In January, the Trump administration rolled back a decades-old Department of Homeland Security memo that protected sensitive locations such as schools, hospitals, courthouses, and places of worship from immigration enforcement. These protections once ensured that students — especially those from mixed-status or undocumented families — could attend school without fear of deportation. Now, with those safeguards rolled back, schools nationwide are bracing for potential raids from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), fueling widespread anxiety.
For many students, particularly those from immigrant families, this anxiety is manifesting in their everyday lives. Rebecca, a high school teacher in El Paso who has been teaching for eight years and asked to withhold her last name to avoid professional retaliation, sees it as “a real slap in the face and an assault on everything that I know a school should be, which is a safe place…