The day after last year’s vote, Melanie Claros, a civics teacher and ESL coordinator at a South Florida school where half the students the students are Latinofound herself having to do work beyond her usual duties.
By the end of the day, she recently told NBC News, more than two dozen students had approached her separately to ask about changes to immigration enforcement before the start of the day. another Donald Trump presidency.
“Are they going to deport us all now? » “Who will be deported first?” “, she remembers students asking her during class.
Concerns haven’t abated since then, Claros said, noting that she knows of at least one student who has already stopped showing up to school for immigration-related reasons. “I am very suspicious that we will have [more] kids who will be removed or just stop showing up to school,” she said.
Claros is one of several educators in six states who told NBC News they found themselves in the uncomfortable position of answering questions about potential mass deportations under the Trump administration. Many teachers and administrators are aware of a variety of scenarios that could begin to occur very soon: immigration officials asking questions about a student; a child who leaves school for the day and discovers that his parents have been detained and no one is home to care for them; students worried about expulsion who simply stop coming to class. Educators and advocates say they feel they need to prepare for such situations, but they are also acutely aware of the risk of backlash that can come from speaking publicly about a political issue like this.
This dilemma has left teachers like Claros in disbelief.
She became a teacher knowing she should talk about civics, she said, but “I never thought they [students] would ask me and I have fears about immigration.
Supporters of Trump’s mass expulsion plans say stronger immigration controls are needed to reduce the incidence of migrant crime and deter people from crossing the border illegally in record numbers. However, critics say they are concerned about the possibility of family separations and widespread fear within some communities.
Several educators told NBC they felt it was in the community’s best interest for children, regardless of their legal status, to have the opportunity to attend school. Jasmin Baxter leads the communications office for the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, school district, which has a large English-learning population. She said the district is committed to making sure all students feel supported.
“You come to school, you’re supposed to feel safe at school. Those outside factors you’re not supposed to think about while you’re studying,” Baxter said.
But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy for school districts to answer families’ questions about immigration or talk about what they’re doing to prepare for possible mass deportations.
“It’s really hard for us to talk about,” said a California deputy superintendent who asked that his name not be used so he could speak freely about the issue. “Because even if we said, ‘This is how we support our students,’ we would face pushback from families and community members.
Viridiana Carrizales, co-founder of the nonprofit ImmSchools, says she has also seen a reluctance on the part of schools to be seen seeking information about immigration and what to do in case of meeting with federal officials.
“A lot of them say the moment we put our name out there, we become a target,” she said.
Even so, in the days after the election, ImmSchools received messages from 37 schools it had not previously worked with, asking about training opportunities and information for their staff, she said. Just before Christmas, the organization also hosted a virtual training session with 29 superintendents on how to prepare for any immigration raids or deportations affecting their student population.
“[Schools] are really scared and trying to find ways to better support families through this situation,” she said.
Teachers also expect students to start disappearing from their classrooms altogether, as Claros has already seen at her school. Parents may be nervous about being separated from their children if they are detained, or think that their child’s presence at school could lead authorities to discover that they are in the country without authorization. .
In Michigan, ESL teacher Karen Iglesias said she has heard students ask if they were going to be expelled and parents tell her they are afraid to drive to their children’s school.
Cinthya Longoria, an elementary school teacher in North Texas, says she does her best to support parents who worry about the future while she remains uncertain about hers. Longoria currently benefits from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary legal protection from deportation to certain immigrants brought to the United States undocumented as children. Recently, a relative asked her to assure her that their family would be OK under the new administration, she said.
“I just told him I hope so,” Longoria said. “Because I couldn’t say yes to him. That’s when I told him I was a DACA recipient. At that point, it was the only thing I could say to him without being dishonest.
Federal laws prohibit schools from denying students a free public education based on their immigration status and regulate the disclosure of students’ personal information. These laws, in addition to Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, are meant to serve as safeguards for undocumented families anxious to enroll their children in school, experts say.
“Taken together, this is a fairly robust set of protections against immigration enforcement actions against students in school, particularly when the school district is committed to protecting its non-citizen students said Nayna Gupta, policy director of the nonprofit American Immigration Council.
Under current policy, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement generally avoids areas where people receive public services, including schools, hospitals and churches. But under the Trump administration, this policy of “sensitive locations” or “protected areas” should disappear, three people familiar with the plan to end it previously told NBC News.
Denver Public Schools in Colorado and the Canutillo Independent School District in Texas both released statements on a possible policy change, emphasizing the need for “uninterrupted learning.”
This is not the first time that schools have found themselves at the center of immigration issues. In 2019, under the first Trump administration, a series of ICE raids resulted in the arrest of approximately 700 workers at seven food processing plants in Mississippi. As a result, district officials told NBC News At the time, local organizations and schools had to find safe spaces for children to go without their parents present. A Mississippi school district said it asked bus drivers to make sure they saw a parent or guardian present when a child was dropped off — otherwise, they took the child back to school for testing. night.
This history has shaped the way some advocacy groups and educators now prepare families.
In Tucson, Arizona, a coalition of nonprofit organizations helps families prepare “emergency packets” containing key information in the event a parent is detained or deported, including a power of attorney for guardianship, contact details and emergency and instructions on how to talk to the children to find out who will do it. be responsible for it in the absence of their parents.
California’s deputy director told NBC News that she and some of her colleagues even offered their homes.
“We spoke to families who came forward with their status and made it clear that their child could stay with one of us if their family was deported as an option for them,” she said.
