Cincinnati’s Price Hill is a bastion of Latino life. On Warsaw Avenue, the neighborhood’s main drag, Guatemalan flags and taco trucks are dotted around street corners and parking lots.

In the streets around the Roberts Academy elementary school, students flood out of school on a recent Thursday afternoon. Nearby, four boys kick a soccer ball around a tiny garden.

It was at this school, where nearly three-fourths of the student body is Latino, and two other nearby schools that on 15 April, Tonina Lamanna, a 17-year-veteran police officer in Gratis, Ohio, and a police department colleague whose jurisdiction lies 50 miles away, attempted to question school administrators about children attending the facilities on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) so-called “wellness checks”.

The law enforcement officers were not received well.

At all three locations, the officers, whose sidearms were visible to school staff at the time and who neglected to tell administrators they were working on behalf of ICE, were denied access to children they sought after failing to produce warrants or papers.

“They told staff in the school’s main office they were conducting wellness checks and displayed a list of approximately 30 individuals’ names,” a statement issued by Cincinnati public schools staff said, referring to the officers’ visit to the Western Hills university high school, a school with more than 400 students with Hispanic heritage.

“The officers asked whether anyone on the list was enrolled in Western Hills. Staff confirmed the enrollment of two students on the list.”

Cincinnati’s mayor, Aftab Pureval, called the incidents “disgusting on so many levels”.

Rights groups say the officers’ efforts speak to the frightening extent that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Trump administration is going to target some of the most vulnerable communities across the country.

While some police officers authorized to act on behalf of ICE are allowed to visit schools as part of efforts to check on the wellbeing of students, they can only do so under limited circumstances and within their own jurisdictions.

Last November, DHS launched an effort involving ICE and state and local law enforcement partners that “aimed at protecting the 450,000 unaccompanied children (UAC) illegally smuggled over the border” that the former claims entered the country under the Biden administration.

The Trump administration claims that sponsors of unaccompanied undocumented children who entered the US during the Joe Biden years were not always vetted properly.

“ICE does not target schools for enforcement actions,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “A local law enforcement partner attempted to verify school enrollment and conduct welfare checks on children who arrived unaccompanied across the border.”

The spokesperson, however, declined to respond to a question asking if ICE plans to take new measures to limit such incidents occurring again. They also declined to respond to a question asking for specific examples of undocumented immigrant sponsors charged with endangering unaccompanied minors who entered the US under the Biden administration.

While DHS says the Trump administration has located more than 145,000 children it claims were placed with unvetted sponsors, concerns have been rising around the department’s contracting of a Virginia security contractor to help with deporting children.

One of the officers involved was Lamanna, who was previously fired from another police department in 2017 for allegedly being untruthful and filing false documents. Lamanna was placed on leave from the Gratis police department after the incident, as was Jeff Baylor, the officer who accompanied her.

Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Gratis, declined to comment on questions asking if he had prior knowledge of his police officers leaving their jurisdiction to conduct operations on behalf of ICE. A village administrator said that a meeting to discuss an investigation into the officers’ actions would be held during the week of 11 May.

‘People were too scared to come out’

Cincinnati is one of many formerly industrial midwestern cities to have benefited from the arrival of thousands of immigrants in the aftermath of the offshoring of manufacturing that fuelled depopulation from the 1970s.

But in recent years, it has become a target for the Trump administration. Last year, the city was labelled a “sanctuary city” by DHS before it was removed from the list in August 2025.

The incidents at the schools are not the first time the Latino community has been targeted by immigration enforcement. Last May, ICE agents descended on a Kroger supermarket parking lot in Price Hill to arrest four immigrants, including a father who was with his young family.

Today, residents and local community organizations are skittish.

“For about a week after that, we had basically no customers,” says the proprietor of the El Mini Valle Mexican Store, who came from Guatemala in 2000 to join family, and who asked not to be named.

“People were too scared to come out.”

Around the same time, Cincinnati was shocked by the deportation of 19-year-old Emerson Colindres, a star soccer player who had no criminal record. Colindres, who was deported to Honduras, attended a school located on the same grounds as one of the schools targeted by the police officers last month.

“The possibility of an immigration arrest, either inside or just outside your school, simply adds another layer of stress and anxiety. How can you learn if you are worried about being arrested, or your parent being arrested when they come to pick you up?” says Lynn Tramonte of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.

“Immigrant and Latino-owned businesses are losing workers and customers to deportation. Raids taking place on their properties, or the potential for raids, scare away customers. Just because a worker is arrested doesn’t mean they were working illegally.”

Concerns have been rising across the US that police departments are sharing license plate reader data with ICE to target undocumented immigrants, in violation of those departments’ own policies. According to DeFlock, a crowdsourced website that charts the location of surveillance cameras, the closest Flock camera to Western Hills university high school is less than half a mile away.

By contrast in Gratis, the village of about 800 people an hour’s drive north of Cincinnati, where the two officers acting on behalf of ICE are stationed, there are no Flock cameras within a 10-mile range, according to DeFlock. According to the US Census Bureau, Gratis has a population that is 100% white.

A public city meeting that came a week after the schools’ incidents saw Gratis residents turn out to protest putting Lamanna and Baylor on leave due to concerns that doing so would affect safety in their own community.

Baylor, the officer who accompanied Lamanna to the schools in Cincinnati, initially tendered his resignation but later rescinded that due to protestations from Gratis residents.