By Moriah Balingit, Bianca Vázquez Toness and Jocelyn Gecker, Associated Press Education Writers
In Fresno, California, rumors on social networks on immigrant immigrant raids in the city’s schools let parents panic – even if the raids were all canopies. In Denver, a real immigration raid in an apartment complex led to dozens of students to stay at the school house, according to a trial. And in Alice, Texas, a school official wrongly told parents that agents of the border patrol could board school bus to check the immigration documents.
The immigration policies of President Donald Trump already affect schools across the country, because officials find themselves responding to the increase in anxiety among parents and their children, including those who are legally. Trump’s executive actions are widely widened which are eligible for expulsion and have raised the ban on the application of immigration to schools.
While many public and school officials have worked to encourage immigrants to send their children to school, some have done the opposite. Meanwhile, the Republicans of Oklahoma and Tennessee presented proposals that would make parents difficult – even impossible – for children in the country, children born in the United States without documentation to go to school at all.
As they weigh the risks, many families have struggled to separate the facts from rumor.
In the Alice Independent School District of Texas, school officials told parents that the district had “received information” that American border patrol agents could question students about their citizenship status during excursions to School bus that cross control points at around 60 miles from Texas-Mexico Border. The information ended up being false.
Angelib Hernandez d’Aurora, Colorado, started to keep her children at the house of their schools a few days a week after the inauguration of Trump. Now she doesn’t send them at all.
She is worried that immigration agents will visit her children’s schools, hold them and separate her family.
“They said to me,” I hope we will never be detained by ourselves “,” she said. “It would terrify them.”
Hernandez and his children arrived about a year ago and asked for asylum. She worked on the appropriate legal channels to stay in the United States, but changes in immigration policies have made her status tenuous.
During last week, his fears intensified. Now, she says, her perception is “everyone” – from Spanish media to social media, including other students and parents – gives the impression that immigration agents plan to enter the schools of the Denver region. The school tells parents that children are safe. “But we don’t trust him.”
Immigration and customs agents are not known to have entered schools anywhere. But the possibility has sufficiently alarmed families so that certain districts push for a change in the policy allowing agents to operate in schools.
Denver’s public schools continued the Ministry of Internal Security last week, accusing the Trump administration of interfere with the education of young people. Denver welcomed 43,000 migrants from the southern border last year, including children who found themselves in public schools in the city. Attendance in schools where migrant children have been concentrated have dropped in recent weeks, said the district in the trial, saying that the immigration raid in a local apartments complex was a factor.
The support that Denver schools have brought to students and families to help through uncertainty implies “tasks that distract and divert the resources of the main and essential educational mission of the DPS,” said District lawyers in the trial.
Throughout the country, the Conservatives wondered if immigrants without legal status should even have the right to a public education.
Oklahoma Republican Superintendent Ryan Walters pushed a rule that would have forced parents to show citizenship proof – a birth certificate or a passport – to enroll their children in school. The rule would have allowed parents to record their children even if they could not provide evidence, but the defenders say that this would have greatly discouraged them to do so. Even the state governor of the state, Kevin Stitt, thought that the rule was going too far – and opposed it.
In Tennessee, republican legislators have presented a bill which would allow school districts to decide if they admit undocumented students. They say they hope to invite legal challenges, which would give them a chance to overthrow a precedent of four decades protecting the right of each child in the country to obtain an education
The implications of immigration policy for American schools are enormous. FWD.US, a group pleading for criminal justice and immigration reform, estimated in 2021 that 600,000 K-12 students in the United States lacked legal status. Nearly 4 million students – many of whom were born in the United States – have an illegally living parent in the country.
Immigration raids have been shown to have an impact on students’ academic performance – even those who were born in the country. In North Carolina and California, the researchers found a lower attendance and a decrease in registrations among Hispanic students when local police participate in a program that exceeds them to enforce immigration law. Another study has revealed that the results of Hispanic student tests abandoned schools near the sites of the workplace raids.
In Fresno, attendance has dropped since Trump took office from 700 to 1,000 students per day. California central district officials have received countless panicked calls from parents about the rumors of immigration raids – including raids in schools, said Carlos Castillo, chief of diversity, actions and ‘Inclusion at the Fresno Unified School District. The dreaded school raids were all hoax.
“It goes beyond students who … have a citizenship status or legal status,” said Castillo. Students are afraid for their parents, parents and friends, and they are terrified that immigration agents can attack their schools or homes, he said.
A school director recently called Castillo in tears after a family contacted them to say that they were too afraid of going to buy grocery products. The director did shop for the family and delivered $ 100 in grocery store at home – then sat with the family and cried, said Castillo.
The district has worked with families to inform them of their rights and advise them on things such as liquidation of assets or childcare planning if parents leave the United States. held nearly a dozen meetings, some of them on Zoom.
The author of the Associated Press, Valerie Gonzalez, contributed to this report.
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Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
