School districts with large numbers of immigrant students craft new policies
Amid stepped-up federal efforts to curb illegal immigration, some school districts with large numbers of immigrant students are crafting new policies intended to balance cooperation with federal officials, protection of student privacy, and the safety of students during enforcement operations. In Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, for example, school personnel are barred from putting information about a child’s immigration status in school records or sharing it with outside agencies, including federal immigration authorities. Personnel are also told to deny any request from immigration officials to enter a school to search for information or seize students. School officials—with the help of lawyers—instead would determine whether to grant access. Meanwhile, some small communities with an influx of immigrants are weighing how best to respond if children are left stranded at school because family members have been detained in an immigration raid.
Complicating these issues is the landmark 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe, in which the court ruled that children are entitled to receive a free public K-12 education in this country regardless of their immigration status. That means, says Cullen Casey, a lawyer for the National School Boards Association, that school officials are prohibited from asking for documentation of parents’ or students’ legal status in the United States, such as asking for Social Security numbers. Instead, they are allowed to ask about a student’s residency in a school district, which can be proved with a utility bill.
Pat A. Reilly, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), says agents are not interested in arresting minors and schools should not have to create special plans to care for children whose parents might be detained because, if a parent is arrested and says that he or she is the sole caregiver for a child or elderly person, federal officials release that person to go home and appear later in court. But Steve Joel, the superintendent of the 8,000-student Grand Island school system in Nebraska, says that when ICE officials arrested undocumented people at a meatpacking plant in his community last December, he and his staff had to figure out what to do with 25 children who had had both parents detained. When federal officials asked mothers who had been arrested if they had children at home, Mr. Joel says, "they would say no, because they didn’t want their children arrested."
In June the Santa Fe school system adopted a policy after an incident in which ICE agents arrested an undocumented man in a school parking lot when he was picking up his 4th grade daughter. Theresa M. Ulibarri, the principal of Chaparral Elementary School, where the incident took place, says the new procedures will give her more confidence in handling such a situation should it arise again. Now, she knows that she can insist that law-enforcement officials follow certain procedures. "I would make sure that they would need to reveal their identity, and not just with a flash of the badge," she says. "I would make sure the child is safe. Not all police officers are tactful when dealing with children. I would ask to be present."
Education Week By Mary Ann Zehr
[Editor’s Note: More about the Grand Island immigration raid and its effect on the school system is posted below.]
NSBA School Law pages on Grand Island immigration raid