Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), says this lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) work in schools is designed to create a narrative that ICE is overzealous and targeting children.
"It's really a shame," she tells AFN. "ICE does not conduct operations at schools. It does not undertake raids to try to arrest lots of school children. If ICE has to go into a school, it's because there's someone in that school who is a danger to the children, the teachers, and the public, or a danger to themselves."
In this lawsuit filed by Denver Public Schools, the district argues that student attendance has "decreased noticeably" since January, when the president rescinded a Biden policy that put a kind of forcefield around schools, churches, hospitals, and other "sensitive locations."
Vaughan says the case is designed to limit how ICE.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asserts that immigration enforcement only happens at sensitive locations where there is an immediate danger to the public. In fact, there have been no raids at schools in Denver, or anywhere else, since the policy was pulled.
"The evidence shows that any drop is the result of fears among students and parents, not any actual enforcement actions by DHS at schools, and may relate to false reports of immigration enforcement at schools or enforcement actions that did not take place on school grounds or at bus stops," DHS points out.
On that note, Vaughan encourages anyone who supports this kind of litigation to research and report on how many times ICE has tried to do anything in a school.
"It doesn't happen routinely," she relays. "It would only happen as a last resort if someone was a danger to the people in the school."
The CIS director clarifies that ICE targets egregious immigration violators who have been arrested for crimes. Agents may arrest others who happen to be where such a target is, "but they certainly do not make a habit of going into schools," Vaughan reiterates.
She says this lawsuit's narrative is harmful because it causes immigrant communities to fear going about their daily lives.
"ICE does not patrol neighborhoods or the streets," Vaughan asserts. "They do their operations based on actionable intelligence or leads or referrals from other law enforcement agencies, and they are aware of the need to not have people in immigrant communities be afraid of them. What they're trying to do is make these communities safer by removing the people who are causing problems there."
Marking schools or churches as zones where ICE cannot enter puts targets on those spaces, meaning dangerous illegal immigrants are more likely to go into them.
The Trump administration hopes the judge will see this lawsuit for what it is and that, in DHS' words, "criminals will no longer be able to hide in America's schools and churches to avoid arrest."
