Opinion: Trump's win terrifies my Latino students. I'm struggling to reassure them.
President-elect Trump just confirmed my students' nightmares by naming pro-deportation Tom Homan and anti-immigration Stephen Miller to his incoming administration.
During my third month as a student teacher in Los Angeles, four police officers were acquitted for the video taped beating of Rodney King, and the resulting rage set the city on fire. Many of my students lived within a few blocks of the conflagration, and I found myself unsteadily trying to help them understand what had happened and why. I wasn't sure I had anything worthwhile to say to them, but I tried. I have been trying ever since ‒ to help the kids I teach make sense out of a world that feels unsafe and unwelcoming.
Whenever blood spills on or near our campus, I try to convince them that their own demise is not inevitable. On the morning of 9/11, I offered reasons to doubt that our school would be the next terrorist target. In the spring of 2020, I tried to help kids have faith in the future as we were saying goodbye for a year of COVID-19 pandemic madness. These “teachable moments” are outside the curriculum and often constitute the most important lessons, though I’ve never felt entirely competent at them.
That was especially true last Wednesday.
Trump promised to deport my students' loved ones
Students were unusually quiet in class. Their glum faces stared up at me. One of them asked what I thought about the election. I tried one of those generic educator responses: "I think the American voters have spoken."
Some kids expressed dismay at the outcome. They looked scared. I had a hunch their reasons might be personal. I also didn’t want to assume everyone felt the same way. I told them that they could write how they felt about the election for the first part of the class.
I read some of them and confirmed my suspicions. The mass deportations Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump promised and which many of his followers celebrated were a pledge to take away the parents and grandparents and other family of many of my students.
What was I supposed to tell those kids?
I could imagine what Stephen Miller or other Trump influencers might suggest: Your parents shouldn't have come here. America is for Americans.
I could imagine some embittered supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris telling these Hispanic kids: Why did some of your fathers and uncles vote for Trump?
On Monday, Trump appointed Miller, one of his immigration advisers, as deputy chief of staff for policy in the incoming White House. He has already named Tom Homan, the former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as a “border czar” to oversee deportation policy. So it appears the president-elect intends to start making good on his promise right away.
I am the grandson of immigrants
I have always tried to resist imposing my political views on students. They are not entirely a secret, but I try to show a balanced perspective. When students express their opinions about things ‒ political or otherwise ‒ I challenge them. That is my role. But the fear on the faces of my students moved me. Their dismay was a plea for reassurance.
I do not know what will happen to their parents. Or to them. I am trying to help prepare them for a future that is haunted by peril.
What I could say was that they aren’t the first teenagers facing an uncertain future. My father was in high school during the Great Depression with the winds of war blowing. I was in high school during the Vietnam War, which ended just before I might have been drafted. Teenagers in Gaza and Ukraine, those who haven’t already been killed, are living with unimaginable horror.
None of this lifted the spirits of the students in my class. Why would it? Perhaps lifted spirits were not what was called for. I imagine that in many other high schools, students are celebrating the results of this election.
Along with my lame message of perspective was my lame attempt at inspiration: It is the challenges we face that make us who we are, and all of you have the strength and courage and talent to do great things.
I should have been better prepared for this moment. It is an honor to have kids who’ve already been through so much lay their fear and pain before me in the hope that I can help them.
I think some of them gave up on me. One young man asked if I could explain the Electoral College. I did my best, showing the election map and explaining the winner-take-all jigsaw puzzle of power and a little of its elitist roots, and I reiterated the fact that the popular vote seemed also to be going to Trump, and how at least that was consistent with democracy.
Immediately I could see my revelation was a slap in those kids' collective faces. That was when it hit me – finally – what they needed to hear:
Whoever thinks you’re not American is wrong. You are welcome in my country and so are your parents. Our immigration system is broken and has been for a very long time.
I am the grandson of immigrants, and my grandfather broke the law to enter the United States. He came alone in 1915 from Russia and presented false documents that said he was an adult when he was barely 14. He earned his place here. He fought for this country and did all the other things immigrants do to better themselves and make the United States a great country.
Just like your parents. Just like you.
I hope I helped my students at least a little on the morning after the election. But as Trump's new appointments suggest, this probably won't be the last time I’ll be trying to reassure them.
Larry Strauss, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992, is the author of more than a dozen books, including “Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher” and the upcoming "A Lasting Impact in the Classroom and Beyond," a book for new and struggling teachers, due out next spring.