What do we do in schools when ICE comes to town?
For this piece, I interviewed two heads of school and two teachers
This is a piece that I started in August when heads of school were asking how to deal with federal troops in our cities. At the time, federal troops had been dispatched to DC and LA—and it appeared likely that they would move to Chicago and NYC next. We know now that the presence of federal troops veiled what seems to have been the main intent—lending a higher threat level to the semi-legal bands of ICE agents who would arrest, harass, detain, and deport members of the public.
But as states like Oregon and Illinois fought off the order for federal troops to occupy cities in their states, the veil was lifted. ICE arrived in Chicago anyway and did incredible damage to the safety, security, and well-being of the residents of Chicago. Some people were directly traumatized and violated. Others lived their lives in fear, some in hiding. Many experienced moral injury as they watched their government terrorize their neighborhoods.
As Minneapolis becomes the new national focal point, it feels like the right moment to share what educators on the ground in DC had to say.
Back in September, when the leaves on the trees were still green and the National Guard had been in DC for a few weeks, I reached out to two heads of school and two teachers in DC to see what kind of advice they might have for other educators who fear their city might be next.
Of the four people I spoke with, they knew nobody in DC who felt safer because of the presence of federal troops. The government said that federal troops were meant to create safety, but instead they created ghost towns in the neighborhoods they occupied. To a person, each interviewee told me that everybody they knew felt less safe. Playgrounds and parks, previously filled with people, were empty. People opted against going into the city to visit the museums. Restaurants suffered because people stayed home to eat. People were impacted across the socio-economic spectrum. In every community, People of Color, Native people, and immigrants (regardless of statuses) were especially limited in their movement.
The impact was felt nationally. Schools from outside DC called their colleagues in DC, asking, “Is it safe to bring students there?” and then decided against it. Field trips to the nation’s capital were cancelled. The center of experiential civics education was no longer a safe enough place to plan to take children.
Claudia (not her real name) is a Spanish teacher at an independent school located just outside DC. A US citizen who was born in South America, Claudia has lived in the US most of her adult life. The occupation impacted her at random and unexpected times. On the first day of school, she passed an ICE checkpoint. “My heart started pounding, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Like, are they gonna stop me?’ I have seen it in the news, but seeing it in person was something that I didn’t… I don’t know why it took me by surprise. Like, it was very impactful for me.”
Both heads of school I interviewed told me that the people in their communities who were the most impacted were also the people who were most threatened, including faculty and families of color, Native faculty and families, and parents whose kids commuted by Metro, on buses, or through regions where there were troops or where there may have been troops.
Another teacher, a white woman who is a citizen, talked about the impact of the occupation, and particularly the ICE raids, on her own family. Her husband, a white man, has worked for over twenty years with the same team of people, most of whom are undocumented. Wherever they work, her husband hangs signs that say, “Employees only,” and he takes care to lock doors and monitor the premises. At the time of the interview, he and his colleague (who is undocumented) were working out contracts that would give him power of attorney so that he could care for his colleague’s business and take care of his family should he get taken by ICE.
She noted that the changes have impacted their independent school community as well. Even White families from Europe who had been in DC for work or to teach at graduate schools had already left—they no longer felt safe in the US. It has had an impact on class size and school financial health. She said she feels increasingly isolated as a practitioner of antiracism because she no longer actively participates politically in social media, where she once found community.
What can schools do?
State your commitment to your faculty and staff
Claudia felt safer at her school after her head of school told the entire faculty that ICE would under no circumstances be allowed into the school. The head laid out a plan, which included the staff at the front desk refusing to allow ICE entry. Over the summer, the school also reconfigured the entrance to the building to make it easier for the people at the front desk to exercise control over who does and does not enter.
Establish clarity about legal and structural boundaries
Both school leaders I interviewed emphasized the need for structural security, stressing the importance of recognizing a “judicial warrant,” which would be required for ICE to enter the private property of a school. Their security guards and staff knew what to look for in a judicial warrant (see this link for the distinction). They also mentioned that some schools were locking gates or otherwise physically closing their campuses whenever possible. As one school leader said, ICE officers are “young and barely trained officers who may not follow the rule of law,” so it is imperative for the security and administrative teams to “know the school’s rights as a private institution.”
Public schools have similar rights. One head of school took much of their learning from LA Public Unified School District, where 35% of the population are immigrants, as reported by public radio station KCRW. LAPUSD trained staff to differentiate between judicial and administrative warrants. They created “safe zones” using staff and volunteers to patrol the perimeters of the schools (within two blocks of each school) in high risk communities. They rerouted buses so that children were picked up closer to home. They recruited over 1000 school staff who worked directly with the LAPD to create alerts when ICE was in the area. A teacher in South LA created the concept of a “walking school bus,” in which teachers met groups of students at their homes and walked them to school. In collaboration with local immigrant advocacy groups, they hosted workshops with educators to know how to respond if ICE came to their schools.
Check in with one another
Claudia said that for her, it meant a lot to have people—including her head of school—check in and see how she’s doing. She said people in her community seemed to feel awkward about it, but it was helpful when people said, “Hey, how are you feeling with everything that is happening? I know ICE has been around the school. How are you doing?”
Balance reassurance and alarm
Both heads of school were working to strike a balance between reassuring their community members and calling attention to their community. One head described it as being mindful of “the tipping point between reassurance and alarm.” This school leader talked about the psychological burden on the school community, particularly faculty and staff of Latino descent, who were changing their routines, no longer exercising outside, and otherwise managing distress over and above the chaos of school life. The psychic load of the occupation was not distributed equally.
Individual community members can similarly take care of one another. There’s no clear prescription for how anyone wants to be treated in an ongoing, unpredictable, amorphous situation like this. But remembering how different our individual realities are outside of school can help us find our way towards empathy and support within school.
Show visible resistance whenever possible
Claudia knew her school couldn’t make public comments about ICE outside of what was said to the faculty. But she named how good it felt to see her community in person and online standing up to ICE. “I love my community so much here in D.C. and my school and even the city I live in. I have seen people with signs like, if they see ICE at a checkpoint, they would be like, ‘Don’t go by there--ICE is right there.’ Yes, that is something that is being done. And I saw in the news that in Columbia Heights, they saw (ICE) by the Metro and like they literally kicked them out of that neighborhood. Like, they started yelling at them, like, ‘Get out. Get out. You don’t belong here.’”
She said she felt comforted, less alone, reassured and supported by these signs of visible resistance to ICE.
Remember that we can’t all protest publicly
Claudia expressed regret and sadness over not being able to partake in the ICE protests after having been so active in the protests for Black Lives, saying, “I tell my husband, I wish I could do that, but I’m scared. Because before all this, like when the Black Lives Matter movement in D.C. and that was in 2020–we went out and we worked with everybody. But now when you have kids, everything is so different because…I don’t want them to take me.”
As we look around at the visible resistance to the current government, the fact that people are not present in the streets does not mean they don’t support the movement. Some people carry much greater risk in this moment than others.
Cultivate communication networks with other independent schools
Each school was working with other independent schools in the area to track what was happening and how people were responding. This cooperation was critical. One head said, “I think that universities and law firms and other organizations would have been much better served if they had all banded together and said ‘this will not stand’…What role is there for independent schools to come together and say we will not stand for this?”
Know your rights
For schools seeking tools for educators, the Firewall Network has created cards that individual teachers and leaders could keep in their wallets reminding them of their rights and action steps.
Protect the children
Schools have the primary imperative of protecting children, of creating safe spaces for children to learn. We would we never allow unidentified masked men to enter a school with weapons and take children away. Parents can’t even remove children from school without ID. When parents send their children to school, the school acts in loco parentis, and their job is to keep children safe until they are returned home at the end of the day. Let this clarity guide the decisions we make to keep our children safe first.
Practicing dialogue
Both heads talked about the importance of dialogue, referencing programs that have been effective in their schools, including the following:
The Bridge Building Program from Eboo Patel, an interfaith dialogue program in which people share their own stories with one another
Georgetown’s empathy program called In Their Shoes
Conducting a community Iftar and a community Seder
An open forum in which students were able to share feelings in reaction to the shooting of Charlie Kirk.
One leader said, “If we can’t figure out how to get along here, we’ll never be able to figure it out outside of our walls and fix the world.”
Another leader suggested that this moment of polarization is different from others we’ve seen. They said:
“We have optimistically been doing work around discourse and dialogue and all of those sorts of things, thinking, you know, as educators, we’re playing a long game and we want 10-year-olds who know how to…dialogue… That is, presuming that they will have a future in which dialogue is even possible.”
The contrast between these two comments illuminates the current dilemma of education. There’s an obvious tension between the urgency of preparing students for their future as democratic citizens, and the imperative to act in this moment, lest we lose the possibility of a democratic future.
On one level, this is not new. Education has always been an act of faith and courage, in which we prepare students for an unknowable future, a future that will be shaped by what we teach students today.
What has changed is that the unknowable future has fewer known quantities than ever in recent history. Schools are being tested as democratic institutions. While schooling used to assume the ongoing existence of democracy in the US, that assumption can no longer be taken for granted. My conversations with heads of school, in preparation to write this piece, have convinced me that school leaders are already feeling this tension. Schools—like law firms, universities, and hospitals—are institutions that have a particular role to play in protecting democracy when the checks and balances of government fail.
What exact role that may be remains to be seen. But we get a glimpse of it as we watch so many schools—both public and independent—physically locking ICE out of their campuses. Schools can no longer fulfill their commitment to protect their students and teachers while complying with the directives of the federal government. This is new territory. And it is a sign of life in a democracy when individual institutions—like schools—are able to stand up to the federal government and choose non-cooperation with unjust, undemocratic mandates.
#CourageIsContagious:
This week I honor Police Chief of Minneapolis, Brian O’Hara, for standing up to the federal government and ICE on the principle that their tactics are not sanctioned by law, nor do they increase the safety of the public or of police (or even ICE agents). O’Hara was hired after the murder of George Floyd to rebuild trust in the Minneapolis Police Department. In this interview on The Daily, he stays rooted in the values and goals of his profession while maintaining the bottom line, which is keeping his community and his officers safe.
Photo by uarry Requina on Unsplash