School Drop-off and Pickup in the Age of ICE

In Illinois, volunteer monitors watch to make sure children can enter and exit their parents’ cars. In Maine, protocols were established and distributed to families prioritizing the safety of school communities, while Oregon published a similar toolkit online. In Portland, OR, a school decided to physically relocate this year just weeks before the academic calendar began.

This fall, US students returned to a world that did not exist before, one where masked strangers on the street can suddenly throw their parents into an unmarked van, leaving them alone and vulnerable.

That K-8 school that moved abruptly in Oregon? Their building was next door to an ICE facility, which, according to the school’s interim executive director Laura Cartwright, had started to use “chemicals and munitions” against protestors.

“Our garden was enveloped in gases one evening,” Cartwright told Portland’s KGW8. Increased activity at the ICE facility combined with families withdrawing their children from the school due to safety concerns led to the decision to move.

Since the Trump administration took office, much about the world has changed, including how and if children can do the most basic activity: getting to school and returning home safely to their families.

Climate of Fear 

As any parent knows, school pickup and drop-off can be hectic and dangerous. Between extra car and bus traffic, young students walking or biking, and inexperienced teen drivers, school arrival and departure times are often chaotic.

Into this, ICE has introduced deeper anxiety, confusion, and distress. ICE agents have used aggressive tactics including showing up unannounced on school grounds, usually during the busy morning drop-off time, to detain parents. Under law, ICE can now enter US school buildings.

There are documented cases of ICE agents, who are often armed and masked, waiting for families to arrive at schools before detaining a parent, sometimes leaving a child alone. In other cases, children have waited after school for a parent who never arrived or have gotten off the school bus to an unexpectedly empty house.

neaToday interviewed a Texas mother who panicked when her child was late exiting the school building in January of this year. Her child had simply stopped to use the restroom, but school staff understood her initial anxiety that something had happened to the child, that ICE had taken him.

As the author wrote, “In a climate where elected officials are choosing fear, families and communities pay the price immigration raids, abductions, disappearing people, and deportations have on them; and the absence of a child—even for a few minutes—can feel like a nightmare come true.”

One mother in Michigan witnessed the abduction of a fellow parent by ICE. After dropping her child off at the elementary school in her neighborhood, she saw multiple police cars. As the parent related to NPQ in an interview, “I noticed that all the ‘officers’ save one were wearing face masks. So, I immediately knew it was ICE.”

The parent, who remains anonymous for safety reasons, pulled her car over and started recording the ICE activity on her phone. She was anxious about her own safety but kept a distance from the ICE agents. Another witness joined her in filming and spoke in Spanish to the man being handcuffed by ICE.

Going to school suddenly becomes a risk for parents and children as it has the potential to devastate the family.

The agents “put him in an unmarked minivan—all the cars were unmarked and looked like everyday vehicles,” the parent told NPQ. “They all got in their cars and literally sped off through the neighborhood, driving so fast, one after the other.”

It was a community effort to help the man and his family. Another neighbor contacted the school to let them know what happened, and the school arranged for someone to pick up the child after school. Community members reached out to the family and spread awareness about the ICE activity on social media.

The man is home now, and says he was given no reason from ICE as to why they pulled him over, apprehended him, put him in handcuffs and leg chains, and detained him for eight hours.

Rippling Out

Targeting people during school drop-off and near school buildings is a deliberate tactic. As the parent in Michigan told NPQ, “ICE followed the man from his home to the school, watched him drop off his son, and then pulled him over on his way out of the neighborhood.”

School is mandatory for US children and is supposed to be a place of safety. The abrupt, unpredictable, sometimes violent arrival of ICE during school mornings makes the ordinary routine of going to school feel unsafe, a risk for parents and children as it has the potential to devastate the family.

“This, for children, creates a sense that nowhere and no one is safe.”

Families are increasingly keeping children home, transferring school districts, even withdrawing children entirely. Teachers have reported children simply not showing up one day, never returning to school to collect their things or say goodbye. As one teacher who spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity, said: “It ripples out. Now there are other students who are missing their friends.”

The presence and activities of ICE around schools comes at a time when the mental health of children and teenagers is in crisis. Seeing parents get handcuffed and put into cars in real time adds to the intense trauma young people are already experiencing—with few or no resources for help. The Michigan father apprehended by ICE says his elementary-school aged child continues to experience trauma from the event.

As Allison Bassett Ratto, a child clinical psychologist based in Washington, DC, told neaToday, “What [children] see are their classmates, their family members, their neighbors often being apprehended in violent and confusing ways while…doing things like picking up their children from the bus stop or going to their jobs, and this, for children, creates a sense that nowhere and no one is safe.”

Learning Loss

Along with disrupting the classroom environment, students missing excess school leads to learning loss. Initial academic shortfalls are compounded by inconsistency in lessons and missing support of friends and peers, an important part of social-emotional development.

Moreover, already-overburdened teachers are attempting to defend the emotional and sometimes physical safety of their students in the face of increased ICE activity, including deciding when and if to physically intervene, as interfering with official ICE actions can lead to criminal charges.

Schools are of course more than just sites of learning: They are places where communities connect, where children are warm and fed. ICE actions are violating these foundational services, disrupting not only family units but the security of whole communities.

Another educator, a first-grade teacher whose class witnessed an ICE raid outside their school that included the use of tear gas, told NBC News that students “were telling me that they feel sad and they feel scared.”

“It doesn’t make sense to them. In social studies, we’re also doing a unit on community, about getting along with others, about rules and laws, about citizenship and respect, and they’re seeing all of these things be violated in real time. The things that they’re learning and the things that they’re seeing outside of the window don’t line up,” she said.

For More on This Topic:

What Nonprofits Need to Know About ICE in Schools

‘They Are Hunting Us’: Child Care Workers in DC Go Underground amid ICE Crackdown

Florida Faculty and Students Organize Against Campus ICE Agreements