Jab Resseger looks at the negative impact of ICE raids on schools. Reposted with permission.
There has been evidence for years that many lawmakers in Congress and federal policy administrators lack a personal grasp of what K-12 educators do in their classrooms and lack a hands-on understanding of the challenges faced by students and teachers in the nation’s public schools. The first clue was, of course, No Child Left Behind, whose working principle was that pressure and fear would make teachers work harder and eliminate achievement gaps. The evidence to be considered was aggregate student test scores, which teachers were expected to produce more efficiently, and which left out real consideration of what happens in the classroom or of how children learn. Once again today, the impact of President Trump’s immigration enforcement is blindly affecting the the learning environment in many American public schools.
In Why School?, the late Mike Rose, the gifted writer and UCLA professor of education, articulated a vision of public schooling that had nothing to do with “test and punish” and everything to do with how teachers must be aware of the needs and experiences of their students, and must develop respectful relationships with their students and across their classrooms: “I’m interested… in the experience of education when it’s done well with the student’s well-being in mind. The unfortunate thing is that there is nothing in the standard talk about schooling—and this has been true for decades—that leads us to consider how school is perceived by those who attend it. Yet it is our experience of an institution that determines our attitude toward it, affects what we do with it, the degree to which we integrate it into our lives, into our sense of who we are.” (Why School?, p. 34)
President Trump’s immigration policy lacks any consideration of students’ well-being or the impact on families or teachers’ daily work with children.
In March, NBC News reported: “In January, the Trump administration rescinded a policy that had been in place since the Obama era, including during the first Trump administration, that largely prohibited ICE from conducting operations in schools, houses of worship and hospitals,” that were previously considered sensitive locations. The reporter begins the story this way: “The Trump administration’s policy allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make arrests in schools is bringing down attendance and driving up fear and anxiety among students and teachers, a group representing 78 large school districts across the country is arguing in court.” At the time, “the Denver public school system… had filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration asking for relief from the policy.” While the Department of Homeland Security felt comfortable about shedding a policy protecting communities from the fear of ICE arrests in and around public schools, NBC News explains that the Council of the Great City Schools felt compelled to submit an amicus brief supporting the Denver Public Schools lawsuit seeking to reduce fear among parents, students and public school educators.
Thanks to a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe, that protects the right of all students in the United States—whether they are citizens, documented immigrants or undocumented immigrants—to a free public school education, immigrant students are welcome in their neighborhood public schools.
While to my knowledge, no student has been arrested in class this year by ICE agents, the new policy has affected schools in myriad ways. After a raid on an apartment house near a Denver Public School, Superintendent, Alex Marrero told NBC News that “regardless of whether ICE has actually gone into one of his schools, the news of the change in policy alone has caused injury to the plaintiffs.” He explained: “We don’t have to wait for them to walk through those doors, the impact has been real… And in this very library, the day of the raid, which—it didn’t happen in our schools but it happened nearby, the emotion, the fear, and the terror in the eyes of our educators was significant. So no one can tell me that we weren’t harmed. It’s clear as day to me.”
NBC News added that at the Denver public school located near the apartment building where the ICE raid took place serves 900 students. The school counselor, “Lizuri Gallardo… said 300 of the 900 students at her school have sought counseling this year, mostly to discuss their fear of deportations.”
More recently just last week, California’s EdSource‘s Mallika Seshadri described the impact of an immigration raid at a Home Depot next door to an elementary school graduation ceremony being held in the auditorium of Huntington Park High School: “Many people online began speculating that the ceremony might be the target of an immigration raid. It wasn’t, but the fear was real… Huntington Park’s residents are predominantly Latino, immigrant and working class, a demographic that has been the target of many of the known immigration raids in recent days… The (school) district’s protocol, which includes offering families the option of remaining on school grounds and notifying the district of immigration enforcement activity so they can determine the appropriate response, kicked into gear. An alternative exit door on the side farthest from Home Depot was opened.”
The Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Alberto Carvalho, “stressed that the graduation season, with more than 100 ceremonies taking place Monday and Tuesday, should remain celebratory and joyous. He said the district has directed its police force to establish ‘perimeters of safety’ around graduation sites to help ‘intervene and interfere’ with federal agents if they arrive. ‘Every child has a constitutional right to a public education…. Therefore, every child and their parent has a right to celebrate the culmination of their educational success.’ ”
Seshadri puts some context around the scope of the challenge for educators in California: “An estimated 1 in 10, or 1 million children in California have at least one undocumented parent, and about 133,000 children in California public schools are undocumented themselves, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
This week, the NY Times‘ Dana Goldstein and Irene Casado Sanchez reported on parents’ anxieties about being deported and how their fear about being separated from their children is impacting their children’s education: “As President Trump promised mass deportations, educators sounded alarms that the actions could scare families away from school…. Many immigrants in the Central Valley said that while fears of deportation had always hung over them, anxiety has never been higher. It is fueled by Mr. Trump’s aggressive agenda and rhetoric, and by stories of family separation and children placed in foster care… One Mexican father of two schoolchildren in Fresno, ages 14 and 6, said that deportation along side his wife and children would mean losing possessions, wealth and his work as a mechanic. In California, he said his wife, a farmworker, had carefully built a life… But while losing that life would be difficult, deportation without their children… was simply unthinkable… He has cut out many of his family’s nonessential trips outside their home but has continued to send his children to school. Many others have not.”
Goldstein and Sanchez describe how fear among families has affected the work of Fresno’s Superintendent Misty Her: “Her makes several home visits per week, seeking to speak with families whose children have stopped coming to school. Her goal is not to shame them, she said, but to understand why and to offer help. In the past, she said, many seasonal farm workers would relocate to work in the fields during harvests and leave their children in the city with family members or friends, so that the children could continue to attend school. Now, she said, parents are bringing their young children with them because they are fearful of being deported without them. While she tries to convince parents to send their children back to the classroom, she also offers the option of enrolling students in the school district’s virtual academy.”
Last week when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins demanded that ICE stop the mass deportation of farm workers to protect the agricultural economy which would collapse without immigrant farm laborers, and when Trump realized ICE’s mass deportations were hurting his own hotel and hospitality sector, he said he would stop ICE from targeting workers in those sectors for economic reasons. It appears he has now rescinded his plan to protect the workers in those economic sectors, but he considered their contributions to our economy. So far, however, there is no sign that he has listened at all to school superintendents, counselors, and teachers who would tell him about the impact of terror among parents who are keeping their children out of school; or that he has considered how fear is undermining the well-being and educational experience of children, distracting them from their lessons, and sometimes making them miss school altogether; or that he has thought about how immigration raids are likely to affect the routine and calm at nearby public schools.