The morning after Election Day last year, Melanie Claros, a civics teacher and ESL coordinator at a South Florida school where half the students are Latino, was forced to do a job that went beyond of their usual obligations.
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 ahead of another Donald Trump presidency.
“‘Are they going to deport us all now?’ ‘Who’s going to be deported first?’” he recalled students asking him during class.
Concerns have not abated since then, Claros said, noting that he knows of at least one student who has already stopped attending school for immigration-related reasons. “I strongly suspect that we will have [more] children who will withdraw or simply stop attending school,” he said.
Claros is one of several educators in six states who told NBC News they have found themselves in the awkward position of answering questions about possible mass deportations under the Trump administration. Many teachers and administrators are aware of a variety of scenarios that could begin to unfold very soon: immigration officials asking about a student; a child who leaves school for the day only to discover that his parents have been detained and there is no one home to take care of them; students worried about deportation who simply stop attending class. Educators and advocates say they feel they have to be prepared for these 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 incredulous.
She became a teacher knowing she would have to talk about civics, she said, but “never in a million years did I think that [students] “I would wonder and be afraid about immigration.”
Supporters of Trump’s plans for mass deportations say increased immigration enforcement is needed to decrease the incidence of crime committed by immigrants and deter people from illegally crossing the border in record numbers. However, critics say they are concerned about the possibility of family separations and widespread fear among certain communities.
Several educators told NBC that they feel it is in the community’s best interest for children, regardless of their legal status, to have the opportunity to go to school. Jasmin Baxter heads the communications office in the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, school district, which has a significant English learner population. He said the district is committed to ensuring all students feel supported.
“When you come to school, you’re supposed to feel safe at school. Those external factors that you’re not supposed to think about while you’re getting an education,” 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 definitely hard for us to talk about this,” said an assistant principal in California 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 get pushback from families and community members.”
Viridiana Carrizales, co-founder of the nonprofit ImmSchools, says she has also seen a reluctance in schools to be seen seeking information about immigration and what to do in the event of an encounter with federal officials.
“Many of them say that the moment we publish our names, we become a target,” he said.
Despite this, in the days after the election, ImmSchools received messages from 37 schools it had not previously worked with asking about training and information opportunities for its staff, it said. Just before Christmas, the organization also held a virtual training session with 29 superintendents on how to prepare for any immigration or deportation raids affecting their student populations.
“[Schools] “They are very afraid and trying to find ways to better support families during this,” she said.
Educators also expect students to begin disappearing from their classrooms entirely, as Claros has already seen happen at his school. Parents may feel nervous about being separated from their children if one of them is detained, or think that their children’s presence at school could lead authorities to learn that they are in the country without authorization.
In Michigan, ESL teacher Karen Iglesias said she heard students ask if they were going to be deported and parents told her they were afraid to drive to their children’s school.
Cinthya Longoria, an elementary school teacher in North Texas, says she is doing everything she can to support parents who are feeling anxious about the future while she remains unsure of her own. Longoria currently receives the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary legal protection against deportation to some immigrants brought to the United States without documentation as children. Recently, a father asked him to assure him that his family would be fine under the new administration, he said.
“I just told him I hope so,” Longoria said. “Because I couldn’t say yes. That’s when I told him I was a DACA recipient. At the time, that was the only thing I could tell him without being dishonest.”
Federal law prohibits schools from denying students a free public education based on their immigration status and regulates the disclosure of students’ personal information. Those laws, in addition to Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, are intended to serve as safeguards for undocumented families concerned about enrolling their children in schools, experts say.
“Taken together, this is a pretty strong set of protections against immigration enforcement actions against students in school, especially when the school district is committed to protecting its noncitizen students,” said Nayna Gupta, principal. of the nonprofit American Immigration Council.
Under current policy, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement generally stays away from areas where people receive public services, including schools, hospitals and churches. But under the Trump administration, this “sensitive locations” or “protected areas” policy is slated to go away, three people familiar with the plan to end it previously told NBC News.
Denver Public Schools in Colorado and Canutillo Independent School District in Texas issued statements about the potential policy change, emphasizing the need for “disruption-free learning.”
This is not the first time that schools have found themselves at the center of immigration issues. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, a series of ICE raids resulted in the arrest of about 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 to in their parents’ absence. A Mississippi school district said it had ordered bus drivers to make sure they saw a parent or guardian present when they dropped off a child; Otherwise, they would take him back to school to spend the night there.
This history has shaped the way some advocacy groups and educators now prepare families.
In Tucson, Arizona, a coalition of nonprofit organizations is helping families put together “emergency packets” that contain key information in case a parent is detained or deported, including a power of attorney for guardianship, emergency contacts and instructions on how to talk to children about who will be responsible for them in their parents’ absence.
The California deputy director told NBC News that she and some of her colleagues even offered their homes.
“We have spoken to families who have spoken about their status and have made it clear that their child can stay with one of us if their family were deported as an option for them,” he said.
