The New Yorker:

As thousands of ICE agents arrived, kids started staying home from school. A local principal, teachers, and parent volunteers have banded together to keep the families safe.

By Emily Witt

One recent afternoon, in a linoleum-floored room at an elementary school in Minneapolis, the mother of a first grader and third grader sorted through sacks of potatoes and oranges. These and other groceries would be distributed to families who’d been too afraid to send their children to school in the weeks since an influx of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement began operations in the city, in December. The day before, a group from a local fitness studio—“a bunch of, like, hot, ripped spinning instructors,” the mom called them—had arrived with eight carloads of donated food. The most vulnerable part of the process, she explained, is the home delivery: “You can just imagine that it’s super sensitive, because you’re getting people’s addresses.” She recalled the first time she did a drop-off. “I see a literal ICE agent walking around, and he just walks right past me. I’m just not on his radar,” she said. She is white, and had on a red University of Wisconsin T-shirt. “But, yeah, I go up to this apartment, and this mom was on the verge of tears, who’s been at home with her kids in a stuffy apartment for, like, a month, you know?”

A couple of weeks before winter break, a teacher noticed that a student with immigrant parents had stopped showing up. “That was the first sign that something bigger was happening,” the teacher recalled. The school, which has around five hundred students, does not ask parents to report their immigration status, but more than half the kids are classified as English-language learners. “We have students who are from many different Latin American countries, and then Somali students, African American students, and a small group of white students,” the principal, who asked that the school remain anonymous, said. “We are serving students who are mostly experiencing poverty, so we spend a lot of time with missing learning and making sure that we’re filling that in. Back before this all started, we could really focus on instruction. That’s what we’d like to focus on again.”

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