Nearly a thousand protesters gathered on Jan. 26 near the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas to protest President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans following the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrests of 84 individuals.
Despite the chill of the severely low temperatures, the demonstrators raised flags and held up various signs for several hours with messages for Trump, ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security in response to their decision to repeal their former protection against immigration enforcement in “sanctuary” locations like churches and schools.
One Dallas resident, who attended the rally on behalf of their undocumented parents and requested to be unnamed, said, “I am here for everyone who can’t be, including my parents, who mean the world to me. Here, together, it gives me strength.”
Although Tom Homan, the newly appointed border czar, claimed that ICE remains focused on finding criminals — saying that the department has only arrested “public safety threats and national security threats”— several school districts like Dallas ISD, Carrolton ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Arlington ISD, and Denton ISD have published statements on their webpages discussing potential ICE raids in their classrooms and reaffirming their support for immigrant children and parents as students begin missing classes in dismay, stating that they remain dedicated to providing equal education opportunities regardless of a student’s legal status.
“It’s insane to think that these kids are getting stripped of their legal right of education,” said Holly Latiolais, a high school coach and ESL teacher who attended and boosted participation in the Jan. 26 protest through her social media page @dallasprotesters. “It goes against everything that we are as a country … and so when we start hearing about these raids, it incites fear in a lot of these students, and we’ve actually had quite a few disappear from our rosters.”
The right of undocumented children to attend public schools in the United States was established in 1982 by the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe. The class action, filed by students of Mexican origin who were denied public school enrollment in Texas, established that federal schools and colleges could not discriminate against students based on their immigration status or require them to provide documentation of their status. According to the Migration Policy Institute, there are roughly 650,000 undocumented students currently enrolled in U.S. public schools.
“There are just so many other issues that we could be stressed about,” Latiolais said. “All these kids want to do is learn their ABCs or whatever they want to learn, and that’s just so sad because every kid deserves to just be a kid. And now they’re having to worry about if they’re going to lose their parent, brother, their sister, or whether they’re going to come home to anyone.”
Several school districts have already vowed to protect their students’ federal right to education in the event of an ICE raid, and Latiolais cites her training in handling school emergencies as sufficient experience to keep her students safe.
“We’ve already been trained to put ourselves in front of a gun, so what makes you think that an ICE agent is going to stop us?” said Latiolais. “We’ve always been trained to protect these babies, so when I heard about the ICE raids, I thought, ‘Come in’ because I guarantee you that you’re going to have to fight one of us first. We’re so close to being on the front line for them and I would do anything to protect them, and I feel like a lot of educators would.”
An upcoming rally against ICE crackdowns was scheduled at press time to take place at Dallas City Hall at 2 p.m. on Feb. 2.
