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Bronx high school Principal Norma Vega stood on stage on a sweltering morning earlier this week surveying the 50 graduating seniors seated in front of her.
Clad in blue and white caps and gowns, many also wore colorful sashes representing the countries they left behind, like the Dominican Republic and Mali, just years earlier, often with little English. Each of these newly minted grads from ELLIS Preparatory Academy, all older than traditional U.S. high schoolers, are now set to enroll in college, a remarkable feat for students who face among the steepest odds of any group to make it to graduation and higher education.
But before Vega began handing out diplomas, she took a moment to acknowledge a student who wasn’t there: Dylan Lopez Contreras.
“This isn’t the easiest conversation to have,” she told the crowd of students, family members and staff. “But we do need to have it. And that is that one of our own was taken.”
Dylan, a 20-year-old Venezuelan native, was in his first year at ELLIS when he was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents last month after attending a routine court hearing. Dylan was the first known New York City public school student to be detained by ICE during President Donald Trump’s second term and remains in ICE detention in Western Pennsylvania, sparking local protests and galvanizing staff and students at ELLIS to rally for Dylan’s release.
“All of us will make sure that this young man is not forgotten,” Vega said. “The mistake they made when they took him is not realizing that he’s not alone. So I want you to be very much aware that … when you go off to these different places, you are never alone.”
Graduations have always taken on extra meaning at ELLIS given the towering hurdles many students surmount to make it to the stage — from arriving in a new country, to learning a new language, to navigating homelessness and poverty, to balancing full-time jobs with school.
Citywide, only 55% of public school students learning English graduated within four years last year, compared to 85% of native English speakers, according to city data. And while the college enrollment data isn’t broken out for English learners, only 7% of city high school seniors still learning English met CUNY’s college-ready standards as of 2020, compared to 63% of students proficient in English.
But this year more than any other, the political environment hung over the occasion. Trump’s mass deportation campaign charged the ceremony with uncertainty and urgency, Vega said. It felt unavoidable to address the politics given how closely they’ve affected the school, she added.
Graduation ceremonies at schools across the country serving immigrant students have been similarly marked by the country’s immigration politics. In Los Angeles, where Trump called in the National Guard and Marines to quell widespread protests against immigration enforcement, some families expressed fears that graduation ceremonies could be targeted by ICE. Local leaders promised to post school district police officers outside of graduation ceremonies to protect them from immigration enforcement.
At ELLIS, staffers had to have more one-on-one conversations with families wary about attending graduation than in years past, explaining the ceremony would be on a private college campus with gates and security guards. Even with those extra conversations, family attendance seemed more sparse this year than in the past, Vega said — though she noted that could also be due to a growing number of students who come to the country unaccompanied and don’t have family members in the U.S. to attend the ceremony.
Vega, who conceived of and founded ELLIS in 2008, has always believed staunchly in the power of vaulting her immigrant students into higher education as a path to help them build lives in this country and escape poverty — and she still believes that. But the past year has tested her and the school in unprecedented ways.
“It feels more dire,” Vega said. “I think about some of our young people now going upstate, and I’m like, ‘Are they gonna get stopped? Are they gonna get more than just stopped?’”
“The idea that going to college … that education is the great equalizer … I feel like that comes into question right now.”
A long road to graduation
When they enrolled at ELLIS four years ago, it was not inevitable that the 50 students gathered in the auditorium in their graduation robes would have earned diplomas — much less acceptance to college, students and staffers said.
Immigrant students who come to the U.S. in high school — especially when they are already 16 or older, as all new students at ELLIS are — often struggle to find a school that will even enroll them because their odds of on-time graduation are so low. State law entitles students to remain in high school through age 21.
ELLIS has developed a system for not only enrolling those students, but often helping them make it to college.
Vega compares the school’s mission to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty overlooking the school’s namesake, the famous island in New York Harbor that processed more than 12 million immigrants.
“She says, ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,’” Vega said during the graduation ceremony. “And that is who we are. This school will take on everybody who nobody else wants or wants to be bothered with.”
Nana Kaeta, a 21-year-old graduating ELLIS senior, was one of those students. She arrived in the country at 17 from Mali on her own. In her four years at ELLIS, she has bounced between different living situations in multiple boroughs, commuting up to two hours each way to get to school. She held down two jobs at once while in school to earn income.
“At the beginning, I was thinking I wasn’t gonna make it, and I wasn’t going to college,” Kaeta said. “But my principal and all the staff talked to me, and I was not believing in myself but they believed in me.”
Kaeta plans to attend Niagara University in upstate New York next year on a full scholarship.
A student wears a sash decorated with both the U.S. and Mexican flags at the Ellis Preparatory Academy commencement ceremony at University of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York. Yunuen Bonaparte for Chalkbeat
College counselor Jackie Peña develops relationships with colleges that understand the backgrounds and needs of ELLIS students. The school’s robust fundraising program brought in over $40,000 this year for students whose immigration status makes them ineligible for federal financial aid. And a network of alumni and volunteers continues to keep tabs on ELLIS graduates once they’re in college, even visiting them on campus to help them stay on track.
Even amid the fear and uncertainty from the political climate, ELLIS graduates said they’re determined to forge ahead.
All graduating seniors face the future with trepidation and excitement. But the feeling is mixed with sadness and fear for seniors like Kai Almonte, a 20-year-old ELLIS graduate from the Dominican Republic who expects to attend LeMoyne College in the fall. He’s able to go to the Syracuse school with the support of the $10,000 Yankees Stonewall scholarship, awarded to one student from each borough who shows leadership in the LGBTQ+ community.
“It’s a little bit scary,” Almonte said, “when you don’t know the future when you’re an immigrant.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org