By: Bianca Pando, Entertainment editor
On January 20th of 2025, the 47th president of the United States, President Trump, was inaugurated into office. Seven days later, Trump launched nationwide immigration raids organized by the Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE), creating huge amounts of raids, which now has been granted access to schools.
Reported in January 21, 2025, Trump’s new policy allows ICE authority to go into vulnerable places such as schools, churches, playgrounds, and daycare centers, which used to be off limits prior to this. Why does this have a huge impact? It takes away places that are supposed to be helpful to communities, bringing fear into these places of comfort. Now, people are worried to seek any medical help at hospitals, and the families of children have fear sending their kids off to schools or daycares.
With these places now being open to ICE, many people have stopped going out in fear: churches now have decreased attendance, and it made a huge change in how many students are coming to school.
As Trump’s immigration plan continues on, there has been an increase in the amount of spotting of ICE officers in the Bay Area. So far, they have been seen in San Francisco, San Jose, San Mateo and Burlingame. ICE will often be wearing plain-clothes, similar to the local police of the area, with a POLICE vest in the front. They can intentionally lie or mislead people into thinking they are something else, not revealing their real intentions while identifying someone, commonly referred to as a ruse.
These plans have been in the works since the year 2011, when the Trump administration announced they would give permission for federal immigration officers to make arrests at schools, churches and hospitals. It was allowed, but the policy ended in 2011, starting again in the year 2025.
Immigrants make up 31% of San Francisco’s population, with around 1,500 students from immigrant families. 35.8% of San Mateo are migrants, and within our country, 56.1% of students have parents that are foreign-born. With that being said, that would be a lot of our community that would be affected. And that’s only in two counties. California as a whole has 10.6 million immigrants that make up its population. Around 1.8 million people live undocumented in California, with the range of 86,800 to 133,000 undocumented students in either a public high school or college.
However, it’s important to understand that our schools have done their own preparations for how they will handle any ICE raid that may or may not happen in the future.
Mills High School’s Principal, Pamela Dusynski, provided her own input on the topic: “Our superintendent has put some protocols into place and trained all the administers with in the direct. They have trained our front office staff and security teams around those protocols and our teachers as well.”
She held a meeting with a group of Mills parents a few weeks prior discussing their protocols that are now in place. But, there has been a misconception on how these ICE raids will go, because there are many legal things that have to happen before.
“Any law enforcement or immigration officer cannot just come into the school and go into a classroom. They have to see me in the main office and I have to see what their request is,” stated Dusynski. “In all situations, I will be referring them to the district office and they will look at all the paperwork they have; if they are looking for a student or family’s information, that must be a legitimate signed judicial warrant or capias.” Schools do not collect those types of informations on any students, as there policies in place that protect students, regardless of legal status. “Our students have a right to their education and a safe environment no matter their immigration status,” emphasized Duszynski.
As some of Mills’ students go to Middle College in the San Mateo Community College, it’s crucial to know that they also have a plan that is very similar to the San Mateo High School District. “If they [ICE officers] were to come into the hallways, the first thing we would do is to call campus security, and they’ll escort them to the president’s [of the College] office,” provided Middle College English teacher, Allison Block.
“I had some students come and tell me that they started to see less people coming to their church,” added Block. “They’re places that are supposed to bring comfort and the idea they are being taken away from that is really sad.” A lot of families are now in fear of whether they should continue to send their kids to school, as now they are avoiding certain areas.
“I’m hoping that our students’ families will trust us and continue to see this as a safe place,” comforted Dusynski.
Although seeing how these new policies are being carried out, we must remain calm and know our own rights. We must trust our districts, as they are doing everything they can to protect us, and continue to be aware of what is happening to our own communities. We must be understanding and supporting towards each other, as many are going through moments of fear or stress because of this. But, there are things we can do to make a change. Right now, a lot of social media has been putting out warnings of places where ICE has been spotted, and there are protests and strikes happening as well. Just because we are young, doesn’t mean we cannot make a change. We, students, all have a right to an education and a safe environment, regardless of our immigration status.
