The effects of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on a Tennessee meatpacking plant last week—“the largest workplace immigration raid in a decade” resulting in the arrests of 100 immigrants and no charges yet for the plant owners—stretched far beyond the facility’s walls and its immigrant workers. According to CNN, 500 students skipped Hamblen County schools and stayed home the day after the raid, fearful of their government and fearful that their families could be next. They were afraid that they would go to school, come back home, and find their parents and family members disappeared:
Jessica Bailiff looked out at her class and saw empty desks where her students were supposed to be.
The physics teacher's heart sank. She knew why they weren't there.
Now, a week later, most are back in class. But the community is still reeling, Bailiff says.
Kids who are supposed to be learning about light waves, radio waves and the electromagnetic spectrum, she says, are instead wondering if they'll ever see their loved ones again.
"There's just fear and sadness written all over their faces," Bailiff says.
This is in no way an outlier. In the two days following an ICE raid in the New Mexico community of Las Cruces last year, “absences at elementary schools rose by almost a hundred and fifty per cent.” At Arrowhead Park Early College High, nearly entirely Latino, absentee rates went up by 25 percent. All together, “Las Cruces’s public schools saw a sixty-per-cent spike in absences compared to the previous week,” with rumors of more raids even forcing school district superintendent Greg Ewing to issue a bilingual letter to parents reassuring them that “we do not anticipate any ICE activity occurring on school campuses.”
Like in New Mexico, the fear among Tennessee’s Latino families didn’t differentiate between immigration status. According to research, “children in the broader Latino community can experience distress even if everyone in their family is authorized.” Some of the children who were kept home were from the families affected by the meatpacking plant raid, but others weren’t:
"Other families are afraid that if their kids go to school and they go to work, that maybe they won't see each other again," [Stephanie Teatro, co-executive director of the Tennessee Refugee & Immigrant Rights Coalition] said.
Schools are accustomed to dealing with traumatic events, [district superintendent Jeff] Perry said, such as the sudden death of a family member or an accident with severe injuries.
But the scale of the immigration sweep, he said, made the impact even more pronounced.
"We've never had anything of this magnitude," he said.
American immigration policies are broken, and they are traumatizing generations of American kids. “Children who have been separated from their parents frequently show signs of trauma, including anxiety, depression, frequent crying, disrupted eating and sleeping, and difficulties in school.” According to CNN, “more than 100 local educators gathered at a church ... for a workshop on how to help students through the crisis”:
At a session led by immigrant rights activists, the teachers became the students.
They used brightly colored markers to express their emotions on big sheets of white paper:
I feel helpless.
I cried Thursday night, wondering which of my students were without parents.
Most of these children are US citizens.
I do not want to live in a place where people I have known for so long can be taken away from me in a second.
Community members have stepped in as well, packing Hillcrest Elementary School’s gym for a prayer vigil and to hear from children and their families. “A boy described how his dad, who was detained in the raid, used to make dinner and play soccer with him”:
A boy described how his dad, who was detained in the raid, used to make dinner and play soccer with him.
"One time," he said, "he even taught me how to shave, even though I don't have the hair yet."
A little girl stepped forward, her hair in a ponytail, her head unable to peer above the podium.
She handed a letter to a man emceeing the event and asked him to read it:
"My uncle takes care of me when I am sick. He always helps me after school. He takes me places like the mall and helps me with my homework. He's a good person. I feel angry and sad they took him away."
Another child followed her to the front of the room, reading a letter about his uncle. He paused after he finished and looked out at the crowd.
"Thank you," he said, "for hearing me."