Education journalist and podcaster Jennifer Berkshire highlights those places where people are standing up for students.
Yes, there are plenty of ordinary Americans right now who are all too willing to participate in the Trump administration’s infliction of pain on strangers. But focus only on them and it’s easy to miss the resistance: the regular people who are refusing to just go along, and by their refusal, inspiring others to do the same.
We got a vivid glimpse of what this looks like over the past few weeks as school officials and teachers pushed back forcefully against Trump’s ever-expanding immigration dragnet. Let’s start with the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Alberto Carvalho, better known for the corporate, edu-CEO style that ruled in the Obama era. Yet here he was rebuffing federal agents who sought to enter two elementary schools in search of of two elementary schools, five students in first through sixth grade under what have since been revealed to be false pretenses. And when asked to explain his actions, Carvalho laid out the sort of clear and forceful explanation about why it’s completely unacceptable for federal agents to be creeping around an elementary school that’s in short supply these days.
You’ve no doubt heard of the principal of a school in upstate New York who led a heroic effort to secure the release of three undocumented students and their mother after they were swept up in an ice raid on a local dairy farm. Jaime Cook and several teachers at the school got right to work, launching an effort that rallied their entire town. Because it turns out that even in a small town that Trump carried by double digits in 2024, and which happens to be home to his immigration ‘czar,’ Tom Homan, the round up of kids is still viewed as unacceptable.
Cook has received the lion’s share of the attention, but what’s truly inspiring here is the level of organizing involved:
The local teachers union sent around a list with the phone numbers and email addresses for officials across New York, and school officials began to make calls in between classes and during planning periods. In their first calls and emails, they reached out to local, state and federal representatives and advocacy groups and pleaded for help to get the children and their mother released.
And it worked. Cook and the teachers were able to secure the release of the kids by rallying the entire town—red and blue residents alike—shaming state and local officials into speaking out, exposing Czar Homan as a thin-skinned blowhard in the process.