It has never been easy to be an immigrant in the U.S., but these are particularly frightening times as the Trump administration pursues an aggressive mass deportation policy. The administration is defending an approach that denies immigrants their day in court, and even very young children have been swept up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. The ACLU has been collecting stories from immigrants who describe living in constant fear for themselves, their families and their communities.
For many immigrant families, the fear is crystalized in a practical question: Should I send my child to school? Viridiana Carrizales, the cofounder and CEO of Immschools, hears this question from parents every day. Her organization, which was founded in 2018, works to create safe and welcoming environments for immigrant students and their families. Immschools works with schools in Texas, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but Carrizales said that since Trump took office, the organization has received calls from other parts of the country, as well.
“We’ve received 170 inquiries from 21 states,” she said. “School officials are telling us, ‘We are seeing our families not bringing their kids to school, and asking whether our schools are safe. We’re seeing the fear our families are feeling and we don’t know what to do.’”
Immschools offers trainings for students, families, educators and administrators. “We’re working to ensure that every student knows their rights, that every family understands what schools are doing to keep their kids safe, and that schools themselves put protocols and practices in place that show their families how they’re going to protect the rights of their students,” Carrizales said. Since Trump’s inauguration, Immschools has facilitated 91 Know Your Rights workshops for families in 15 states, and 45 professional development trainings in 38 school districts. Immschools also offers an extensive library of resources for parents, schools and community members.
It isn’t easy to reassure parents amid daily news accounts of arrests and deportations — including of people holding green cards, in some cases. There have also been reports of ICE vans parked outside of schools during pick-up and drop-off times. “Just last week, there was a school district that experienced immigration detaining two parents as they were dropping their kids to school,” Carrizales said. “So instead of an incident here or there in another state, it is becoming more common, and that is intensifying the fear of parents. People are afraid to even go to the grocery store.”
A significant number of families are impacted by the administration’s policies: An estimated 5.5 million K-12 students in the U.S. have at least one undocumented parent. It’s a population that many funders have supported: over the years, Immschools’ backers have included the Margulf Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and others.
As IP’s Martha Ramirez outlined last year, other funders — like the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, the Pershing Square Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation, have also backed immigrant students over the years, and others have supported immigrant and refugee children and families.
Given the administration’s stepped-up attacks on immigrant communities and the number of students affected, Carrizales hopes that funders — education funders in particular — will increase their support.
“We’ve been making the case to [education funders] that you cannot support education without seeing how all these other factors are impacted,” she said. “We’re seeing very explicitly under this administration that it doesn’t matter how good a teacher you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Teacher of the Year — if a student is feeling afraid, they’re not going to learn. If families are withdrawing their kids from school, we’re not going to achieve our mission of supporting students and families across this country. The anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are threatening the missions that many philanthropies and foundations have when it comes to education and economic mobility.”
How advocates are working to protect immigrant students and families
Until Donald Trump started his second term, schools, as well as churches, were considered “sensitive locations” where immigration agents weren’t allowed to carry out enforcement actions. That protection was removed after Trump took office. But ICE agents are only authorized to enter public spaces within schools, like school lobbies — not classrooms or cafeterias. And without a judicial warrant, ICE cannot question or remove a student from school, or obtain access to their personal information.
Aliento, another immigrant student rights organization, offers many resources; it works with colleges and universities as well as K-12 schools and families. Aliento is located in Arizona, but has a broader reach, according to Reyna Montoya, Aliento’s founder and CEO. “When you’re supporting immigrants, you have to constantly look at what is going on at the federal level, and we have provided some programs and done advocacy campaigns outside of Arizona,” she said.
After Trump’s inauguration, Aliento began to hear from many of their school partners with questions about how to respond. “When the ‘sensitive locations’ designation was taken away, there was a lot of fear from our school partners,” Montoya said. “They wanted to make sure that they were following the law, but also giving some comfort to families.”
Immschools and Aliento emphasize to administrators and families that it is essential for schools to have updated emergency contact information for every student. It is also important for undocumented parents to make plans for their children in case they themselves are detained.
“If a parent is detained and deported and they don’t have any plans for who takes custody of their children, those children who are U.S. citizens enter the foster care system,” Carrizales said. “We’re trying to avoid having schools in a situation where they have to call child protective services because there’s nobody else that can pick up that child from school. We tell parents that it doesn’t have to be a family member if you don’t have relatives in the area; it just should be a trusted adult. This is something that we tell schools to prioritize in conversations with parents.”
In Carrizales’ experience, families are more likely to send their children to school when administrators proactively provide relevant information to both staff and parents. “We know that the information that we’re providing matters, because it can mean the difference between a child feeling safe going to school or a family choosing to withdraw them,” she said.
Like Carrizeles, Montoya has found that when schools offer information and develop protocols for keeping students safe, they see more of their students attending school. “We’ve seen a spectrum of schools and those who offer resources and let parents know what to expect do well from an attendance and academic perspective,” she said. “The schools that are not communicating are creating a lot of uncertainty.”
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
An important moment for funders to “leverage their positional power and institutional voice”
There has been some resistance to the Trump administration’s threats to immigrant students: In California, for example, Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of education, sponsored a bill that would restrict ICE activities on school grounds.
But given the administration’s actions in its first 100 days, and extreme measures being proposed by lawmakers around the country, it is no wonder that families are scared. In multiple states, efforts are underway to challenge the Supreme Court’s 1982 Plyer v. Doe decision, which granted immigrant students the right to a free, public education. “That is the real threat, to keep our immigrant students from accessing K-12 at all,” Carrizeles said.
But it’s not just families that are feeling wary: IP reached out to a number of funders who have provided support for immigrant students, and they all declined to talk to us, or didn’t respond. Even as some grantmakers speak out — and increase their payouts — to meet Trump’s threats, immigration is one area where grantmakers have been especially cautious about speaking out this year.
But as Adam Strom, the executive director of Re-Imagine Migration, argued in an IP guest post, there is a lot philanthropy can do to support immigrant students. “Philanthropy has a critical role to play in creating schools where all students feel they belong,” he wrote, pointing to advocacy, professional development, community partnerships, and convenings as areas that could use funder support.
And just because they’re staying quiet about it, that doesn’t mean funders aren’t responding. Cairo Mendes, senior director of state and local programs at Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, believes many funders are formulating their strategies for how best to respond in the current climate. “I think this is an important moment for philanthropy to really step in and leverage their positional power and institutional voice, to advocate on behalf of their grantees and move financial resources as quickly as possible,” he said.
As my colleague Martha Ramirez outlined recently, philanthropy can also support organizations that are protecting broader immigrant rights as the Trump administration takes extreme measures — including undermining due process rights by shipping immigrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador without allowing them a hearing.
Immschools’ Carrizales underscored the stakes for immigrant students. “This administration is not holding back,” she said. “They are threatening our right to education. We need to respond in the same way: unapologetically and boldly. If philanthropy specifically — with its level of influence and power — does not step up in the way that they need to, we’re going to continue to be in the position where we’re just reacting, trying to defend the little that we have. And I don’t think that should be the strategy.”
