The Trauma of ICE Raids Is Rippling Through Public Schools Across the US

In several Minnesota communities, public school teachers and community volunteers are now riding school buses with their students to ensure that at each afternoon drop-off, the adults who were expected to be waiting at home for their child’s arrival have not been taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids during the school day.

“The president’s decision to send thousands of masked, heavily armed agents into our communities has forced educators to adapt in many ways,” Monica Byron, the president of Education Minnesota, told Truthout via email. She added:

Many teachers are working full days and then patrolling bus stops, guarding school entrances, and riding buses to ensure students get home safely. And it’s not just educators; thousands of parents are joining us to patrol school property and provide the mutual aid many Minnesota families need to survive. What’s so infuriating about this situation isn’t the extra work; it’s that it’s all been created by the cruel choices of a few people in power in Washington. None of this pain and fear is inevitable. It’s intentional.

In a recent video released by the National Education Association, a Minnesota teacher echoed the pain and outrage expressed by Bryon over the fact that the Trump administration’s new policies have forced schools to adopt new safety protocols beyond the standard fire drills and tornado drills — safety protocols to be activated “in case our own government shows up to hurt or kidnap our students.”

“After ICE showed up at bus time at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, our system changed our bus safety protocol,” the teacher in the National Education Association video explained. “We now have all staff, every day, all bus times.”

Aneesa Parks, an immigrant rights activist who runs seven kindergarten through third grade tutoring programs in and around the Twin Cities, told Truthout that teachers and concerned parents realized the urgency of adopting new accompaniment policies after reports emerged of children being left alone overnight after ICE abducted their parents and the school bus dropped them off at an empty home.

Meanwhile, school staff in Minnesota are also packing food boxes for kids to take home to families that are afraid to go outside because of ongoing arrests and detainment, and are making sure that kids who opt to study remotely due to fear of ICE — now an option for all Minneapolis students — have the textbooks, computers, and other supplies they need to keep up. In addition, they have begun arranging Zoom sessions so that kids studying at home can see their friends in the classroom during their daily meeting each morning.

“Schools, of course, exist to educate our children,” Parks told Truthout. “But they are also communities, and ICE has made everyday life dangerous for these communities. This has forced schools to step up. Thankfully, there is a lot of solidarity between teachers and they’re committed to supporting one another and protecting their students.”

Nonetheless, she described the children she works with as “scared, scared, scared.”

There are many reasons for their terror, and the impact of this fear is far-reaching and extends into every area of daily life.

For example, Parks reported that a Minneapolis parent of a 16-year-old U.S. citizen who just got his driver’s license repeatedly cautions him to watch for vehicles that are driving erratically or speeding because they could be ICE personnel.

She also described a Venezuelan child, who has been in the U.S. for less than a year and is not yet able to speak or understand English, who sat quietly in a Minnesota classroom until she found a Spanish-speaking tutor. When they met, she told the tutor that her father died en route to the U.S. Once able to converse, the child sobbed and expressed profound grief over the loss of her beloved dad.

This alarm, of course, extends far beyond Minneapolis. One Latine therapist, who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, mentioned hearing a client in Florida — a young child — express fear after watching deportations in her community. In situations like this, she said she tries to validate her clients, telling them “scary and sad things are happening,” but then works with them to find ways to feel some comfort.

And social worker Allison Brown, who is based in Corona, New York, told Truthout about receiving a call from an Ecuadoran mother who said her elementary-aged child would be absent that day because ICE agents were on their block and they feared going outdoors. The child, Brown said, had missed just one other day of school since September.

This was not the first time ICE had intruded on the elementary school. Brown reported that another child’s father was nabbed and detained by ICE in early December.

“ICE agents stopped this man on the street, showed him a picture of someone, and asked if he knew him. When he said ‘No,’ they asked him where he was from. He was then taken and detained in Newark, New Jersey, for a few days before being sent to Louisiana over the Christmas holidays,” Brown said. “Once we found out where he was being held, we were able to get him on a video call and brought his daughter in to speak to him. Her teacher told us that when she returned to class, she began to cry hysterically.” Brown added that the child’s father was eventually deported, and that the child and her mom are considering self-deporting themselves.

Millions Are Impacted

According to the Los Angeles Times, 5.62 million children in the United States live with someone who is undocumented, more often than not a parent. While many of these kids were born in the U.S. and are citizens, the National Newcomer Network — a three-year-old coalition of educators, advocates, researchers, and policy makers — estimates that 1 million students are themselves immigrants. What’s more, The Conversation reports that upward of 600,000 of them likely lack legal status and are vulnerable to ICE raids, arrest, and deportation.

This comes despite a 1982 Supreme Court decision (Plyler v. Doe) that gives undocumented students the same right to a free, K-12 public education as anyone else.

By all accounts, fear in immigrant communities is palpable, and this on-paper legal protection, advocates say, has done little to mitigate fear and stop immigrants from self-deporting.

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), during the first nine months of the second Trump administration, 2 million people — including 1.6 million men, women, and children who DHS says have left “voluntarily” — have been removed from the country.

But how best to protect those who remain, especially children enrolled in school?

“When the National Newcomer Network came together in 2022, we intended to center biculturalism as an asset for the nation. We’ve since had to pivot since the foundational right to an education under Plyler is under attack,” Alejandra Vázquez Baur, co-founder and director of the Network, told Truthout. “A year ago, the administration announced that schools, hospitals, and places of worship were no longer going to be considered sensitive locations, exempt from ICE raids, and we’ve seen that play out. Schools and school districts have had to pull together plans to keep students safe if ICE arrives at their school, and have had to protect and support kids waiting at bus stops.”

Throughout the country, she said, students have been forced to prioritize safety over academic achievement. Nonetheless, she says that she is heartened that “in pockets of every state, community activists, parents, faith leaders, and educators have mobilized resistance on the ground because it has become necessary to do so.”

Among other things, Vázquez Baur said, communities throughout the U.S. have set up neighborhood networks to walk children to school if their parents feel it is too risky for them to go outside themselves; have arranged afternoon pickups so that kids can participate in after-school activities; and have helped families fill out paperwork, called Caregiver’s Authorization Affidavits, that designate a surrogate caretaker for their children if they are detained. They’ve also established trauma-response groups and multi-lingual referral networks to work with children whose lives have been upended by ICE or whose fear is so great that it inhibits learning.

Dealing With Children’s Trauma

The Society for Community Research and Action of the American Psychological Association (APA) confirms that children of deported parents typically experience heightened fear and insecurity and have difficulty trusting others.

“Following deportation of a family member, children demonstrate numerous emotional and behavioral challenges such as eating and sleeping changes, anxiety, sadness, anger and withdrawal,” the APA reports. Not surprisingly, they explain, “children who were present at the moment a parent was detained tended to have greater emotional, cognitive and behavioral effects.” What’s more, in the aftermath of a parental deportation, older kids often have to assume responsibility for the care of siblings and frequently have to find a job since a parental deportation increases the likelihood of economic precarity and housing and food insecurity.

Gabrielle Oliveira, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at Harvard and author of Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life, toldTruthoutthat even when an entire family leaves the U.S. to self-deport together, the dislocation can have a deleterious impact on children. “The children are often leaving everything they know behind. They not only have to attend a school they’ve never been to before and learn in a language that may be somewhat unfamiliar, but the schools in other places can be very different from what they’re used to,” Oliveira said. “In Brazil, public programs have very few resources. If the family can’t afford to send the child to a private school, the kids will find themselves in a public school classroom with 30 or 40 others. In addition to being in a new, unfamiliar place, this can be really stressful.”

At the same time, she added, staying in the U.S. and hunkering down can also be fraught. “The father in one family I know was deported back to Brazil. His wife and children live in Massachusetts, but he’d been doing construction work in Florida. He got caught and was deported, leaving his wife to raise their three U.S.-born kids, all under the age of 10, by herself,” Oliveira said. “The wife wants the family to self-deport, but she is afraid to go to the children’s school to get their academic records or apply for U.S. passports for them. Right now, the community is trying to help her raise the money to go to Brazil, but it’s expensive. Tickets can run between $1,300 and $1,800 per person. This mom is also terrified that in making this strained choice, any movement on her part could put the whole family into detention.”

Assuaging this terror, she said, is where schools should come in. Unfortunately, she continued, most are not doing enough to mitigate concerns or navigate bureaucracies. Furthermore, while Oliveira said that she is pleased that Minnesota educators are protecting their students, schools in Massachusetts have, for the most part, chosen neutrality. “They post signs saying that everyone is welcome, but they have not posted anti-ICE messages or organized programs to discuss what is happening or addressed student fears. The majority of schools I’ve visited have been nervous about saying anything that will bring attention to their programs,” she said. “They’re not exactly neglecting the issue, but they are trying to protect immigrant students by keeping a low profile.”

This is also true in New York. Brown told Truthoutthat after Trump took office last January, her school sent a “know your rights” leaflet to every family. “The kids understand what is happening, and while it is hard to know what to say or how much to say, we should be preparing for what we know is coming. Our union has not stepped up as much as it should, and while ‘know your rights’ fact sheets were initially important, ICE is now grabbing people off the streets and breaking down doors, so we need a more robust plan of action. We need to advocate for more humane policies and be readying ourselves to respond to ICE in a more organized manner,” Brown says.

Alan J. Singer, a professor emeritus in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Technology at Hofstra University, agrees. “This is a national emergency that every teacher needs to address within their classrooms. Trump’s threat to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to bring federal troops into communities to suppress dissent” ups the ante, he told Truthout, and schools need to proactively develop age-appropriate ways to discuss what’s taking place.

Silence, as Audre Lorde taught us, protects no one.

This brings us back to Minnesota, where educators and parents have fed students’ hunger for information and insights.

“The schools in Minneapolis closed for two days after Renee Good was murdered by ICE, so kids know what is happening and are worried about themselves and their friends,” activist Carol Hornbeck told Truthout. Hornbeck is part of ISAIAH, a statewide group working for racial and economic justice. She took her elementary-school-aged grandson to meet with managers at a Richfield, Minnesota, Target store shortly after two Latine employees were apprehended by ICE. Although Hornbeck did not witness the round-up first-hand, she said that after learning of the attack, the group formulated three demands. She added:

We want the store to train employees about the need to see a judicial warrant before letting ICE in; we want the store to post anti-ICE signs; and we want the store manager to pressure Target’s corporate office to do the same in every state. I expected my grandson to be a spectator at this meeting, but he spoke up and asked the manager why he wasn’t afraid of putting his customers and staff in danger by doing nothing.

Hornbeck further reports that she is teaching her grandson what it takes to sustain activism long-term. “Our model is action and reflection followed by rest,” she said. “It’s a necessary cycle. When I’m resting, I know that someone else is taking action. I want everyone to understand this so they can remain active for the long struggle ahead.”