If gunning for worst cabinet member were an Olympic sport, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos would surely sweep gold. DeVos has admitted she has no idea if underperforming schools have improved, she has trampled on the civil rights of transgender students and she has instituted “devastating” campus sexual assault guidelines—and that’s just year one.
Betsy DeVos is wholly unqualified, unprepared and ignorant, which she yet again put on full display in front of Congress this week, when she claimed that individual schools should be able to decide if they feel like turning undocumented kids over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE):
“That’s a school decision. It’s a local community decision,” DeVos said during testimony before the House Education and the Workforce Committee, adding that “we have laws and we also are compassionate.” Her comments came in her first-ever appearance before the education panel, lasting close to three and a half hours.
No, no, no. That isn’t how it works. That’s not how any of this works. The Supreme Court has already decided that all kids here, no matter their immigration status, have the right to a public school education. Shit, even ICE has a “sensitive location” policy dictating that schools should generally be “off-limits” to enforcement action (though, unleashed under Trump, they’ve come dangerously close to skirting it).
The point is, this isn’t up for debate. All kids have the right to go to school, and the fact that the fucking secretary of fucking Education doesn’t fucking get this is, even for Betsy DeVos, fucking astounding. “Her testimony,” said Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) leader Thomas Saenz, “stems either from an astounding ignorance of the law or from an insupportable unwillingness to accurately advise local school districts.” I’d put my cash on both. Mass deportation policies are traumatic, damaging and when they take place at our schools, a violation of the Constitution:
The Supreme Court made clear in Plyler v. Doe that public schools have a constitutional obligation to provide schooling for children, regardless of immigration status. That means schools also cannot enforce measures that would deter undocumented children from registering. They cannot ask about immigration status. And according to the American Civil Liberties Union, they cannot report students or their families to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
While DeVos is wrong as all hell, damage could very well already have been done. Fear has been a feature, not a bug, of this mass deportation administration, and fear of raids has resulted in school after school reporting massive absences among immigrant children and the child of immigrants. When ICE raided a Tennessee meatpacking plant last month, 500 kids stayed home:
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
But even 500 students pales to the 2,000 students who stayed home following a Las Cruces, New Mexico raid, just weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration. At the city’s high schools—Arrowhead Park Early College High is nearly entirely Latino, according to the New Yorker—absentee rates went up by 25 percent. But at the city’s elementary and middle schools, where younger students are more likely to be dropped off by an undocumented parent or relative, the numbers skyrocketed:
“In the two days after the raids, absences at elementary schools rose by almost a hundred and fifty per cent.”
“Let’s be clear,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Lorella Praeli. “Any school that reports a child to ICE would violate the Constitution. The Supreme Court has made clear that every child in America has a right to a basic education, regardless of immigration status. Secretary DeVos is once again wrong.” Pili Tobar of America’s Voice: “The administration must clarify DHS’s position before this unleashes panic on immigrant children and families throughout the country.”