Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

“We recognize as a board and as a district that the lives of many of our students and their families will be impacted because of immigration policy,” said Des Moines Public Schools board member Maria Alonzo. “We felt making this statement was important.”

That quote comes from Samantha Hernandez’s story for the Des Moines Register on the Des Moines Public Schools’ new policy statement about the immigration concerns of students and their families. It appears to be an effort to resist President-elect Donald Trump’s plan (endorsed by Governor Kim Reynolds) to conduct mass deportations of undocumented migrant children and their families.

I commend the school district for releasing this statement, which recognizes the precariousness of students whose parents (or themselves) are here from another country and possibly lack documentation.

How the Des Moines Public Schools responded

During its regular board meeting on December 10, school board members Anna Campos and Maria Alonzo read a statement in English and Spanish (enclosed in full at the end of this post) declaring that the board and district officials would do everything possible to support area families. Hernandez covered the meeting for the Register. The official video, along with a transcript, is on YouTube.)

Campos also said: “The intense political rhetoric from all sides during and since the election is creating anxiety and uncertainty within our school community, particularly for students and families with mixed immigration status. We want to acknowledge our students and families that may have worries or concerns about what the future holds.”

Hernandez reported,

In February 2017, the school board approved two resolutions that gave guidance on how employees should handle requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE and encouraged state lawmakers to support the Bar Removal of Individuals who Dream and Grow our Economy Act or BRIDGE Act.

Campos said during this month’s meeting, “the board is partnering with the superintendent to ensure information, including partnerships with organizations that offer support services and access to information and legal resources will be shared with our students and families.” Once again, people should understand this policy statement has nothing to do with “border security” or harboring criminals.

When I shared the Register’s story on Facebook, many people posted supportive comments, but one woman considered the district’s statement “not enough” and “weak.”

How other school districts are approaching the issue

The Chicago Public Schools became “one of the first large school districts to make a public display of resistance and support for students after the 2024 election,” according to Chalkbeat Chicago. 

The Chicago Board of Education passed a resolution Thursday [November 14] reaffirming its commitment to protect students of various immigration statuses, gender identities, and sexual orientation following last week’s presidential election.

Chicago Public Schools is one of hundreds of school districts that have declared themselves sanctuaries or safe havens for immigrant students since Trump was elected the first time. But Chicago has been a sanctuary city since 1985, well before Trump even entered politics. Then-Mayor Harold Washington signed an executive order declaring protections for immigrants that became law in 2006.

The Marshalltown, Iowa Community School District also posted a letter advising the staff and parents of its stance on protecting all students regardless of immigration status.

The New York City Public Schools shared a resource in an ACLU webinar that a Des Moines Public Schools teacher leader attended. She shared with me the language about federal privacy laws and the “defined process” for when non-local law enforcement (including ICE) visits a school.

The ACLU of Iowa is a great resource for school districts unsure of how to proceed. The NEA (National Education Association) has provided general guidance for federal law and prohibitions on accessing student files.

Such policies typically speak to 1) Privacy of Immigration Status: The district will not collect or maintain any information about students’ immigration status. 2) Handling External Requests: Any request from federal immigration officials to access schools, properties, or information about our students or to communicate with a student under our care-will be immediately referred to the Superintendent’s Office. 3) Protecting Students’ Rights: The Superintendent’s Office will act in full compliance with the law while prioritizing the protection of students’ constitutional and legal rights. We will not share information or grant access unless legally required to do so.

It would be monumental if every Iowa school district took similar supportive steps.

“Our country is being poisoned,” said Donald Trump

In addition to school policies, media coverage could constrain Trump’s efforts, such as reporting on his first administration’s policy of separating children from their parents during unauthorized crossings.

But conservative media outlets are laying the groundwork for Trump’s mass deportation plans. The Fox News station in El Paso, for example, ran a story this month stating that America’s public schools have endured a massive financial hit “by accommodating illegal migrant children” — and removing these students would be an “attempt to alleviate the problem.” Its only source was from an interview that a right-wing pundit had given to the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.

We know a portion of parents in every community support Trump and his policies. People have become outspoken in reflecting the anger (some say “hate”) his rhetoric inspires. Many of the outspoken proponents of deporting immigrants do not understand the implications of their outrage.

Trump attended the 2024 Moms for Liberty’s third annual conference last September. Instead of speaking about his education policy, in his more than one-hour interview with Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, he spoke at length about immigration, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.

As the Tennessee Lookout reported, Trump said of migrants and their children in public schools, “Our country is being poisoned, and your schools and your children are suffering greatly because they’re going into the classrooms … they don’t even speak English.”

Trump didn’t share details on how he would enact education policy changes at the federal level, but said he was against public schools allowing transgender students to identify with their gender identity in the classroom.

Moms for Liberty has chapters through the nation, including some in Iowa. Reynolds spoke at a “town hall meeting” the group held in Des Moines in 2023 and praised their mission.

What can we expect to happen?

In an interview with NBC News, Trump floated the possibility of removing immigrants’ American-born relatives during deportations because he doesn’t “want to be breaking up families.” 

“The only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” said Trump, who was widely condemned for separating families at the southern border during his first term. 

Earlier this month, a father in Houston, Texas began his fight to reunite his family after ICE deported his wife and four children to Mexico. Two of the children, infant twins, are U.S. citizens born in September. According to Democracy Now!,

The father, Federico Arellano Jr., is also a U.S. citizen. The mother, Christina Salazar, and the couple’s four children were apparently lured by ICE to a meeting point, where they were arrested and forced onto a plane to Reynosa, Mexico. They were targeted for deportation after Salazar and their older children missed an immigration hearing because she was recovering from her emergency cesarean section, of which the family had notified the court.

Trump has repeatedly promised to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.

• End the constitutional right to citizenship for anyone born in the U.S.
• Overturn the 1982 Supreme Court case affirming undocumented children’s right to a free public education. 
• Give immigration agents permission to carry out raids in classrooms. 

What the ACLU says

The American Civil Liberties Union has highlighted the danger:

Donald Trump promises to decimate American communities by targeting immigrants who are already contributing members of society and blocking new immigrants from coming lawfully to the United States. Trump has made clear that he will double down on what he did during his presidency — without regard for the law, decency, or common sense.

Indeed, Trump has promised to be far more aggressive in a second term, emboldened by close advisers, like Stephen Miller, to launch a “shock-and-awe blitz” of executive orders and actions that will target millions of immigrants and their families and threaten the freedom and security of everyone in the United States. “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told The New York Times in November 2023. Former senior Trump officials helped write Project 2025, a detailed plan to overhaul federal agencies that includes more than 175 immigration actions.

“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller said in that 2023 interview with The New York Times. The plans include restricting legal and illegal immigration in a number of ways—rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the United States and detaining them in camps before they’re expelled from the country.

Trump has frequently bragged about his plans for the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. Tom Homan, the acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency during Trump’s first term, will be his “border czar.” Homan was an ardent supporter of family separation policy.

The ACLU’s warning explained that arrest is only the first stage of the process.

Actually processing and deciding all of the resulting cases is an administrative and judicial process that cannot practically be farmed out to other agencies. Carrying it out on Trump’s scale will require bloating the removal system beyond all reason.

The Trump team is therefore looking for any excuse, no matter how improbable, to avoid the legally required procedures for determining whether an individual can be removed. For example, Trump’s advisors have suggested that they might implement an extremist theory, invoking the Alien Enemies Act — an obscure law that has rarely been used since it was enacted in 1789 — to override these procedures. Trump will also likely seek to massively expand the use of a fast-track deportation procedure called “expedited removal,” even though applying that procedure in the interior would violate constitutional guarantees. And he could encourage or pressure states to create their own independent arrest and deportation systems separate from the federal one, as Texas has attempted with SB 4.

In anticipation of the massive scale of arrest and detention these plans will require, Trump’s advisors are already trying to get Americans used to the idea that the landscape will be dotted with “vast” immigrant detention camps. Trump could again attempt to divert funds from other purposes in order to build these camps, just as he did when building his wall.

Oklahoma jumps in with both feet

The Huffington Post reported this month Oklahoma State Department of Education proposed a new administrative rule “that would require school districts to collect data on undocumented students in the state.”

In 1982, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Plyler v. Doe that schools must enroll all children, regardless of their immigration status, making it illegal to ask individual students about their immigration status.

Oklahoma’s proposed rule change would require school districts to report the number of students who are unable to prove their citizenship. This likely doesn’t run afoul of any state or federal laws — the text of the rule says that the data would be anonymous and not used to keep children from going to school — and could discourage parents from sending their children to school.

There are about 6,000 undocumented students enrolled in Oklahoma’s public schools, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Karen Svoboda, the executive director of Defense of Democracy, a nonprofit that advocates for equality in public schools, criticzed the proposal in comments to The Oklahoman newspaper. She asked, “What purpose does such a requirement serve aside from creating yet another tool to ‘other’ children from different cultures, and to create a chilling effect on enrollment by minority children and their families?”

Patricia Caro covered the latest political ruse for El Pais:

Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters has requested $474 million from the federal government to cover the costs of educating undocumented immigrants in the state’s public schools. “One of the biggest problems facing Oklahoma — or schools across the country, frankly — is illegal immigrants coming across the border, tapping the resources of taxpayers and stretching everything thin,” he said on Nov. 20.

Chalkbeat reported in October,

Both Trump and Vance have characterized immigrant children as being burdens on schools who are overcrowding classrooms and taxing teachers with their language needs. Top aides to Trump tried for months during his first administration to give states the power to block undocumented children from attending public school, Bloomberg News reported, and an influential conservative think tank is seeking to revive that idea if Trump wins a second term.

Mississippi raids hurt children

Chalkbeat reported in October on the fallout from immigration raids conducted during the first Trump administration.

When immigration agents raided chicken processing plants in central Mississippi in 2019, they arrested nearly 700 undocumented workers — many of them parents of children enrolled in local schools.

Teens got frantic texts to leave class and find their younger siblings. Unfamiliar faces whose names weren’t on the pick-up list showed up to take children home. School staff scrambled to make sure no child went home to an empty house, while the owner of a local gym threw together a temporary shelter for kids with nowhere else to go.

In the Scott County School District, a quarter of the district’s Latino students, around 150 children, were absent from school the next day. When dozens of kids continued to miss school, staff packed onto school buses and went door to door with food, trying to reassure families that it was safe for their children to return. Academics were on hold for weeks, said Tony McGee, the district’s superintendent at the time.

“We went into kind of a Mom and Dad mode and just cared for kids,” McGee said. While some children bounced back quickly, others were shaken for months. “You could tell there was still some worry on kids’ hearts.” […]

Researchers from the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy found that the Mississippi raids were especially traumatic for the children whose schools were located within sight of a poultry plant. Many saw their parents handcuffed and shoved into white vans on their way home from school, prompting screams and uncontrollable crying.

Children “continued to suffer emotionally” for weeks and months, the research team wrote, and even kids who’d been reunited with their parents showed signs of post-traumatic stress and separation anxiety. Some kindergartners started wetting the bed again, and toddlers regressed in their speech. It was common for kids to come home from school, drop their backpacks, and spend the rest of the day sleeping. Older kids often took on more housework, child care, and paying jobs so they could contribute to their households.

How Trump’s plans would hurt the whole country

The New York-based Center for Migration Studies published a report in March on how Trump’s deportation plans would harm the country. Excerpts:

Using data from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS, the most recent year of data available), the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) estimates a total undocumented population of 10.9 million people. While the details of Trump’s plan are sketchy, the goals are clear: to conduct immigration “sweeps” throughout the country using any and all enforcement personnel, and to rid the United States of persons who are, in his own words, “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In pure policy terms, this plan would harm the interests of our nation in several tangible ways, including US economic and domestic and national security interests. In legal terms, it would violate due process and humanitarian norms, undermining the rule of law upon which the nation was founded. And in human terms, it would violate human rights, including the separation of families, diminishing the United States as a nation built upon moral values. […]

Instead of launching a plan to deport the undocumented, the United States should provide them a path to citizenship and allow the majority to remain and continue to contribute to the economy and culture of the United States. In addition, resources should be directed toward modernizing our legal immigration system and toward apprehending immigrants who are a threat to the United States. Finally, the United States should also work with sending countries, especially in this hemisphere, to address the root causes of flight, the only long-term solution to irregular migration. It is time to move away from costly, inhumane, and failed enforcement-only policies, and create a US immigration system which honors due process and creates a more orderly process for immigration to our country.

New York’s channel 1 news has reported, “Even if they don’t come to pass, education professor David Bloomfield said just the fear of deportation would impact the tens of thousands of migrant students in city schools.”

Iowa’s governor on board

Reynolds recently joined 25 other Republican governors who vowed to help the incoming-president carry out his plan to remove undocumented people. Chaos, community-wide trauma, and possible riots and violence are likely to ensue.

Last April, the governor signed Senate File 2340, a bill modeled on a Texas statute. It would allow Iowa law enforcement to arrest undocumented immigrants for “illegal reentry” into the state. The Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Justice and the ACLU of Iowa (representing several immigrants and an advocacy organization) both sued to block the law from going into effect, arguing that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. A federal judge agreed, and the state’s appeal is pending before the Eighth Circuit. The Texas law is before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reynolds has favored using the National Guard or other law enforcement to help round up and deport individuals lacking documentation. Of course, it is appropriate for local police to arrest criminals (in accordance with school rules)—but they should not be used to intimidate children and their immigrant families.

I enclose below the full statement from the Des Moines Public Schools, released in English and Spanish.

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Full statement from the Des Moines Public Schools

Des Moines Public Schools educates students who come to our state and community from around the world. In fact, this year one out of four DMPS students are English Language Learners. At their most recent meeting on December 10, the School Board shared the following statement acknowledging potential changes in immigration laws and policies are a cause of concern for some students and their families, and that the school district will do what it can to be supportive and foster an inclusive learning environment for all students.

Living in a democracy means embracing the peaceful transfer of power through elections, a cornerstone of our nation’s history. However, the intense political rhetoric from all sides during and since the election is create anxiety and uncertainty within our school community, particularly for students and families with mixed immigration status. We want to acknowledge our students and families that may have worries or concerns about what the future holds.

In 2017, in light of multiple federal executive actions negatively impacting immigrant families, Des Moines Public Schools passed a resolution to support all students and families, regardless of immigration status.  As a district, we remain committed to ensuring equal protection and safeguarding our students from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, citizenship, immigration status, or national origin.

We understand that fear and uncertainty, especially concerning the potential deportation of family members, can significantly impact our students’ well-being, their attendance, and their ability to learn. To address these challenges, the Board is partnering with the Superintendent to ensure information, including partnerships with organizations that offer support services and access to information and legal resources, will be shared with our students and families.

Our dedication to fostering a safe and inclusive environment remains unwavering. DMPS is committed to respecting and supporting our youth and their families, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to thrive. Together, we uphold the values of inclusivity, respect, and understanding that are essential to our vibrant, diverse, amazing school community.

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Vivir en una democracia significa aceptar la transferencia pacífica del poder a través de elecciones, una piedra angular de la historia de nuestra nación. Sin embargo, la intensa retórica política de todos los bandos durante desde la elección, ha estado creando ansiedad e incertidumbre dentro de nuestra comunidad escolar, en particular para los estudiantes y las familias con estatus migratorio mixto. Reconocemos que nuestros estudiantes y familias puedan tener preocupaciones sobre lo que el futuro pueda traer.

En 2017, a la luz de múltiples acciones ejecutivas federales que afectaron negativamente a las familias inmigrantes, las Escuelas Públicas de Des Moines aprobaron una resolución para apoyar a todos los estudiantes y familias, independientemente de su estatus migratorio. Como distrito, seguimos comprometidos a garantizar la igualdad de protección y salvaguardar a nuestros estudiantes de la discriminación basada en raza, etnia, ciudadanía, estatus migratorio u origen nacional.

Entendemos que el miedo y la incertidumbre, especialmente en relación con la posible deportación de miembros de la familia, pueden afectar significativamente el bienestar de nuestros estudiantes, su asistencia y su capacidad de aprender. Para abordar estos desafíos, la Junta está colaborando con el Superintendente para asegurar comunicación, incluyendo asociaciones con organizaciones que brindan servicios de apoyo y acceso a información para asegurar que esto sea compartido con nuestros estudiantes y familias.

Nuestra dedicación a fomentar un entorno seguro e inclusivo sigue siendo inquebrantable. DMPS se compromete a respetar y apoyar a nuestros jóvenes y sus familias, garantizando que cada estudiante tenga la oportunidad de prosperar. Juntos, defendemos los valores de inclusión, respeto y comprensión que son esenciales para nuestra comunidad escolar vibrante, diversa y maravillosa.