Trump vows 'largest deportation in history.' How teachers like me can fight it. | Opinion
Teachers anticipate facing difficult choices. Not just about cooperating with authorities and potential action against us if we don't, but also dealing with the aftermath of separated families.
Last month I took my daughter to see a revival of "Fiddler on the Roof," a show from my childhood that I had made part of her childhood with a video cassette of the film adaptation. It was a poignant experience for a sentimental old man, but the most poignant moment was at the very end of the show.
"Fiddler" has no grand finale. It ends with a silent caravan of dispossessed Jewish villagers turned into nomads. I imagine it was a powerful statement in the 1960s about antisemitism in particular and discrimination in general.
Seeing it close to Christmas 2024, though, is so much sadder. Several of the fleeing characters have plans to find their way to “America,” and we know how that plan turned out for so many refugees of my grandparents’ generation. It is my family history and that of millions of other privileged Americans ‒ one that refugees of today won’t be able to write for themselves.
Stephen Miller, whose ancestors fled anti-Jewish pogroms, now wants to deport refugees
There is no longer an America for the dispossessed. We have made it a crime for most refugees to want the American dream.
Now the incoming president and his adviser Stephen Miller ‒ whose ancestors fled anti-Jewish pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century from what is now Belarus ‒ want to be the dispossessors of millions of people already in this country trying to make it.
And I am left wondering where that leaves me and my colleagues, those of us whose students are the children of ‒ and in some cases themselves ‒ the people the Trump administration plans to make refugees of.
President-elect Donald Trump drew cheers Sunday in Phoenix when he told a crowd that on Inauguration Day, he'll launch a removal program for undocumented immigrants called "Operation Aurora."
“We will begin the largest deportation operation in American history,” he said.
The Los Angeles school district for which I teach has already declared itself a sanctuary for immigrants (as well as LGBTQ+ kids). They plan to train us in how to fend off any inquiries by federal agents about our students or their parents, and hopefully provide us with legal counsel if the feds ever come after any of us for not cooperating with them.
Most of us have braced for this before. Not just during Trump’s first presidency but as far back as the 1990s, when California voters validated Proposition 187 to deny all public services, including education, to undocumented people. I remember talking to colleagues about what we'd do if the state criminalized teaching those students.
As it turned out, the courts overturned Prop 187 and our concerns were never realized.
There were also no mass deportations during the first Trump presidency, but this time feels different, and many of us anticipate facing difficult choices.
Not just about cooperating with authorities and potential action against us if we don’t, but also dealing with the aftermath of fractured families and shattered lives.
Teachers preparing to help students affected by mass deportation
Traumatized students are nothing new to my colleagues and me. For the most part, the kids I have the privilege of teaching are incredibly resilient. Students in my classes have lost parents to deportation as well as incarceration, illness and violence. Some kids have lost both parents (I taught a student whose mother was in prison for killing his father).
Most of them wind up with other family members. Or sometimes on their own. Or living with slightly older siblings, teenagers working to pay rent while going to school.
Otherwise it is the overwhelmed and sometimes brutal foster care system ‒ or some other arrangement; a neighbor, a coach, a teacher. I am among more than a few teachers who have offered shelter, at least temporarily, to a student to maintain some semblance of stability in their life and their education.
If there are mass deportations, some kids will end up with their parents in some other country trying to figure out their futures.
One kid recently told me that her mother, who is undocumented, was happy that Trump was reelected. She said her mother believed that Trump would be good for the country and this was all that mattered to her. She would accept being deported if the country improved for her kids.
So some us are mentally preparing for the possibility that some, perhaps many, of our students will need a place to live in order to finish high school and reach for their American dream.
Then there is the far more grave possibility ‒ students who are themselves at risk of deportation, including those brought to this country when they were very young and now might be sent to live in a place of which they have no memory and might not even speak the language.
What could the risks be for offering refuge to a child?
Is the criminal president going to make compassion a crime for others?
And what are the emotional risks of losing a student to such an injustice?
For the moment, these students seem to just be living the dream, trying to ignore the cloud of uncertainty hanging over their lives and what could be their last Christmas with their parents or with their friends. Worrying instead about GPAs and what to wear for holiday spirit week, and the upcoming soccer and basketball season and girlfriends and boyfriends and whether to eat the school lunch today and whether to run for student council or take two AP classes next year.
Pretending it might not all be for nothing.
Larry Strauss, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992, is the author of “Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher” and "A Lasting Impact in the Classroom and Beyond," a book for new and struggling teachers, due out next spring.