The Trump administration’s racist, anti-immigrant offensive is targeting sanctuary cities and the few remaining spaces where undocumented immigrants can feel safe — even where they go to learn and receive healthcare. As a teacher in New York City, this is a direct attack on my students, their families, and my coworkers.
A new directive from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has authorized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to raid schools, hospitals, and religious institutions like churches and mosques — locations previously designated as “sensitive areas” under a 2011 policy.
This change eliminates protections that had barred ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers from making arrests in certain spaces, including funerals, weddings, and public demonstrations. A DHS spokesperson stated: “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”
Undocumented and mixed-status families have been made to fear sending their children to school or picking them up. As one Guatemalan mother of two from Los Angeles shared in an interview with the Washington Post, “I’m scared that when I go to pick up my children, they’ll be there taking parents from the schools.”
Moreover, the threat of ICE in hospitals is sowing the seeds for a potential public health crisis, where crucial undocumented hospital workers no longer feel safe at their jobs, and undocumented individuals feel too afraid to seek healthcare.
The administration has also intensified its assault on sanctuary cities. Since Trump took office, federal law enforcement and ICE agents have arrested over 500 undocumented immigrants in these cities, including 373 detained during raids across the country. In Newark, NJ, ICE already made a raid without a warrant, which reportedly led to the detention of both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens.
But let’s be clear: ICE raids and deportations didn’t start on Monday — attacks against immigrants are a bipartisan project, and Democrats paved the way for Trump’s attacks. Biden’s administration deported more undocumented immigrants than the Trump administration’s first term. And Democrats (12 in the Senate and 48 in the House) just helped pass the reactionary Laken Riley Act — a measure that makes it easier for federal immigration officials to detain and deport those without legal status who are charged with crimes as small as minor theft.
No capitalist politicians on either side of the aisle are coming to save us. While we may hear oppositional rhetoric, their fight is constrained within the legalistic and the “possible” — which is moving further and further to the right. It is not in the interest of capitalists to end the exploitation of immigrant workers, open the borders, and stop the imperialist plunder that has forced so many to flee their countries. The Democrats — and the leaders of unions and NGOs that support them — won’t put up a real winning fight for that any sooner than the Republicans will.
As a teacher and rank-and-file union member, that fight is going to be in the hands of us: my coworkers, my fellow union members, and the broader working class.
How Do We Defend Our Schools?
Since I’m a high school teacher, I want to explain what this might look like at my workplace or at other schools around the city. (I’d love to hear what others who work in hospitals, doctors offices, or other sites imagine their defense might look like and encourage other workers to write about this, too. If you are moved by this article and want to write about your own workplace, reach out to us.)
First of all, we need to see the militarization of ICE as a direct assault on our students and our workplaces. The pandemic made it clearer than ever: our students’ learning conditions are our working conditions, and our students have the right to learn without fear. We need to make sure our students know that they have adults they can trust at school who care about their and their families’ safety.
While right-wing narratives about immigrants abound, appealing to nationalism, racism, chauvinism, and fear, we need to have genuine conversations about these attacks and cut through the noise: these attacks serve to terrorize and divide our communities, not keep us safe. They’re part of a broader strategy both within the U.S. and at the border to criminalize and scapegoat immigrants for the economic hardships that capitalist crisis has created. While the Right says they are “putting American workers first,” the true goal of these attacks is to pit sectors of the working class against each other and deepen the exploitation of us all.
Resisting these attacks won’t be easy; it will take trust. As educators, this is what our work is already built on. We trust each other to support our students every day — from listening to their struggles at home, to creating classrooms that are safe, to helping them critically think about the world they’re inheriting. Our resistance will take trust that we’ve already built through years of working alongside each other, but it will also take new, deeper levels of trust that can only be built through struggle. That’s why our fight has to be based in our workplaces with our coworkers — the people we spent the most time with in our lives, who work together day in and day out to make society run.
We need to create networks of communication within our schools and communities, organizing meetings with students and families around what’s going on. We need to make a plan to defend our schools if necessary, developing plans to resist immigration authorities and demanding that our administration refuse to comply with ICE. This won’t happen on its own, nor can we rely on our administrations to do this for us — we need to create bottom-up, self-organized bodies of our own to organize this defense. And if arrests and detentions occur, we need to make a plan to follow up and mobilize to demand their release.
But it can’t stop at our own schools. We have to coordinate within our neighborhoods, discussing what to do if other schools, hospitals, or religious sites are attacked, linking our struggles with other workers and community members outside our direct workplaces. This could look like neighborhood or community assemblies holding democratic discussions and voting on next steps.
And through those assemblies, we need to make demands on our union leaderships to mobilize our ranks. As a member of a UFT in New York City, our unions should be leading the struggle of the masses against these attacks — not watching and waiting to see what happens. While know-your-rights workshops and webinars are important and our unions should continue to offer them, these are the bare minimum. The whole point of these raids is to violate our rights and strengthen the presence and power of the state — cops, ICE agents, and the military — in our daily lives. If our mayors start to strip away sanctuary city protections and our administrations comply with new reactionary guidance, we can’t just adapt to our ever-eroding “rights” within the confines of legality; we need to fight for more.
That’s why our unions have to call for mass mobilizations against these assaults. The UFT should organize massive days of action in coordination with other unions like NYSNA, PSC-CUNY, and DC37. And we have to make a plan to break the Taylor Law — which prohibits public sector workers in New York State from going on strike — and organize ourselves to withhold our labor to defend our students, patients, and neighbors who are under attack. This has to be connected to a larger struggle against racism and for full rights to healthcare, education, and housing for all workers and oppressed people around the country and the world. But our union leaders — steeped in years of business unionism and labor peace with the bosses — are not going to do that on their own. We’re going to need to organize this fight from below.
This fight is one for the entire working class. While the imperialist United States has long criminalized immigrants under both capitalist parties, Trump’s attacks are moving at an alarming speed so we have no time to waste. The time to begin talking to and organizing our coworkers, neighbors, and communities is right now.