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BACK TO SCHOOL - As summer winds down, kids all over the United States are starting the school year. In addition to the standard back-to-school trepidation, children of color are facing the unimaginable terror of being snatched by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
In Southern California, which has been an epicenter of ICE activity since early summer, federal agents handcuffed a 15-year-old boy with disabilities at gunpoint on August 11, 2025. The boy, a student of San Fernando High School, was waiting in the car outside Arleta High School with his mom while his sister finished registration for the new school year.
It was apparently a case of mistaken identity, and the ICE agents ultimately released him. But LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told the press, “The trauma will linger. It will not cease.” Those children who witnessed the incident while attending their school orientation were also likely terrified and will remain psychologically scarred.
ICE officers are snatching children and their families without warrants, traumatizing them first and asking questions later. And, they aren’t going into private, whiter, and wealthier schools to check if foreign students might have overstayed tourist visas. They are targeting low-income, brown-skinned public school children and their families. As a mother of two brown-skinned boys who take a city bus to public school in Southern California, this inspires a visceral horror in me.
Parents are also being violently separated from their children. In San Diego, California, there have been numerous documented cases of federal agents snatching parents near schools. One man, grabbed by federal agents in Linda Vista Elementary in August, was waiting to pick up his son.
Agents picked up another San Diego man in Encinitas near his child’s elementary school. “Let him say goodbye to his family,” a bystander filming the incident is heard saying. The man was on his way to work when agents separated him from his family as his daughter wailed in distress.
Traditionally, schools and their surrounding areas have been off-limits to ICE agents and considered “protected areas” from immigration enforcement. Such areas have included churches, courthouses, and hospitals. “Schools should be completely off-limits in any kind of issue around immigration,” saidRandi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). “And, even in the first Trump administration, they were.”
But on the day he began his second term on January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump rescinded that rule. In an indication of how much worse things are today than they were during his first term, a DHS spokesperson said, “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.”
The Trump administration is labeling innocent children “criminals” based on their skin color and national origin. Moreover, trusting agents to use their “common sense” within this out-of-control fascistic landscape offers little comfort.
ICE agents began persecuting public school children as early as this Aprilwhen federal agents attempted to enter two LAUSD elementary schools in the first such incident of its kind. In their quest to snatch five first- through-sixth-grade children, the agents lied to school authorities, saying they were checking on the students’ well-being and had parental permission. The children remained safe only thanks to the school authorities’ diligent protection.
Weingarten explained that teachers are “in loco parentis.” In other words, “we serve in the stead of parents for the time that kids are in school. So, somebody knocks on that school door and says, ‘I want that kid,’ we have an obligation to say ‘no.’”
Trump’s unleashing of law enforcement in schools sets teachers on a collision course with armed federal agents—a disaster waiting to happen. It’s no wonder teachers are demanding their school districts do more in their official capacity to keep families safe. “As teachers, of course, we are worried about the well-being of our students and their families,” said Ron Gochez, a high school history teacher in South Central Los Angeles and a leading member of the community organization, Unión del Barrio, during an interview.
How we treat our children ought to be a measure of the health and well-being of our society. By such standards, we have become a very sick nation, as kids face ICE arrest and disappearance and separation from their parents—at the same time, the scourge of gun violence, school police, and the memory of COVID-19 shutdowns haunts K-12 campuses. In Southern California, there is the added trauma of wildfire destruction.
The fate awaiting young people after they are snatched by federal law enforcement is nightmarish. ICE agents snatched 18-year-old Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz in mid-August, just days before he started his senior year of high school. Guerrero-Cruz was walking his dog in Van Nuys when plainclothes federal agents disappeared him in what his family called a “kidnapping.”
He told his former teacher that he overheard the men who kidnapped him boasting of a $1,500 payment they expected to get for his capture. The teen is currently being held at the notorious Adelanto detention center in Southern California, sharing a cell with two dozen men.
It’s not just Southern California schools where ICE is unleashing its terror and mayhem. Since January 2025, immigration enforcement has detained and deported dozens of children in the New York City area, including one child as young as six. A 15-year-old and his father were secretly held in hotels before being sent to Ecuador.
And, a father in Beaverton, Oregon, was pulled over while transporting his child to day care. ICE agents smashed his car window and arrested him in spite of his status as the spouse of a U.S. citizen awaiting his green card, and they are now holding him in detention.
Southern California immigrant rights activists, who have experience with community self-defense, are offering a way forward for all those around the country who want to protect children from the government. Groups such as Gochez’s Unión del Barrio and LA Tenants Union are part of a Community Self-Defense Coalition patrolling schools to help parents and children feel safe and to alert the neighborhood of potential ICE activity. They provide helpful ways to identify ICE agents’ cars on social media.
Gochez said his organization has trained more than 1,500 educators over the summer, preparing them for possible ICE activity at schools. “We are patrolling around our schools before and after school to keep an eye out for our kids and will continue to do so until the kidnappers leave our communities,” he said.
In San Diego, members of Unión del Barrio are training teachers to do safety patrols during drop off and pick up outside schools. If ICE agents are sighted, activists want schools to go into lockdown mode in the same way they would in the case of an active shooter.
Gochez is determined. “We will do everything within our power, and we will use our school and union structures to defend our students,” he said.
(Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning journalist and host of Rising Up With Sonali, a weekly television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is the author of Talking About Abolition (2025) and Rising Up (2023), and a fellow with the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.)
