On an overcast Tuesday morning, a mother and father dropped their child off at Laurel Elementary in Oceanside. As the couple returned home, a pair of SUVs with tinted windows pulled them over at the corner of Olive Street and San Diego Street, less than half a mile from their child’s school.
When the couple’s child got out of school that afternoon, their father wasn’t there to pick them up. ICE agents had handcuffed him and led him away into the back seat of a Ford Explorer, leaving his wife standing on the sidewalk.
It was the second-to-last day of the school year.
Amid the Trump administration’s deportation onslaught, school leaders across the country have grappled with how to respond. The administration’s decision to allow federal immigration agents to carry out operations on schools, a reversal of previous policies, has only increased the stakes.
But even as school districts attempt to reassure vulnerable families that they’re doing what they can to protect them from immigration actions, the things school leaders can control is dwarfed by things they can’t. Oceanside Unified officials, like San Diego Unified, passed a policy during the first Trump administration that restricts ICE agents from entering campuses without a warrant signed by a federal judge. District officials on Tuesday sent an email to families notifying them of the parent’s arrest reminding them of the policy.
Save for barricading a door, there’s not much a school can do if ICE agents show up with a warrant. Besides, ICE agents don’t even need to bother getting one if they just lie in wait a couple of blocks away from a school.
Eric Joyce, the Oceanside city council member who represents the area around Laurel Elementary, said immigration operations like the one on Tuesday have real costs. Joyce is a longtime special education teacher and a former Oceanside Unified board member.
“This means there’s now a child and family left behind without a breadwinner,” he said.
The fear this sort of action creates is also palpable, he said. After the father’s arrest, community members from all across the area reached out to Joyce’s office. He even heard that some families picked their children up from school early.
The surge in immigration actions also has big, systemic impacts on all sorts of things. Local police have reported fear of deportation has eroded immigrants’ willingness to contact them when crimes occur. Some people have even avoided going to the doctor for fear they could get tangled up in federal immigration authorities’ web.
The stakes are incredibly high in education too. Not only does the specter of deportations destabilize already vulnerable family units, it negatively impacts student performance.
Joyce put it plainly: “It’s impossible to overestimate the impact this could have on the learning of our next generation it all starts with feeling secure.”
Fear of immigration operations have also led to decreased attendance in districts across the country. For diverse communities like Oceanside, that’s likely a frightening prospect, because schools in California receive funding partly based on attendance. So, less attendance means less money for schools.
“We have a broad community of people who should all feel safe accessing basic services like education, like hospitals and the justice system, so it concerns me if large portions of our community do not feel safe doing the things they absolutely need,” Joyce said.
Donald Bendz, Oceanside Unified’s communications director, said district officials “do not believe ICE activities will impact attendance or performance in the coming school year.” Today’s promotion ceremonies were well attended, he added.
The key to limiting the fallout from enforcement actions like Tuesday is building trust, Joyce said. That comes from working closely with the community and being honest about what you can control.
Reminders of the impact are everywhere, though.
The night of that father’s arrest, Joyce attended a promotion event at an Oceanside school. There, he spoke to a community member whose husband is in the country without legal documentation. She described having to reassure her daughter that her father is going to be OK, all while not knowing how true that may be.
“For me, that feeling is unimaginable,” Joyce said. “But lot of our mixed status families have lived with this fear for a long time.”
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