This school district is preparing blockages, but now it is not just for shots

Clemen Avalos, a school psychologist in a primary school in the San Fernando Valley, is seeing many more children crying at school this year. They are accustomed to seeing children of preschool age or kindergarten fight to say goodbye to their parents during the first days of school. But now, several weeks after the year, they have older children who come to their office crying.

A fifth grade student told Avalos that he is afraid and wants to go home. His mother sells tamales in the street, he continued to repeat.

Avalos understood how the girl felt. As a mexicoamerican that grows in California during the 1994 Fight to deny public services to undocumented immigrantsShe remembers listening: “The migra will take you back to Mexico.” Once, when her mother was arrested, they started crying, believing that the police would take her mother and never see her again.

“I remember him as vividly as a 37 -year -old woman,” they told News themezone.

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The teachers and school staff saw how fearful students were during the first Trump administration, but this time, anxiety has been inevitable.

During his second campaign, Donald Trump threatened to carry out the “largest deportation program” in the history of the country. In June, federal agents were deployed in Los Angeles and since then arrested thousands of people, including students, American citizens and people with legal authorization Be in the country. Monday, the Supreme Court governed that federal agents could continue to attack “any foreigner or person who is believed to be an alien”, canceling a previous order by a federal judge who found that ice agents were stopping people based on their race, accent or line of work.

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Students are full of questions: What will happen if ICE is presented on the campus? What will their teachers do to protect them?

Los Angeles schools, including 30,000 immigrant students, 7,500 of which are undocumentedare particularly vulnerable to immigration raids. Every day, students and their parents travel to and from school predictable, risking the apprehension of federal agents.

But somehow, schools are uniquely prepared to respond to this threat. Both educators and students have been forced to learn blocking and refuge policies in the place designed to protect them from active shooters or natural disasters, and some of these precautions are now being reused to protect them from federal immigration authorities. And many educators have also spent summer participating in community defense efforts, which are now expanding to their schools.

In June, Alalos helped lead the union training of the neighborhood, a political organization that has Community patrols carried out Defend the people of the immigration raids since the 1990s. The training, which was attended by members of dozens of community groups, including United Los Angeles teachers, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, Jewish Voices for Peace and Harriet Tubman Center, helped create a coalition of volunteers who could carry out community patterns throughout the county.

For the first day of school, the members of UTLA had established patrols around the schools, distributed information about their rights, worked with the Los Angeles Unified School District to offer tight bus routes that collect children closer to home and pushed the district to offer virtual learning options.

“Many people are going crazy,” Lupe Carrasco Cardona, a master of secondary schools in downtown Los Angeles, told News themezone. “But I always remember everyone that hope is in the coalition. We have organizations that are not normally organized around immigration problems, but they firmly believe in being part of the defense that has joined. That’s where I find the greatest light and hope.”

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On the first day of school, a suffocating Thursday in August, Cardona settled instead of patrol after school. From their hanger, they could tell each student while approaching their buses home, scanning the streets to obtain signs of immigration application.

That day, everyone got on buses safely.

Cardona joined Unión del Barrio in 2015 and began participating in street patrols in eastern Los Angeles and South Central in 2020. In the apogee of immigration incursions during the summer, the direct line of rapid response response of the neighborhood sounded constantly, sometimes until 3 in the morning.

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“People [were] Calling to say: ‘I can’t work. I have no food, ”said Cardona. In response, the group raised and associated with higher supermarkets to distribute groceries worth $ 16,000.

Just before the school began, the nightmare organizers had prepared to happen. August 8, Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruzan 18 -year -old student from Van Nuys, walked to his dog when he was arrested by masked ice agents. Currently, the teenager is detained at a desert detention center, and federal officials have not explained why he was stopped first. On August 11, another student, A 15 -year -old with disabilitiesHe was briefly handcuffed and sustained at a high school in San Fernando Valley with his mother before the agents let him go.

“If there were a shooter of some kind on the campus, so it is basically as we are treating the ice.”

– Skye Tooley, Primary School Teacher at East Hollywood

After the arrests, the Superintendent of the Unified School District of Los Angeles, Alberto Carvalho, announced that the District would display its staff and the School Police to form protection perimeters around 100 schools in areas led by the application of immigration. (During Trump’s first presidency, said the district Ice was not allowed on campus – And he adopted a resolution Declare a sanctuary district after the November elections).

The first day assistance was 2% higher than last year, Carvalho said at a press conference, citing this as a testimony of the safeguards that the district and volunteer groups have established to protect students.

Union members have requested a campus block policy in the event that ICE agents appear in schools. Previously, “the basic understanding was that unless [ICE] He had an arrest warrant for school and for someone at school, they cannot come to the campus, “said Skye Tooley, a primary school teacher at East Hollywood and a member of UTLA, noting that two primary district schools had rejected the native security agents who tried to perform” well -being controls “in five students in April.

Now, “if ICE tries to come to campus even without a court order, most schools now have a closing procedure,” said Tooley. “If there were a shooter of some kind on the campus, so it is basically as we are treating the ice.”

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Lausd refused to answer a list of questions, including if the district requires blockages if immigration authorities appear in a school. A district spokesman who refused to be appointed In a statement: “Work in close collaboration with the city’s leaders and municipal partners, we have strengthened security measures in and around our schools. This includes better communication with several entities, visible presence in impacted communities and rapid response protocols should occur the compliance activity.”

“Our message is clear: each child belongs to school, and we will do everything in our power to keep our campus safe, supportive and welcoming for all,” the spokesman continued.

The members of the Union of Teachers, UTLA, have applauded the efforts of the district to create “safe areas” to protect students, reflecting the UTLA patrol system itself. But many also say that the district could do more to support their students, particularly those who have nearby immigration audiences or have been deported, and to better train all types of school employees, including substitutes.

Maria Miranda, former teacher and vice president of Primary of UTLA, said that some union members are concerned that, because the registration in some classes is low as some students fear Immigration raids outside schools, this could result from the fact that teachers be resumed or cut completely. The district made its official registration count to determine any class change in what is known as “day of the standard” on September 12.

“We don’t need that kind of instability at this time,” Miranda said. “We hope there is some kind of agreement to limit [teacher] Displacements because it cannot be a business as always this year. ”

There has been a 7% increase in registration for online courses during the first week of classes this year, but most students have returned to the campus, potentially because they were tired of being locked at home all summer during the raids.

“A mother of one of my students told me how boring the family was because they could not leave the house,” Cardona said. “Usually, they go to the library, the community pool and the visits to the beach as a family. But their neighborhood was reached by ice rates. They could look out the window and see that these things happen.”

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The first day of school, the teachers joined other community organizers who had spent summer patrolling in front of the deposits and parks of households where federal agents attacked daytime workers and street vendors. A few days before school began, the border patrol agents jumped from a penske truck in Westlake Home Depot parking and arrested more than a dozen immigrants, an action lawyer described as a rape of a federal court order.

This household deposit is regularly patrolled by volunteers of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, who fights for safe and affordable homes in Los Angeles. Zoie Matthew, an organizer of the Koreatown Lato store, sees the rights of immigration and tenant raids as inextricably linked themes. The workers who are being taken out of the streets are forced to choose between “endangering work or getting in danger of eviction when staying at home,” said Matthew, asking for an eviction moratorium in response to immigration raids.

Matthew Patrol the area near most Home Depot mornings, starting at 6:30 am, has reused the binoculars they obtained to observe birds to detect vehicles of suspicious appearance. As of August 14, Matthew and the other LATU volunteers expanded their patrol routes to include the perimeters of the three neighboring schools in Home Depot.

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Still stirred by the Raid of Penske Truck earlier that month, they discussed how horrible it would be for something similar, while hundreds of children were heading to school. They feared that immigration agents armen the drops of falling and collection of school to gather parents in the predominantly Latin neighborhood. Some children, the volunteers said, did not even have parents to accompany them to school, either because they had been arrested or did not feel safe when they left the house.

During his patrol, Matthew and another volunteer of the tenant union crossed with members of the Union of Teachers and Volunteers of the Central American Resources Center and discussed ways of collaborating. At one point, they appeared at a cross guard and asked where it was the best place for people to look. The Cruce’s guard, who stopped to hug a young student he acknowledged, said there seemed to be fewer people walking. She suspected that some people were afraid to leave. Matthew gave him a phone number to use to inform any suspicious ice activity. They thanked for their work. It depends on people to take care of each other now, they agreed.

Two weeks later, the border patrol agents raided the Westlake Home Depot for the fourth time, This time using tear gas and pepper ballsLocal Outlet La Taco reported. The agents entered a street less than a block from a high school just before 7 am, Matthew said, and noted that there was a school bus at the bottom of the video that filmed the incident.

Until now, Miranda does not know the immigration authorities who get access to any of the Lausd campus, but the suspicious agents have been seen driving near schools. Even so, teachers and community defenders want to be prepared.

The “Big Beutiful Bill” Law of Trump, which grants the Department of National Security billions of dollars in additional funds, comes into force next month. “We anticipate that in October things will get worse,” said Avalos. “So we are really focused on trying to train as many educators and communities as possible so that everyone can take this work and apply it to their neighborhood.”

Cardona believes that organization efforts in Los Angeles can be a model for other cities where federal authorities can change their attention below. Earlier this month, the Trump administration began an immigration application operation in Massachusetts After pointing out that the National Guard would deploy for Chicago.

“The fact that you have not found ice still does not mean that you will not. We are in it in the long term,” he said. “The more we can organize in advance, once all the structures are in their place, when they face you a situation, I can comfortably teach knowing that the door is blocked.”