Education Week - November 30, 2016 - 16

2016 ELECTIONS > Transition

K-12 Braces for Trump's
Immigration Stance
President-elect Donald Trump
campaigned on promises to deport
millions of undocumented immigrants, build a wall along the
U.S.-Mexico border, and repeal
temporary protections for young
immigrants who were illegally
brought to the United States as
children.
With Trump now set to take office
in mid-January, immigration advocates and school officials are bracing for the prospect that he may
keep his word, and undertake one
of the most aggressive immigration
enforcement operations in modern
American history.
"Most analysts don't doubt that
[Trump] will follow through in
implementing a number of the
harsher proposals that he's put
forth," said Margie McHugh, the
director of the Migration Policy
Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.
For the millions of K-12 students
who are the children of undocumented immigrants, or who are undocumented themselves, the effects
of the Trump administration's policies could be widespread, advocates
say: disrupted home lives, separation of families, revoked deportation reprieves, and a rolling back
of civil rights enforcement that has,
over the years, exposed practices in
some school districts that made it
difficult for immigrants to enroll.
The Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals policy, commonly known as
DACA, could be an initial target of
the Trump administration, advocates say.
President Barack Obama ordered
DACA in 2012, establishing that
undocumented immigrants who
came to the U.S. as children could
receive temporary work authorization and protection from deportation. The policy offers a two-year
stay to young unauthorized immigrants who meet a number of criteria, including that they came to
the U.S. before age 16, have lived
here for at least five years continuously, attend or graduated from
high school or college, and have no
criminal convictions.
Because DACA was created
through executive authority, the incoming president could alter or end
it as part of his plan to crack down
on illegal immigration.
Since his election upset, Trump
has walked back talk of immediately deporting all of the nation's
estimated 11 million undocumented
immigrants. In the days after the
election, he vowed to round up immigrants with criminal records as
his first order of business.
That would seem to offer some
breathing room for so-called "Dreamers," the main beneficiaries of DACA.
"Of all the populations that one may
take action against, this is the population usually thought to be at the bottom of the priority list," said McHugh
of the Migration Policy Institute.

Nonetheless, civil rights organizations and immigrant advocacy
groups are bracing for battles on
that front and others.
"We've seen that providing education for all individuals regardless of
immigration status, is something
that builds our country, our communities and our economy," said Nicholas Espíritu, a Los-Angeles-based
lawyer with the National Immigration Law Center. "It's essential that
we continue to protect this fundamental right."

Trying to Calm Fears
Obama urged Trump and his
incoming team "to think long and
hard before they are endangering
that status of what for all practical
purposes are American kids."
In the days after the election, activist Mariela Gabriela "Gaby" Pacheco,
who immigrated to the U.S. from
Ecuador, took to social media to encourage people to share their stories
and why the president-elect should
re-consider his stance on deportation. Pacheco is the program director
at The Dream.US, a philanthropic
group that funds scholarships for
Dreamers.
"We know and understand the
anxieties that the immigrant community, and specifically the students, have," Pacheco said.

Roberto Koltun/Miami Herald/TNS

By Corey Mitchell

change their immigrant status. Legal
experts remain split on whether the
president has the authority to do so.
Immigration is policy that hits
home in Chu's district and across
her state. Of the 740,000-plus people
protected under DACA, about 1 in 3
are estimated to live in California.
Officials there stand ready to defy
the Trump administration if it pursues an aggressive effort to deport
unauthorized immigrants.
The Los Angeles Unified school
board voted after the election to
reaffirm its policy that bars federal
immigration enforcement agents
from school campuses without approval from the superintendent and
the district's lawyers.
Amid increasing reports of postelection harassment and violence in
schools, districts from New Mexico

The threat of exposing the immigration status of a family member could also discourage students
from enrolling in school, advocates
say.
The U.S. departments of Justice
and Education have issued very
clear guidance on this topic, reminding school districts to refrain
from using policies and practices
that discourage students from enrolling in school because they, or
their parents, may not have legal
immigration status. Plyler v. Doe,
the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, declared that children are entitled to receive a free public K-12
education in the United States
regardless of their immigration
status.
That hasn't stopped some districts from trying in more recent

We know and understand the anxieties that the immigrant community,
and specifically the students, have."
GABY PACHECO
Program Director, The Dream.US

U.S. Rep. Judy Chu, a California
Democrat, is asking the Obama administration to shield the identities
of "Dreamers."
During the application process,
DACA recipients must submit sensitive information to the federal
government, including relatives'
home addresses. The information
has been handed over with the
good-faith understanding that it
would not be used against them or
family members, she wrote in a letter to the president.
Future administrations could
abandon that and use the information to carry out deportations, Chu
warned. "When we asked immigrants to come out of the shadows,
we never imagined the election of
a candidate who ran on a policy of
mass deportation," Chu said in a
statement.
Three Democratic members of
Congress-U.S. Reps. Zoe Lofgren
and Lucille Roybal-Allard of California and U.S. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez
of Illinois-have asked Obama to
issue pardons to DACA recipients
for entering the country illegally or
overstaying visas; a pardon would
protect them from deportation, not

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 30, 2016 | www.edweek.org

to New York state, are taking similar
steps to ensure families are aware of
their rights and to make them feel
safe in school.
To address common questions posed
by immigrant students and their
families, the Denver public schools
produced a fact sheet and letter recommending, among other things, that
students who've already received reprieve through DACA contact immigration lawyers immediately.

Family Ties
As of 2014, about 3.9 million students in U.S. public and private
schools, roughly 7 percent of all K-12
students, are the children of undocumented immigrants, the Washingtonbased Pew Research Center estimates.
Any enforcement action taken
against these parents would upend
any semblance of stability for their
children, both at home and school,
researchers have found. A 2015
study from the Urban Institute and
Migration Policy Institute found
that children with deported or detained immigrant parents face difficulty accessing early education,
health care, and social services.

years, especially as unaccompanied
minors, many of them fleeing poverty and violence in Central American countries, surged into some
communities.
In New York state, a joint investigation in 2015 by the attorney general's office and education department
found a pattern of illegal enrollment
requirements, including schools that
made students or their guardians
present Social Security cards, across
at least 20 districts. That happened
despite repeated warnings from federal and state agencies.
Defiance of state and federal statutes could happen more frequently
during the Trump administration,
said Thomas Saenz, the president
and general counsel of the Mexican
American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
McHugh, with the Migration
Policy Institute, said more districts
could look to read the "body language" of the president-elect's administration, gauging their willingness to monitor violations.
The Education Department often
issues guidance as an implicit
threat to intervene on civil rights
violations. How and if that hap-

Yaneth Mejías,
center, with her
children, Juan
David Morales,
14, and Valeria
Morales, 16,
worries about
the pending
deportation of her
husband, the Miami
Herald reports.
The family came
from Colombia 11
years ago. Their
application for
asylum was
rejected.

pens during the Trump administration remains unclear.
"I don't know whether we can expect that from the incoming administration," Saenz said.
Civil rights leaders and advocates
are also deeply concerned about how
members of certain religious groups
will be treated, particularly Muslims whom the president-elect said
during the campaign should be subjected to "extreme vetting" or banned
outright from entering the U.S. At
least one member of his presidential
transition team has floated the idea
of reinstating a registry set up after
the Sept. 11 terror attacks for immigrants from countries where terrorists are active.

Many Unknowns
That talk has been widely condemned and called out for echoing
the racism and xenophobia that
led to the internment of JapaneseAmericans during World War II.
This comes following a year in
which hate crimes against Muslim Americans and others reached
historic highs. Anti-Muslim hate
crimes rose 67 percent, according
to the latest numbers released in
the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics
report.
While there are no firm estimates
showing how many students in U.S.
schools are Muslim, the numbers
are growing. Arabic and Somali-
languages commonly spoken by
Muslim students-are among the
top three languages for Englishlearners in the nation's schools.
"Our concerns range from the apocalyptic to the benign," said Ibrahim
Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations,
a Washington-based Muslim civil
rights and advocacy organization.
"We have students out there wondering if their families are going to
be deported," Hooper said. "They
want reassurance. We just don't
know the answer to that right now."
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
supports coverage of policy, government
and politics, and systems leadership
in Education Week and on edweek.org.
The Broad Foundations were established
by entrepreneur and philanthropist
Eli Broad to advance entrepreneurship
for the public good in education, science,
and the arts. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content
of this coverage.

http://www.edweek.org http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - November 30, 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - November 30, 2016