On August 11, masked agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) handcuffed and pointed their guns at a disabled 15-year-old while he waited for his mom to pick him up from school in Arleta, California. On August 8, ICE arrested Benjamin Guerrero Cruz as he walked his dog in Van Nuys, days before the 18-year-old was set to begin his senior year of high school.
These are just two in a string of examples of ICE’s aggressive implementation of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation agenda, an approach experts say is traumatizing kids and families and sending a chill through school communities across the country.
“This back-to-school season, children are facing the terror of wondering if their parents will be there to pick them up,” said America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cardenas during a virtual briefing. “The usual first-day jitters have been replaced by fear.”
She added, “This is the hidden cost of Trump’s agenda, education chaos and psychological scarring.”
On his first day back in office, January 20, President Trump rescinded a Biden-era policy that directed immigration agents to steer clear of “sensitive locations,” including churches, hospitals, and schools. In the weeks and months since, ICE agents have carried out operations targeting all the above locations, among others, as it pursues the administration’s aim of 3,000 arrests per day.
“This creates a toxic climate of fear and uncertainty which causes intense stress, anxiety, and trauma,” said child clinical psychologist Allison Bassett Ratto. “As children see immigrants being detained, they are not seeing violent criminals being apprehended by uniformed police. Instead, what they see are classmates, family, and neighbors being apprehended in violent and confusing ways while going about their daily lives.”
Ratto explained that the torrent of images and reports of ICE apprehensions is creating a sense among all young people, immigrant or otherwise, that “nowhere and no one is safe.” Students, she noted, carry that sense of fear and anxiety into the classroom, hampering learning.
“We as educators are taking action,” said Noel Candelaria, secretary-treasurer with the National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union representing more than 3 million educators and school staff members.
In California, two bills—SB 48 and AB 49—are currently moving through the legislature that would limit ICE’s ability to conduct operations in and around schools.
Still, the impact of immigration enforcement policies is just one in an array of headwinds public schools across the country are facing as enrollment falls and as the White House continues to push for greater privatization through the expansion of school vouchers.
States including Florida, Texas, New York, and California tie school funding to attendance, which means they lose money as fewer students show up to class.
Perhaps nowhere else has the force of the Trump White House’s policies fallen harder or more visibly than in Los Angeles. LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho drew on his own experience as an undocumented immigrant to describe the impact of current policy on today’s students.
“As an educator, as an American by choice not chance, as an immigrant once undocumented, as someone who once slept under a bridge, I cannot speak or address any issue without recognizing the impact education has had on my life,” said Carvalho, adding that “thousands of kids are now facing the same abuse I felt when I was a teen alone in this nation.”