Fear of Deportation Is Driving Migrant Kids to Stay Home from School
It was 6:30 AM when Wildin David Guillen-Acosta stepped outside his house in Durham, North Carolina, headed to school. The 19-year-old had just begun his second semester of senior year at Riverside High School, where teachers considered him an exemplary student and peers called him a leader. But that morning, Acosta never even made it down the street—two immigration agents waited in the driveway and commanded he get in their vehicle.
"The agents picked my son up in the driveway and asked him questions, and they didn't identify themselves until they got him in the car," Acosta's mother Dilsia Acosta told me in Spanish, recalling the incident on January 28. "He just wanted to go to school. He loved it there. He wanted to keep studying, to go to the university and become an engineer."
Acosta, a Honduran native who fled gang violence for the US at age 16, is among dozens of Central American youths around the nation who have recently been targeted for deportation on their way to class, to work, or to the store.
The arrests are part of the Department of Homeland Security's large-scale crackdown on Central American migrants, in reaction to a record number of women and children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador crossing the border. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials conducted highly publicized raids on families in early January, and on Tuesday, Thomas Homan, the executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations for ICE, announced that the agency had created dozens of teams to continue apprehending and deporting Central Americans.
"Consistent with our laws and values, recent border crossers, including those apprehended as unaccompanied children, who are unable to establish they are eligible for relief and have exhausted appeals have been, and will continue to be, ICE removal priorities," Homan testified at a Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday.
But as ICE boasts about its strict enforcement tactics, it declines to acknowledge the jarring impact these raids have on US soil: Many students have simply stopped going to school.
Attendance dropped by one-third in several classes at Riverside High School the day after Acosta's arrest, according to Bryan Proffitt, the president of the Durham Educators Fear of Deportation Is Driving Migrant Kids to Stay Home from School | VICE | United States:
