School district leaders and education associations have become concerned about protecting children in K-12 schools from “raids” targeting illegal immigrant students under President Donald Trump’s leadership, but officials have yet to see a child arrested at school nationwide.
Across the country, school districts in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver have reported large swaths of students staying home from school out of fear of being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers inside their classrooms ever since the Trump administration opened up schools as locations to make arrests.
The National Education Association, which represents 3 million educators, parents, students, and activists, encouraged educators to know their rights and school boards to adopt “safe zone” policies, according to an NEA spokesman.
Schools see no students arrested
Despite an all-out effort by concerned parents and teachers to secure schools, the NEA told the Washington Examiner that it was not aware of any incidents in which ICE pulled a student from school.
A spokeswoman for the National Association of Elementary School Principals confirmed NEA’s observation.
“I haven’t heard of any examples of this scenario from our member principals,” NAESP spokeswoman Kaylen Tucker wrote in an email Thursday.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest district in the country, told the Washington Examiner in a statement that the district has “had no ICE activity on our campuses.”
“The District has established protocols for responding to immigration personnel requests for information about students, families, and staff and has trained staff in how to respond if federal immigration officers appear at or nearby schools,” the LAUSD spokesperson wrote in an email.
What triggered the fears?
On Trump’s first day in office, he rescinded a Biden-era policy that barred federal immigration officers from entering “sensitive” areas, including churches, hospitals, and schools.
The National Immigration Law Center blasted the move and deemed it an “attack on immigration communities’ wellbeing.”
“In the wake of a litany of cruel executive orders targeting immigrants — and sanctuary policies — the rescission is especially pernicious in its attempt to make immigrants feel unsafe even in spaces that are the core of a civil society,” NILC said in a statement.
How schools have responded to Trump
Schools in a number of cities chose to implement their own “sanctuary” policies. A sanctuary zone is a place, typically a city or state, where elected officials have opted not to allow local police to work with ICE, including in turning over criminal illegal immigrants in jail to federal authorities.
This means ICE must go into communities after those individuals are released, find them, and arrest them.
NEA recommended that school districts implement policies as “sanctuaries” or “safe havens” for immigrant students. It said hundreds of school districts have followed its recommendation.
“NEA strongly encourages schools and school districts to adopt a Safe Zones policy that outlines what educators and staff should do if ICE attempts to engage in immigration enforcement at schools,” the organization wrote in a statement on its website.
In Richmond, Virginia, the school board voted unanimously in February to declare the city’s schools a “safe zone.” This means ICE and school staff have to follow the board’s new policy on interactions, which seeks to slow down ICE’s access to students.
ICE and school rights
Some schools have created private spaces within their buildings, which, under the Fourth Amendment, are protected as places where people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” according to the NILC.
ICE may enter schools but would need an administrative warrant to access those protected spaces.
Although ICE has not entered any schools, to the knowledge of those mentioned above, that could change soon.
Just this week, a charter school in south Chicago informed parents that an adult was detained by federal immigration officers while dropping off children.
But the bigger concern is what could come in light of a new development.
Reuters reported that the Trump administration directed federal immigration officers to find the more than 500,000 unaccompanied children who came over the southern border under the Biden administration and were ordered to be deported by a court but have not left.
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Enforcement of that directive could send ICE into classrooms.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
