. “This kind of trauma has been shown to have negative effects on children’s health and wellbeing. Community members are terrified but we are heartened by the strong community response.”

MLive reported on Thursday that within three miles of where Tuesday’s detention occurred, school campuses include Ypsilanti Puentes Multilingual School — a Ypsilanti Community Schools K-4 school with a Spanish-language immersion program — Washtenaw International High School, Ypsilanti International Elementary School, Ypsilanti Community High School and several other elementary and middle schools within the district.

Michigan Immigrant Rights Center is not currently in contact with the fourth arrested individual, a man from Honduras, who was detained in a second vehicle stop in Ypsilanti, and that person’s detention location is not currently known.

ICE did not immediately respond to a follow-up inquiry about where each person is being detained.