The little girl approached the therapy dog outside the school library, reaching out to touch her fluffy blond coat. Social worker Nicole Herje leaned in.
“How does it feel when you pet Sage?” Herje said.
“I like it,” the girl said. “In Ecuador, I had a dog.”
A few months earlier, this girl and many of her classmates at Valley View Elementary were staying off the streets to avoid the immigration officers flooding their suburban Minneapolis community. Attendance plummeted as families kept their kids from school during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge.
Sage the goldendoodle is not just a cute diversion. She’s part of a broader strategy to address the psychological wounds of children who witnessed arrests, lost relatives to deportation or endured anxious weeks indoors.
Immigration officers made more than 4,000 arrests and shot multiple people, two fatally, before “Operation Metro Surge” wound down in February, leaving an imprint on the psyches of young children that could haunt them for years, mental health providers say.