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Penny Chavez has been watching immigration enforcement activity in Minneapolis with increasing panic, seeing public school students like her two grandchildren being detained.
Rumors are swirling that her town, Springfield, Ohio, could be the next target for a surge of activity from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in part because of its Haitian community. Chavez and her two grandchildren, ages 5 and 4, are U.S. citizens, but she’s still fearful that they will be detained at or near their schools because they are Hispanic.
Chavez has pressed Springfield’s school district for answers around how school leaders would react if agents were to enter a district school, but she hasn’t been reassured by their answers. For parents without legal status whose kids are enrolled in the district, a lack of clarity makes them reluctant to send their children to school, she said.
“They have the right to know whether or not it’s safe to pick the kids up or drop them off,” she said.
A year after the Department of Homeland Security rescinded a policy limiting operations in and around schools, agents are not raiding schools, but immigration enforcement has nearly arrived at the schoolhouse door. There are reports of parents getting detained at bus stops and images of agents tackling people on school grounds.
Some of those places adjacent to schools would have been off-limits under the previous policy, raising questions about where the federal government will draw the line and putting pressure on school leaders to reassure families like Chavez’s.
Legal experts say the Fourth Amendment hasn’t changed: It still limits agents from charging inside a school without the right paperwork. But the overall approach by agents has been unpredictable, creating highly charged circumstances around schools.
Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, and others have called for a reinstatement of the federal policy, with some organizations pressuring Democrats in Congress to withhold funding for the Department of Homeland Security until it is restored. Recent incidents show that ICE is getting closer to going inside schools, she said.
“They’re not physically inside the buildings yet, but they’re literally at the school yard gate,” she said.
A tracker launched by K-12 Dive, an education industry news site, identifies at least nine instances in which immigration agents came onto the grounds of a K-12 school or preschool. In Chula Vista, California, last week, ICE agents arrested both parents of a 12-year-old and 4-year-old after school drop-off, according to a local news report. According to a GoFundMe for the family, the children finished their school day without knowing their parents wouldn’t be the ones to pick them up.
The Department of Homeland Security has denied some of the reports, like a recent claim that agents targeted parents in Michigan at a bus stop during student drop-off time. And a department spokesperson said they ended up on school grounds at Roosevelt High in Minneapolis, with agents tackling someone, due to a car chase involving a citizen they claimed impeded enforcement activities, the Sahan Journal reported.
School leaders don’t always have clear answers for families and are limited in what they can do, said David Law, superintendent of Minnetonka Public Schools in a suburb of the Twin Cities and president of the School Superintendents’ Association.
“They’re mad at us, like, ‘Why can’t you stop this?’ Well, we didn’t start it,” he said.
The effect on students, particularly in Minnesota, has been sweeping: more absences from school, an increase in remote learning, and grief from seeing classmates vanish. About 1 in 4 St. Paul Public School students were learning virtually amid the enforcement surge, the superintendent told reporters in January.
“Not only are they being subjected to the presence of ICE at their bus stop or at their school, but it’s this force that is lacking the control and composure that you would expect from law enforcement, and that has to be extremely traumatic for these students,” said Sarah Pierce, the director of social policy at Third Way, a center-left national think tank.
A looming question: Will ICE try to enter schools without a judicial warrant?
For decades, the sensitive locations policy limited immigration arrests at or near schools. The policy made an exception for circumstances that posed an imminent threat.
That change means spaces considered public, such as a front lawn or near the parking lot, could be subject to ICE activity, said Keith Armstrong, an immigration attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
But, in internal memos reported by the Associated Press and the New York Times, ICE has asserted broad powers to enter homes without a warrant signed by a judge, known as a judicial warrant, and to arrest people in public without any warrant. That has raised questions about how the agency might treat sensitive locations, such as schools.
Legal experts and advocates point to the Fourth Amendment, which bars agents from entering schools without a judicial warrant. A “long line” of case law also supports the notion that agents need the signed warrant, Armstrong said. If ICE is targeting families in actions on school premises, “that is something we definitely want to know about and see if we can develop a case about.”
The recent incident where agents went on the grounds of Minneapolis’ Roosevelt High signals an “attitude shift” in what agents consider OK, Armstrong said.
“It seems like there is a change in attitude where previously it would have been sort of unthinkable for ICE to, even with the rescission of the sensitive locations memo, it would have been pretty unthinkable for ICE to really try to do something that brazen,” he said.
Ken Cuccinelli, former deputy secretary for DHS during the first Trump administration, told Chalkbeat immediately after the policy was rescinded that he believed agents would tend to avoid enforcement at schools, and he did not expect them to target school drop-off or pick-up to “round up a bunch of people in transit.”
But he said in late January that limiting operations within 1,000 feet of a school would also put a “good chunk” of the country off-limits.
Still, while ICE has been more aggressive in Trump’s second term, “they haven’t had to go in a bunch of schools,” he said.
Democrats, who are facing pressure to withhold DHS funding until the sensitive locations policy is restored, are considering a variety of measures to curb ICE activity.
A tentative budget deal reached Friday did not include longterm Department of Homeland Security funding to give policymakers more time to haggle.
Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, said restoring the sensitive locations policy is a priority, but it’s one item in a list of competing priorities including preventing agents from wearing masks or ensuring they’re using warrants appropriately.
Bennet, who led Denver Public Schools from 2005 to 2009, said parents and children are separated during the school day and have the reasonable expectation that they’ll be reunited when school ends. ICE’s recent actions are upending that assumption for vulnerable families.
“There is a ripple of fear that is running through our communities,” he said. “Traditionally, schools and hospitals and churches have been sanctuaries and places where kids shouldn’t have had to worry about immigration enforcement.”
ICE unpredictability leads to school unpredictability
In Springfield, Ohio, Chavez said people of color in the community, including citizens, are making contingency plans for child care in case families are separated during the school day — much like families have done in other cities, at times with the support of public schools.
Chavez also wants assurances that Springfield City School District would develop a procedure or standards in the event that ICE agents asked to enter schools, including whether school officials would grant them access to a student without a signed warrant.
After multiple phone calls with school officials, the grandmother still feels like her questions haven’t been sufficiently answered. A spokesperson for the district did not answer Chalkbeat’s request for comment. The superintendent has told staff members in an email message to remain calm and supportive in the event of a surge in ICE activity and to not engage in any political activity, according to WOSU, a local NPR station.
School superintendents are in a tough spot, said Law, the president of the School Superintendents’ Association. He estimated that due to recent events, 80% of the job for some Minneapolis-area superintendents encompasses managing immigration uncertainty and responding to ICE activity.
The lack of cooperation or communication between local law enforcement and federal agents is unusual, he said.
“We have two police officers stationed at our high school,” he said. “Yet, when something is happening with immigration a block from school they don’t know what’s going on … Even our elected officials are trying to figure out, you know, what has caused all these changes?”
He said parents should know that schools have “longstanding practices to discourage enforcement from happening at school.” Bus drivers are trained to drive away from situations that appear chaotic and to call parents instead of dropping kids where circumstances appear questionable. When law enforcement has come in with a judicial warrant, he said administrators can sometimes reason with police officers to carry out the warrant somewhere else.
“We would much rather be a safe haven, because no student wants to see an armed person tackling their classmate or their teacher,” he said. “Those are traumatic experiences. But we have practices in place.”
For Chavez, the lack of reassurance has led her children to take her grandchildren out of school until “the school is able to assure the community they won’t allow access to the kids at a minimum,” she wrote in a text message to a Chalkbeat reporter.
They are paying for online school instead.
Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.
