Immigration and Customs Enforcement complained in a Tuesday release that media outlets have been reporting on the negative impact that its immigration raids have had on schoolchildren. But the agency has recently been engaged in arrests of parents near schools in multiple states, an occurrence clearly traumatic for children and families.
In the statement, ICE said it “does NOT raid or target schools.”
Department for Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin asserted, “The media is sadly attempting to create a climate of fear and smear law enforcement. These smears are contributing to our ICE law enforcement officers facing 1,000% increase in assaults against them.”
McLaughlin also insisted that “ICE is not conducting enforcement operations at, or ‘raiding,’ schools.”
This is simply not true. ICE has conducted operations near school grounds in several states.
For instance, ICE agents were sighted on Sept. 3 at a high school in Long Island, New York, on the first day of school. According to a representative of the ICE-monitoring group Islip Forward, ICE agents detained and arrested at least one parent after they dropped their teenage child off at the school.
The group also provided local television station WNBC photos of ICE agents at a middle school in Hempstead, New York.
A sign protesting ICE is posted to a utility pole outside a Home Depot in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles on Aug. 28.
In Michigan, Ann Arbor resident Rodrigo Osorio told local outlet MLive that ICE agents detained him after he dropped his child off at a middle school. “They waited for me to drop my kid off and pick me up,” he explained.
Osorio said his 8-year-old child was “pretty traumatized” by the event and has asked their father, “Are they gonna come pick you up again?”
In California, surveillance video was released in July allegedly showing ICE agents on the grounds of a high school in Pico Rivera. The agents appear to be urinating in the school’s parking lot, which is adjacent to a preschool playground and an elementary school.
In August, ICE agents in Los Angeles wrongfully detained a high school student that they picked up outside of his school. Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, later told reporters, “This is the exact type of incident that traumatizes our communities.”
At the start of the current school year, school officials in Los Angeles began making plans for how they would handle ICE activities on their campuses. The action has sprung up in response to repeated ICE abuses and activities, like kidnapping purported immigration targets in broad daylight.
Children have been directly targeted by the Trump administration’s deportations as well. The administration has racistly gone after Latino communities, resulting in children and families fearing a government agency given carte blanche to operate.
People are afraid of ICE kidnapping people around schools not because of a media conspiracy covering up the truth, but because ICE is an agency of mass trauma using American schools as a backdrop.
