By Alvin Buyinza
Overview: In an exclusive interview, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, says Americans need to be in solidarity with one another to protect students from the wave of immigration and custom enforcement raids.
(WIB) – In January, not long after President Donald Trump signed a flurry of day-one executive orders that included a nationwide sweep of undocumented migrants, Randi Weingarten, the influential president of the American Federation of Teachers, sent a letter to the White House.
On the campaign trail, Trump had promised he’d only go after the “worst of the worst” — gang members, drug dealers, hardened criminals. But Weingarten noticed that Benjamine Huffman, Trump’s former acting Homeland Security secretary, had rolled back a long-standing rule that kept immigration agents from conducting raids in sensitive areas — including K-12 schools.
The change “is cruel and counterproductive,” Weingarten wrote in her open letter to the president. “It will create havoc in places where families put their trust. Children, she wrote, “will be traumatized by the spectacle. This will indelibly scar native-born American families as well as immigrant families; the impact and harms will be absorbed by entire communities.”
RELATED: ICE Raids Are Traumatizing Students in Chicago
But that request fell on deaf ears. A year after Trump took office, Weingarten says she’s fielding reports from AFT members that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are harassing, handcuffing, and detaining students on school grounds. That includes Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old preschooler who was detained with his father while still wearing his backpack and floppy bunny-ears hat.
Now, Weingarten is speaking up about the damage Trump’s raids in Minneapolis, and elsewhere, are doing to schoolchildren as well as teachers and school administrators. Educators, she says, are doing something they never signed up for: putting themselves between their students and immigration agents wearing masks, clad in combat gear and carrying weapons better suited for battle.
“So many of them are involved and engaged in terms of mutual aid,” helping the immigrant parents of their students cope with the ongoing crackdown. “And they pretty much understand that this is their assignment right now. Fear, anger — a commitment to helping our kids and our communities.”
RELATED: What Do ICE Raids Teach Kids?
In Minnesota, the sweeps and arrests have reached an “inflection point,” Weingarten says. She points to the recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens who were observing ICE activities when aggressive agents killed them during confrontations.
While Liam, the preschooler, was released, the heavy-handed situation in Minneapolis “has created such a mass anxiety,” Weingarten says. “It creates anxiety for, obviously, our immigrant neighbors, but also our non-immigrant neighbors. If your kid’s best friend is somebody whose parent has just been deported, what do you think is gonna happen to your kid?”
Word In Black: How Are Schools Coping With the Recent Surge of ICE raids across the U.S.?
Randi Weingarten: This is a federal government at war with a community. Schools have been very proactive.
There have been some superintendents who have been really engaged, and there are some who are not. There are some states that are engaged in some of them or not. There are some states where their police forces are helping us and some that are not. So it’s come down to the intuition of teachers.
The Importance of Community
RW: In Chicago, we were with the mayor when he proclaimed that schools have to be ICE-free zones. We believe that schools should be ICE-free zones, but we also believe in protecting our communities and our neighbors.
WIB: What should students and teachers do in this moment?
RW: I think being in community — in these community trees, these community watches, these mutual aids, all of this stuff that you see in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Chicago, now New York, L.A. — this is really, really important.
WIB: It sounds like something a labor union would do.
RW: We would do this when there’s a strike. You’d have a phone tree, you’d have an informal network, as well as the formal school network. That informal network has to protect each other. It’s whistles, it’s video, but it’s also how we protect our neighbors who are at risk.
That’s why it’s not just these days saying no to ICE in a school, and trying to resurrect that “sensitive-locations” philosophy, but it’s how we help do the transportation, how we help make sure that there’s food for people who are not leaving their homes.
WIB: Do You Believe That the Courts Can Protect Students’ Rights?
RW: In terms of the fight against an abusive government, we have to be in the courts and the court of public opinion. That means we have to be in the streets, and we have to be talking to and listening to, and discussing things with our neighbors who may not agree with us. We have to engage in this moral quest, because this is now calling into question what being an American is. So it’s not just the courts, but it’s the court of public opinion.