Teachers’ Unions Develop Curriculum to Deal with Trauma of ICE Raids
Earlier this month, a record-breaking ICE raid detained over 600 immigrant workers at several meatpacking plants in Mississippi. Quickly, images of small children stranded at school, after learning that their parents’ detention by immigration authorities, began appearing on TV.
“I need my dad,” one 11-year-old girl Magdalena cried in a viral CBS video.”I am not going to have nothing for the first day of school for me. My dad bought me everything for me to live over here. The rent. Now, I don’t know where I am going to eat.”
Increasingly, teachers are being asked to step in to help children affected by the terror and trauma of deportation.
“While children in Mississippi were at their first day of school, their parents were being rounded up by the government,” says American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “Those kids came home ready to talk about what they learned at school, who they met and what they saw, only to be greeted with abject fear at the hands of a cruel government policy designed to terrorize an already frightened community.”
Over 2.5 million undocumented youth attend public school in the United States, where they are faced with the constant risk of choosing whether to risk deportation by attending school. An additional 4.1 million public school children, who are U.S. citizens, live in a household, where one or both parents are immigrants.
“As educators, we know that separation from a parent causes trauma for a child that can impede learning opportunities and social and emotional health,” says Jackson Federation of Teachers President Akemi Stout, who was part of an AFT emergency response group that helped respond to the raids in Mississippi this month. “Our members will do their part as frontline protectors of students.”
With millions of children affected by increasing ICE raids targeted undocumented workers, many CONTINUE READING: Teachers' Unions Develop Curriculum to Deal with Trauma of ICE Raids – Payday Report
