‘Shredding of the American Dream’: Immigrants fear ICE raids at schools

Communities across the state are still reeling from the Trump administration's new policies and rhetoric surrounding immigration. The threat of mass deportations, the casual criminalization of immigrants and the barrage of confusing and conflicting statements from public officials have left families at a loss and politicians stuttering to find a meaningful response. But at the end of the day, students are still afraid to go to school, and their parents are left wondering: How are they supposed to become “true Americans” if they aren’t afforded the opportunity to live the American Dream? 

ICE in NYC

While campaigning to return to the White House, President Donald Trump promised an intense approach to border security, and, for better or worse, he has delivered. On Jan. 20, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security rescinded a Biden-era policy that had directed federal immigration authorities not to operate in sensitive areas like churches, hospitals and schools. On Jan. 28, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt labeled all undocumented immigrants criminals. 

The same day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended upon New York City. Although New York City Mayor Eric Adams said that the ICE agents were focused on arresting people suspected of committing crimes, not just those who had entered the country without documentation, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan noted that anyone in the country illegally could be arrested in the course of the ICE operations. Since then, there have been further sightings of federal authorities across the state, including at schools. There have also been anecdotal reports of shrinking class sizes as fearful students and their parents avoid schools, and the problem appears to be ongoing as the full scope of ICE’s plans to target schools and children remains murky. (ICE did not respond to City & State’s requests for clarification.)

“This is a shredding of the American Dream,” state Sen. Andrew Gounardes told City & State. “How many immigrants come here because they want to give their children a chance to get that golden ticket, to pursue that American Dream, and they come here to put their kids to the best education system in the world, arguably, in order to be able to have a chance at success in life? This is just taking those hopes and those aspirations and trampling on them and making a mockery of the pursuit of the American Dream, and I think that is a generational harm that is going to occur here.”

No warrant, no admittance

As it stands, educators in New York are working off of guidance issued by the governor’s office, the state Attorney General’s office and the state Department of Education. School districts and educators have had it stressed to them that ICE can only enter school grounds with a judicial warrant, which must be signed by a state or federal judge, rather than an administrative warrant, which requires a lower burden of proof and can be signed by an ICE agent or immigration judge. A mixture of state and federal law also prevents law enforcement from accessing student data without parental consent or detaining any students, regardless of their immigration status. According to legal experts, it’s all pretty cut and dry. 

“The idea is, basically, ICE shows up, the principal gets called, and the principal is supposed to turn them away unless they have a warrant, and so school districts don't have really any option to do anything differently with state guidance,” said Susan Horwitz, supervising attorney of the Education Law Project at The Legal Aid Society.

However, Horwitz said that the real concern isn’t noncompliance on the part of school officials, but rogue federal authorities who might feel unimpeachable under a new administration. 

“The problem that I am foreseeing is that in Trump’s first term, from what I understand, they respected this guidance, and if they get turned away, they walk away,” she said. “I have concerns that it will not be as easy to get them to leave this time around just because of this sense that people are feeling emboldened to do what they want to do and to not necessarily follow what the law tells them.”

Whom ICE could solicit warrants from is also unclear. While Trump has appointed nine of the state’s 50 federal district court justices, it isn’t obvious how brazen jurists at the federal and state level would be to support his administration’s agenda. Some experts think it’s an impossible argument to even formulate. 

“Rescinding the sensitive locations policy is about creating terror and chilling people's right to attend school,” said Emma Hulse, a Skadden Fellow at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “So I have a very hard time imagining a scenario in which it would be important enough that a state court judge or a federal judge would sign a warrant permitting ICE to enter schools.”

Commuting to school

Even if ICE can’t arrest students at school, though, there is still the question of whether students will be protected while on their way to and from school. Hulse said that the same laws and guidelines that are meant to protect undocumented students at school are also applicable on school buses, whether they are private or government-owned. But walking to school or taking the train is its own realm, outside of a school’s protection.

“They still have to get there,” Horwitz said. “And so there are bus stops, there's subways, there's – just even for parents who drive their kids to school – there is that distance between the car and the building, and no one has any protections there. And that's the really scary part.”

Local officials’ attempts at interpreting immigration law can muddy the waters. On Jan 13., Adams issued a memo to city workers to comply with federal immigration authorities orders if they felt that they were putting their safety at risk. That went over like a lead balloon. 

In response to the guidance, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew penned an open letter to Adams, excoriating the mayor for the fear he’d caused, though it was later clarified that the city Department of Education hadn’t even received the memo. “Your memo was a selfish political ploy with New York City students, educators and school communities left paying the price,” Mulgrew wrote.

Hoping for the best

Immigrant communities are simply terrified, and organizations that normally would provide support to families for simpler issues, like cellphone bans or curriculum are now doing their best to alleviate fears that can’t even be fully articulated. The National Parents Union’s New York State Director Ashara Baker said that, even ignoring the element of school safety, it’s a traumatic time for undocumented children and children in families with mixed immigration status whose parents may not feel comfortable going out in public. 

“Families are definitely scared. Within a week's time, we've not only seen communities be destabilized, we're seeing folks destabilized within accessing healthcare, and clearly within the school system, feeling unsafe sending your kids to school, or even kids fearing that when they arrive from home they won't find their parents,” Baker said. “It's a scary feeling all the way around.”

Right now, there isn’t much that Baker and organizations specifically committed to supporting immigrant communities can do, beyond providing information and recommendations and hoping for the best.

Make the Road New York Executive Director Theo Oshiro believes that training school staff on the legal issues at play and continuing to educate community members is crucial.“We know that students now are being targeted,” Oshiro said. “We know that, yes, English language learners could be potential targets, and so could their families and their parents, but we also know that immigrant communities are learning their rights.”

New York Immigrant Coalition President and CEO Murad Awawdeh said he hoped that judges in New York would listen more to the law and the facts of each case than “their feelings”. Awawdeh also placed some of the blame for immigrant communities’ heightened fears on elected leaders unwilling to challenge Trump and ICE. “What we don't need is Mayor Eric Adams trying to collude with immigration enforcement against local policy,” he said. Aside from the infamous memo, Adams has caused concern with his open courting of the Trump administration in an apparently successful bid to end his legal troubles. 

Know your rights

Progressive elected officials are trying to find ways to help their constituents. New York City Council Immigration Chair Alexa Avilés has been working with other lawmakers to educate New Yorkers about their rights and specifically to what degree they need to comply with federal authorities. Avilés said these “Know Your Rights” events have had a positive impact, though some community members have been worried about attending them just in case ICE is monitoring such events. 

In the course of preparing families for the new normal, Avilés has advocated for making preparations for the troubling scenario that Baker outlined: a kid gets home from school, and no one is there. 

“We are helping parents to really think through: Who is the next point of contact? Does the school have updated information? Are people talking through those possibilities, right?” Aviles said. “Are they talking with the neighbors? Do they have the guidance that they need in terms of parental consent? So unfortunately, there is a lot of emergency planning going on and hard conversations that parents are having to have amongst themselves and with their family and friends, and sometimes with the school administrators as well.”

She said that, between the mayor’s alarming positions and the governor’s apparent silence, immigrant New Yorkers need affirmation that New York’s most powerful officials have their back. 

“It would be nice to have a full-throated mayor and governor who would say, ‘Yes, this is who we are as a state and as a people, and we have wide and long evidence to demonstrate that continues to be the right thing to do,’ and we don't hear those kinds of proclamations from either of them,” Aviles said. 

Some families have gone a step further than keeping kids home and left New York altogether, in the hopes of landing somewhere that isn’t in ICE’s crosshairs. 

Republican reaction

For their part, Republicans like Assembly Member Brian Maher have sought to downplay immigrants’ fears about indiscriminate ICE raids, though even he acknowledged that the rhetoric coming from the White House has not assuaged many immigrants’ fears.  Maher said that when you actually look at the specific language used by the president and his executive actions, there is less cause for concern. He dismissed many immigrant advocates’ claims about the immigration crackdown as alarmist and inflammatory, though he added that he’d be the first to admit he was wrong and ask his party to reverse course if immigrants’ worst fears about ICE came true. 

“You have some rhetoric that folks who are attached, maybe to the executive office or to different agencies, kind of say conflicting things, but it's pretty clear in the order that you would need a warrant,” Maher said of Trump’s executive order allowing ICE agents to enter sensitive locations. “You need a judge to sign off on you entering a school. So that fact, I think, needs to be better communicated to everyone involved – that it's not something where these law enforcement agents are going to come into schools and just rip kids away.”

Maher said he doesn’t believe conservative activist judges will go rogue and sign off on warrants to arrest undocumented children at school. He said that there aren’t even enough resources to carry out mass deportation in the manner immigrant communities fear, though he said that he still understands how unsettled some of the constituents in his Hudson Valley district have become. “What is real is the fear,” Maher said.

New York for All?

Many undocumented immigrants are looking to the New York for All Act – a bill sponsored by Gounardes and Assembly Member Karines Reyes, the chair of the Assembly Puerto Rican/Hispanic Task Force – for a possible solution. First introduced in 2020, the legislation would prohibit state and local government agencies, including law enforcement, from colluding with ICE, diverting resources to aid them or disclosing sensitive information to them.

Advocates and lawmakers hope that, with the impetus of a second Trump presidency, the support will finally be there to pass the bill in the state Legislature and have it signed into law by the governor this year. Reyes said the current climate begs for a bill like this. 

“It hearkens back to the times of the Holocaust when people were getting asked for ID,” Reyes said. “Just the simple fact that they can potentially begin to stop people and ask them for identification. We should all be worried about that, because in the state of New York, what document tells an ICE agent that you are indeed documented in the state of New York? You can have a driver's license and be undocumented.” 

The Trump Administration is acutely aware of that, and the Department of Justice is suing New York over its Green Light Law, which lets undocumented New Yorkers apply for driver's licenses without providing a social security number and restricts the state DMV from sharing data with federal immigration authorities. 

Reyes and Gounardes said they have been working on building support for the New York for All bill since the legislative session began and have steadily recruited new co-sponsors. Reyes, who is well aware of the realities of Albany, knows that the bill still faces long odds of being signed into law, but she said that she won’t stop fighting to ensure the safety of undocumented New Yorkers and their children.

“Oftentimes what happens in Albany is that we put forward the solution, and that gets negotiated and changed and watered down and renegotiated, and then we end up with something else,” she said. “So I don't know where we will land, but I know that this is an issue we're not going to be able to ignore for much longer.”