Jan Resseger, who spent many years as an advocate for children and social justice, reviews the effects of Trump’s promise of mass deportations on the children of immigrants. Others look at the economic costs of his promise. Jan considers the human costs. Please open the link to read her post in full.

She writes:

On Tuesday, the NY Times’ Dana Goldstein rather blandly reported that the nation’s largest school district, the New York City Public Schools, has now sent guidance to school principals to prepare them for President-elect Trump’s threatened immigration raids:

“If immigration agents arrive on the doorstep of a New York City public school, principals have been told what to do. Ask the officers to wait outside, and call a school district lawyer.  The school system has enrolled about 40,000 recent immigrant students since 2022. Now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office with promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the district has shared with school staff a protocol to try to shield students who have a tenuous legal status. In a December letter to principals, Emma Vadehra, the district’s chief operating officer, wrote, ‘We hope using this protocol will never be necessary.’ Still, New York and some other school districts across the country are readying educators and immigrant families for a potential wave of deportations.”

Goldstein’s interest seems more centered on the challenges these students have presented for the school districts serving new immigrant families, however, than on the coming trauma if Trump’s threatened raids actually become a reality: “Public schools serving clusters of migrant children have already dealt with a dizzying set of challenges in recent years, as an influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants crossed the southern border. Some are educating students who speak Indigenous languages and may have never before been enrolled in formal education. Others are trying to prod teenagers to class, when they may face intense pressure to earn money. And many have assisted newly arrived families with finding shelter, food and winter clothes. Now, these schools are facing an additional challenge: convincing parents to send their children to class when some are so anxious about deportation that they are reluctant to separate from their children for even part of the day.”

Of course, public schools, no matter their location, are expected to provide appropriate services for all the children in the community, and most are prepared with qualified English as a Second Language teachers. While 40,000 new immigrant students would overwhelm most local school districts, the NYC public schools serve approximately a million students every day and were likely well prepared. One wonders if Goldstein remembers the chaos that schools faced during immigration raids back in 2019.

More realistically, Chalkbeat‘s Kalyn Belsha has explored some recent history to remind readers about what happens when a massive immigration raid at a local industry disrupts the community’s public schools and terrifies children and adolescents: “When immigration agents raided chicken processing plants in central Mississippi in 2019, they arrested nearly 700 undocumented workers—many of them parents of children enrolled in local schools. Teens got frantic texts to leave class and find their younger siblings. Unfamiliar faces whose names weren’t on the pick-up list showed up to take children home. School staff scrambled to make sure no child went home to an empty house, while the owner of a local gym threw together a temporary shelter for kids with nowhere else to go. In the Scott County School District, a quarter of the district’s Latino students, around 150 children, were absent from school the next day. When dozens of kids continued to miss school, staff packed onto school buses and went door to door with food, trying to reassure families that it was safe for their children to return. Academics were on hold for weeks, said Tony McGee, the district’s superintendent at the time. ‘We went into kind of a Mom and Dad mode and just cared for kids,’ McGee said. While some children bounced back quickly, others were shaken for months. ‘You could tell there was still some worry on kids’ hearts.’”

In an important December 18, 2024 update that considered President-elect Trump’s threatened immigration raids after he takes office in January, Belsha described the struggle school districts will possibly face: “For three decades, federal policy has limited immigration arrests at or near schools, treating the places where children learn as ‘sensitive’ or ‘protected’ areas. But President-elect Donald Trump likely will rescind that policy soon after his return to the White House, according to recent reporting from NBC News. That could open the door for immigration agents to more frequently stop parents as they drop their kids off at school, or for interactions with school police to lead to students and their parents being detained. Educators and advocates for immigrant children worry that would create an environment of fear that could deter families from bringing their children to school or participating in school events. That could, in turn, interrupt kids’ learning and make it harder for educators to build trusting relationships with immigrant families.”

In her December report, Belsha also provides important context for concern about Trump’ threatened immigration raids: “An estimated 4.4 million U.S.-born children have at least one undocumented parent, and an estimated 733,000 school aged kids are undocumented themselves. Other students may have authorization to live in the United States but hold temporary immigration statuses that Trump has threatened to revoke. Researchers estimate that half a million school-age children have arrived in the U.S. just in the last two years.  Federal law generally overrides state and local statutes, and immigration agents have broad authority to detain people they suspect of being in the country illegally.” She adds, however, “Nevertheless, several large school districts already have mapped or expanded policies they crafted during the first Trump administration to reassure students and parents… Trump left the sensitive locations policy intact during his first term, but won re-election with a series of hardline immigration proposals, including a plan for mass deportations.”