Washington, DC – This week, as children across the country start to go back to school, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation machine arrested parents at school bus stops in Danbury, Connecticut, as children rode home from their second day of school. Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves said nearly 50 detentions in three days have left families broken and “terrorized and living in fear.”
Just over a week earlier in Austin, Texas, ICE pulled over five-year-old Liam Tadeo and his father, Victor Martinez Nieto, on their way to a soccer game, days before Liam was supposed to start kindergarten. Liam and his father were deported to Mexico together this week, after ICE refused to release Liam to his mother in Austin.
Also this week, a New Jersey court filing revealed that earlier this year, four ICE vehicles blew past a stopped school bus with flashing lights, then descended on an apartment complex where elementary school children were waiting for another bus. The children scattered and ran.
The chaos and terrorizing of children is unfolding nationwide. Trump and Miller’s enforcement surge has driven Hispanic K-12 enrollment in Maryland down for the first time in years, with some Montgomery County schools losing up to 11 percent of Hispanic students. Meanwhile, Virginia officials describe families living in hiding. And, in Minnesota, a statewide survey found 68 percent of educators in the state reported students absent from class during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge earlier this year.
Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, issued the following statement:
“The Trump administration continues violating our basic values by not respecting our central tenet of protecting all children. Now ICE agents are terrorizing children and bringing fear into classrooms and school yards across the country. This is wrong, and it’s unamerican. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller have built a deportation machine that treats five-year-olds on their way to kindergarten as targets and school bus routes as hunting grounds. No bus stop, no soccer game, and no classroom is off-limits to this administration’s cruelty. Children who should be thinking about homework and recess are instead fearful that going to school could mean losing a parent. The damage shows up in empty desks, falling enrollment, and a generation of kids who now associate school with fear instead of safety. Congress and DHS must put an immediate end to enforcement operations near schools and other sensitive locations.”
