In Fresno, California, the rumors of social networks about imminent immigration raids in the city’s schools left some parents in panic, although the incursions were all deception. In Denver, a real immigration raid in an apartment complex led dozens of students stay at home from schoolAccording to a lawsuit. And in Alice, Texas, a school official said incorrectly to parents that the border patrol agents could address school buses to verify immigration documents.
The immigration policies of President Donald Trump are already affecting schools throughout the country, since officials are responding to the growing anxiety between parents and their children, including those who are legally here. Trump’s executive actions greatly expanded who is eligible for deportation and raised a prohibition of Application of immigration in schools.
While many public and school officials have been working to encourage immigrants to send their children to school, some have done the opposite. Meanwhile, Republicans in Oklahoma and Tennessee have presented proposals that would make it difficult, or even impossible, for children in the country illegally and the children of parents born in the United States without documentation to attend school.
As the risks weigh, many families have struggled to separate the facts from the rumor.
In the Independent School District of Alice in Texas, school officials told parents that the district “received information” that the border patrol agents of the United States could ask students about their citizenship status during the trips of field on school buses that pass through the control points about 60 miles from Texas-Mexico Edge. The information ended up being false.
Angelib Hernández de Aurora, Colorado, began keeping his children at home Your schools A few days a week after Trump’s inauguration. Now she doesn’t send them at all.
He worries that immigration agents visit their children’s schools, stop them and separate their family.
“They have told me: ‘I hope we never stop for ourselves,” he said. “That would terrorize them.”
Hernández and his children arrived about a year ago and requested asylum. I was working through the appropriate legal channels to remain in the US., But changes in immigration policies have made their status dim.
Last week, their fears have intensified. Now, he says, his perception is “all”, from the media in Spanish to social networks to other students and parents, he is giving the impression that immigration agents plan to enter schools in the Denver area. The school tells parents that children are safe. “But we don’t trust that.”
It is not known that the Immigration and Customs Agents have entered schools anywhere. But the possibility has alarmed families enough for some districts to be pressing for a change in policy that allows agents to operate in schools.
Last week, Denver’s public schools sued the Department of National Security, accusing the Trump administration to interfere with the education of young people under their care. Denver received 43,000 migrants from the southern border last year, including children who ended up in the city’s public schools. Assistance to schools where migrant children are concentrated in recent weeks, said the district in demand, saying that the immigration raid in a local apartments complex was a factor.
Denver’s support schools have given students and families to help through uncertainty implies “tasks that distract and divert the resources of the central and essential educational mission of DPS,” said the district’s lawyers in demand.
Throughout the country, conservatives have been questioning whether immigrants without legal status should even have the Right to public education.
Oklahoma’s Republican state superintendent, Ryan Walters, pushed a rule that would have required parents to show citizenship evidence, a birth or passport certificate, to register their children at school. The rule would have allowed parents to register their children even if they could not provide evidence, but the defenders say they would have discouraged them. Even the republican governor of the State, Kevin Stitt, thought that the rule was too far, and He vetoed him.
In Tennessee, Republican legislators have presented a bill that would allow school districts to decide whether to admit students without documents. They say they hope to invite legal challenges, which would give them the opportunity to Return to a precedent of four decades Protect the right of each child in the country to obtain an education
The implications of immigration policy for American schools are huge. FWD.US, a group that advocates criminal justice and immigration reform, estimated at 2021 that 600,000 K-12 students in the United States lacked legal status. Almost 4 million students, many of them born in the United States, have a father who lives in the country illegally.
It has been shown that immigration raids affect academic performance for students, even those who are native. In North Carolina and California, researchers have found less assistance and a registration drop among Hispanic students when the local police participate in a program that delegates them to enforce the immigration law. Another study found Hispanic student test scores He fell into schools near the sites of the raids in the workplace.
In Fresno, the assistance has decreased since Trump assumed the position of 700 to 1,000 students per day. The officials of the Central District of California have received innumerable panic calls from the parents about the rumored immigration rates, including those in schools, said Carlos Castillo, head of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Unified School of Fresno. The dreaded school incursions have been misleading.
“It goes beyond students who … have citizen status or legal status,” Castillo said. Students are afraid of their parents, family and friends, and are terrified that immigration agents can assault their schools or homes, he said.
A director of the recently called Castillo in Tears after a family approached to say that they were too afraid to buy groceries. The director went to buy the family and delivered $ 100 in edible to his home, and then sat down with the family and cried, said Castillo.
The district has been working with families to inform them about their rights and advise them on things such as liquidating assets or Children’s custody planning If parents leave the United States, the district has been associated with local organizations that can give legal advice to families and have celebrated almost a dozen meetings, including some in Zoom.
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Associated Press writer Valerie González contributed to this report.
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