A Thank You Letter to Betsy DeVos From a Public School Teacher

Teacher's Response to Betsy DeVos | POPSUGAR News:

A Thank You Letter to Betsy DeVos From a Public School Teacher

Thank you, Betsy.

That sounds strange coming from a public school teacher of 15 years. Indeed, after a day of teaching fourth graders, who are diverse in every way and whose future is now in your control, saying thank you is the last thing I thought I'd say today. But thanks. On Tuesday, 50 Republican senators voted for you, you who would not have made the cut to be hired as a tutor for their own children. Thank you, Betsy, for showing me money has power, but not over all.

I don't know if I feel worse for the senators who sold out because of the money you gave them or for the ones who sold out for free. But not everybody let their vote be bought, and that gives me hope.

Thanks, Betsy, for by showing me my fears, you clarified my beliefs. Yes, you inspire a lot of fears in me . . . will class size grow? Will Title I be cut? Will English For Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) services disappear? Will special education be decimated? How will my job change? Will my students have the same opportunities for college as my generation?

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Through clarifying my beliefs, you triggered my actions. Thank you for giving me more solidarity with my co-workers, friends, family, and world. In our mutual sorrow at your lack of credentials, we came together. On Tuesday, I did not eat while grading papers or planning lessons. I sat with my co-workers as we mourned the loss of our voice. During the fight to block your confirmation, so many teachers, students, and parents spoke up while calls and letters to senators were ignored and protests delegitimized.

My union never lit a fire beneath me — but you did. Thank you.

Thank you, Betsy, for inflaming my disappointment in our government. Mr. Rogers taught us to look for the helpers in any time of darkness. But it was you who made it dark enough for me to look.

I watched hours of CSPAN listening to thoughtful testimony of so many education advocates and became obsessed with ordering a bound copy of Monday night's incredible congressional record. I have never before felt so political or so united behind my party. Now I want to donate money, support the candidates I believe in, organize . . . the sky is the limit. My union never taught me this, never lit a fire beneath me — but you did. Thank you.

More than anything, I want to teach. I want to continue to teach my fourth graders that citizenship means respect for all and a responsibility for each other, to read critically, to value being informed. I want to teach them that a million small efforts will eventually be more powerful than one large campaign check. And I want to teach them that America will always return to freedom, no matter how much corruption tries to reign.

So, thank you, and good luck to you. You have no clue what you just signed up for.

Related:
How Betsy DeVos Literally Bought Her Position as Education Secretary
Al Franken Scolds GOP Senators For Wasting Everyone's Damn Time on Betsy DeVos
A Catholic Nun Perfectly Explains the Hypocrisy of the "Pro-Life" Argument
The Pope Gloriously Shaded Donald Trump Without Even Saying His Name

Teacher's Response to Betsy DeVos | POPSUGAR News:

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: This Week's Reading + Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: This Week's Reading (2/12):

ICYMI: This Week's Reading 

The list is long this week, but at least it's not all politics. At least, I'm pretty sure it's not all politics. 

I Never Cared Much About Politics; The Trump Nominated Betsy DeVos

A guest at the Washington Post. The title is self-explanatory

Holy Warrior Against the Welfare State

Jennifer Berkshire's trip to Michigan yielded a lot of good writing. This piece appeared in the Baffler and explains a bit more about DeVos's Amway roots, among other holy things.

Charter School Killed Crook County Grad Rate

From Oregon, the story of hos cyber-charter results made a mess out of a district.

I Was Trained for the Culture Wars

A defector from the world of ultra-conservative Christianity gives us a picture of what education looks like in the world of Mike Pence and Betsy DeVos

The Rise of Crony Appointees and the Inexpert Ruling Class

Paul Thomas connects the dots between Arne Duncan and Betsy DeVos

You Don't Want DeVos Style Charter Schools

What the DeVos approach to charters looks like on the ground

Unexpected Consequences of Test Based Accountability

Reformster Robert Pondiscio at Education Next explaining how much of a mess high stakes testing makes out of schools. I don't agree with his solution, but it's a pretty good explanation of the problem.

Betsy DeVos Christian School Vouchers

From Mother Jones, another well-researched in-depth look at how DeVos made a mess out of Michigan

Ten Year Old Applies to be Cambridge Professor of Legos

A short case study in how to properly handle a small child with big dreams.

Can a Universal Voucher Program Succeed

A good look at the ins and outs of such a system

The Best Writing Teachers Are Writers Themselves

Yes. This.

A Visit to the For-Profit Edu-Mall

A comic strip series from Mr. Fitz. Great explainer to share with people who aren't up for reading whole paragraphs.

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: This Week's Reading (2/12):

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: The Wealth Gap: Worse Than You Think + Impersonal Personalization

CURMUDGUCATION: Reformsters Contemplate Race (Part 2)

CURMUDGUCATION: Reformsters Contemplate Race (Part 2):

Reformsters Contemplate Race (Part 2)

I've worked my way slowly through two panel discussions held at the American Enterprise Institute a couple of weeks ago. They're interesting and mostly thoughtful discussions among reformsters about how reformsterism (by which, mostly, they mean the charter movement) can navigate this new era and the fissures that it has opened up in reformland. You can read about the first panel here, but I'm going to walk you through the second one now.

This conversation is a bit broader than the first one, and I'm going to give you broad strokes of broad strokes. If you want to watch yourself, the second panel starts around the 1:10:00 mark on the video below.

Who's here?

The panel moderator is Stacy Childress (New Schools Venture Fund), and participants are Andy Smarick and his winter beard (AEI, Bellwether), Chris Stewart (EdPost), Marilyn Rhames (Teachers Who Pray, EdPost), Jason Crye (Hispanics for School Choice) and Derrell Bradford (NYCAN). Interesting assortment.

So, we can't assume that we can do the work of school reform without discussing race equity etc. Our charge is to stay in dialogue even across our disagreements. Childress is saying that the goal here is to hash out differences without "permanently alienating potential allies" There was apparently a conversation about all this earlier, so Childress is asking for a sort of reflection-recap of that.

Note: There's a lot of discussion in this panel about disagreements and dialogue. They mean disagreements and dialogue within the reformy community. Nobody here is going to talk about how to achieve dialogue with their "opponents" or the "enemy" or, as someone will put it later, the "bad guys." This is about dealing with internal discord.

What was one thing you heard today from a colleague that helped you have a clearer CURMUDGUCATION: Reformsters Contemplate Race (Part 2):

Are charters the answer for ed? Testifying @NAACP charter school hearing – Cloaking Inequity

Are charters the answer for ed? Testifying @NAACP charter school hearing – Cloaking Inequity:

Are charters the answer for ed? Testifying @NAACP charter school hearing

Are charters the answer for a nation’s long history of underserving the needs of poor children?

The NAACP’s most recent national resolution on charter schools has elicited a vigorous discourse about charter schools in the United States. The nation’s largest and oldest civil right organization is also a democratic, community-based organization. As a result, the National Board of the NAACP after its vote to support a charter moratorium, announced the National Task Force for Quality Education on October 15. This new group is charged with studying education quality, “until safeguards are in place to provide better transparency regarding accountability, and to prevent cases of fraud and mismanagement.” See the post Updated: @NAACP Holding Charter School Hearings Across Nation

Here are my remarks as prepared for the testimony (but necessarily as delivered). The written remarks are followed by a video of the remarks taken by Lauren Steiner. I believe that professional video of all seven hearings will be available from the NAACP at some point soon.

My Confession is that I am a former charter Volunteer (MN), Educator (CA), Parent (TX) and Donor (CA) I’ve also publish peer reviewed research on charters.

I am a scholar. We are in pursuit and convinced by evidence. So I’d like to talk about evidence today.

Here are 10 things to consider about the market-based charter schools debate:

• Where did market-based school choice come from? Writing in the 1960s, academics such as the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, followed by John Chubb and Terry Moe in the 1990s, argued for a profit-based education system where resources are controlled by private entities rather than by democratically elected governments. They recommended a system of public education built around parent-student choice, school competition, and school autonomy as a solution to what they saw as the problem of direct democratic control of public schools.
• School “choice” does not cure the inequality created by markets. Not surprisingly, the academics neglected to mention that market-based mechanisms are the very system that created the inequities in American public schools today. Along with other public policies, including redlining, market forces created racial and economic segregation. Instead of making this situation better, school choice made this situation worse. Research by the UCLA Civil Rights project has demonstrated this fact. I have included this report and other resources in your green folders. I have a few extra packets that I can give to folks after my presentation.

• What does the research tell us that happens when everyone has choice? Also known as Universal choice? A group of economists mentored by Friedman, the Chicago Boys, took Friedman’s theories about education back to their home country and to push an education system with universal choice and relaxed regulation and oversight. Over the past several decades, Chile simultaneously became one of the richest countries in South America and the most unequal developed country in the world. In markets there are winners and losers.s I also recommend you check out Linda Darling-Hammond’s, a Stanford Professor, new book Global Education Reform Movement. This book examines countries around the world and finds that market-based reforms have failed spectacularly when compared with equity-based reforms.
• The position of the NAACP and Black Lives Matter on privatization is consistent with the views of past civil rights leaders. NAACP co-founder E.B. Du Bois, in his essay Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the U.S., extolled the virtues of collaborative social and government action. He railed against the role of businesses and capitalistic control that “usurp government” and made the “throttling of democracy and distortion of education and failure of justice widespread.” Malcolm X characterized market-based public policy  as “vulturistic” and “bloodsucking.” He advocated for collaborative social systems to solve problems. Martin Luther King Jr. argued that we often have socialism in public policy for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor. White academics pressing for market-based school choice in the name of “civil rights” ignore this history of African American civil rights leaders advocating for collaborative systems of social support and distrusting “free market” policies.
• Is the NAACP and Black Lives Matter position on schools out of touch with civil rights? A barrage of criticism has come from market-based school choice proponents and charter operators about the NAACP and Black Lives Matter resolutions. However, the NAACP has for years been consistent in its critique of charters schools. At the 2010 convention, the NAACP national board and members supported a resolution saying that state charter schools create “separate and unequal conditions.” A review of ten years of research supports their statement. I have included the review of research in your packets. More recently, in 2014, the NAACP connected school choice with the private control of public education. More recently, the 2016 resolution includes a variety of civil rights-based critiques such as a lack of accountability, increased segregation, and disparate punitive and exclusionary discipline for African Americans.
• Do families actually choose charter schools? Probably the most prominent argument heard from market-based education proponents is that school choice means that families can choose their own schools. Proponents of market-based school choice have argued that charter schools were designed to have both more freedom and more accountability. Critics of privately-managed schools point out that charters are actually afforded less accountability. Mr. Ungar in his remarks cited a recent report released by the ACLU and Public Advocates found a variety of illegal exclusionary policies in more than 20 percent of charter schools they examined. In New Orleans, parents now only have charters to choose from in the Recovery School District. The New York Times has described the reality of school choice for parents in Detroit as “no good choice.” Jonathan Williams did speak to Special Education. Our new study in the Stanford Law and Policy Review (you can find a copy in the green folder)s that was released a few weeks ago used geospatial analyses to examined charter schools and public schools nearby. While statewide number in Texas suggested similar proportion, when you conduct analyses at the local level, the disparities in access were statistically apparent.

• Why is more oversight and accountability needed for charters? Proponents of more accountability for charter schools want parents to be able to choose from high-quality public schools. Instead, charter schools have the power to selectively choose students who will perform well. Charter supporters blame a few bad apple charters for limiting access and expelling too many students. But charter school supporters and their lobbyists consistently support laws that promote lax oversight and regulation. For example, the California Charter School Association has actively lobbied against data collection and accountability for charter schools. The pastor asked the Lord for opportunities for us to collaborate. I was recently asked during a conversation with Howard Fuller where we those could disagree could collaborate with the charter industry. Since that time, I have come to the belief that accountability and transparency is one such place.
• Are teachers’ unions leading the opposition to school choice? Another common argument from supporters of privately-managed schools is that the teachers’ unions are the primary opponents of market-based school choice. But as Cristina De Jesus, from Green Dot mentioned, there are tens of thousands of unionized charter school teachers. The attacks on unions from charter supporters is misplaced. In fact, we can thank unions for the charter school idea. Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, first proposed the charter school idea in 1988. But his perspective became that his idea was being misappropriated in the creation of anti-democratic, privately managed public schools. He realized that charters were increasingly going to a group of people who were “eager for public funds but could care less about public education.” Considering peer reviewed research and reports from the Detroit Free Press— the charter agenda pressed by Betsy Devos in Michigan may be the worst example with the vast majority of charters being for profit and have some the lowest accountability and transparency standards.

• Who is supporting charters schools behind the scenes? The hundreds of millions of dollars spent to promote privately managed schools is coming from the non-democratic foundations of billionaires such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Smaller organizations including the Black Alliance for Education Options and the Libre initiative and the Democrats for Education Reform have accepted tens of millions of dollars over the years from billionaires and their foundations to press for market-based school choice. It is very clear that civil rights organizations, academics, parents, students, media and stakeholders that have brought critiques to our democratic discourse about private control and privatization are the underdogs in this conversation.
• Do charters perform better than public schools? Charter proponents often cite studies produced by The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. CREDO studies are not peer reviewed. But charter school supporters and the media point to CREDO’s 2015 urban charter study to say that African American and Latino students have more success in charter schools. Leaving aside the integrity of the study, what charter proponents don’t mention is that the performance impact is .008 and .05 for Latinos and African Americans in charter schools, respectively. These numbers are larger than zero, but you need a magnifying glass to see them. Contrast that outcome with policies such as pre-K and class size reduction with far more unequivocal measures of success than charter schools. Also, CREDO doesn’t usually compare schools in their studies. Instead, researchers use statistics to compare a real charter school student to a virtual (imaginary) student based on many students attending traditional public schools. In spite of criticism of CREDO’s methods and lack of peer review, charter proponents and the media continue to cite the CREDO studies as important evidence demonstrating charter school success. 

Considering the election of Donald Trump, we may have reached a watershed moment for market-based school choice and the privatization and private control of education. I probably don’t have to tell you that Donald Trump loves charter schools. The recent appointment of Betsy Devos has made this conversation more salient than ever. Donald Trump has promised to spend 20 billion on school choice in his first 100 days. Considering his recent executive orders, he appears to be determined to implement his private control and privatization agenda regardless of the consequences of his actions on schools and communities…

In conclusion,

I have talked about ten of the more contentious points in the debate about charter schools, but there is one major point of agreement: Poor students in the United States have less opportunity for a high quality education than students living in wealthy areas.

It is the shame of our nation.

We must NOT, MUST NOT, do nothing… because African Americans, Latinos and other poor students continue to be underserved in our society on purpose.

But there is an alternative, historical and emerging research supports the expansion of community-based, democratically controlled education approaches instead of private control privatization as the best course of action for families and communities of color. Community schools in one such approach as raised by Cecily. Communities of color, unions, school board members, teachers and parents should be seen as the solution and not the problem.

Are charters the answer for ed? Testifying @NAACP charter school hearing – Cloaking Inequity:

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Are charters the answer for ed? Testifying @NAACP charter school hearing – Cloaking Inequity:

Alt Facts Alert: Don't let this public community college teacher lie about the Incarceration of Japanese Americans to his students.

Don't let this public school teacher lie about the Incarceration of Japanese Americans to his students.:
DON'T LET THIS PUBLIC Community College TEACHER LIE ABOUT THE INCARCERATION OF JAPANESE AMERICANS TO HIS STUDENTS.

Orphaned infants incarcerated at the Manzanar Children’s Village. Many children, some with as little as 1/8th Japanese ancestry, were ripped from orphanages and foster homes for incarceration. (1943, Manzanar concentration camp, California.)

An associate professor at Columbia Basin, a publicly-funded community college, is teaching his students that the Incarceration of Japanese Americans was not racist. 

It's the same teacher, Gary Bullert, who asked in his Tri-City Herald op-ed, "Was the Relocation of West Coast Japanese Racist?"

On January 29, the Tri-City Herald published this opinion piece insisting that the Incarceration was not based on racism, but rather on national security concerns. The writing is filled with numerous errors, and paints the Japanese American population as a major threat to national security during World War II. I responded accordingly with my piece, Yes, actually, the "Relocation" of Japanese Americans was racist.

I also contacted the paper, which defended publishing the op-ed despite its flagrant errors and distortions. I discovered that the author of the op-ed, Gary Bullert, teaches political science at CBC. Next, I contacted the school, and they informed me that although the school's president denounced Bullert's deceptive portrayal of the Incarceration, no disciplinary action could be taken since Bullert was acting as a private citizen.

Then I received a message from one of his students.


Through social media channels, I obtained an actual audio recording of the lecture Bullert gave to his students on Wednesday, February 1. He repeated much of the same misinformation, and added some new falsehoods. This changes the situation, since Bullert is acting as a representative of this public community college as he misleads students about our history.

To make it clear that I am not unfairly taking his quotations out of context, I am making the audio recordings available to anyone with doubts. They are available here:

Part 1 

Part 2

The recording revealed the impetus for Bullert's op-ed. He claimed that the Badger Club, which had hosted a presentation on the Minidoka concentration camp, had failed to show both sides of the argument when discussing the Incarceration. But Bullert failed to realize that the presentation on the Incarceration was at the Badger Club's annual meeting, not a regular debate forum. The Incarceration, of course, would not have been an appropriate topic for a debate.

I'll take a couple examples of things Bullert told his class:

" ...there were Japanese Americans who were dual citizens. They were both citizens of Japan and the United States, and so their loyalty to the United States in this situation was somewhat suspect."

The Issei (first generation immigrants from Japan) were banned by law from acquiring U.S. citizenship because of the wave of anti-Asian sentiment that resulted in the Chinese Exclusive Act of 1882, as well as the Don't let this public school teacher lie about the Incarceration of Japanese Americans to his students.:

Betsy DeVos Made Me Want To Run For School Board : NPR Ed : NPR

Betsy DeVos Made Me Want To Run For School Board : NPR Ed : NPR:

Betsy DeVos Made Me Want To Run For School Board

Early one morning, the week before Betsy DeVos' confirmation as education secretary, 23-year-old Allison Kruk was dropping her boyfriend off at the Philadelphia airport when she decided to swing by the office of her United States senator and give him a piece of her mind.

Kruk was a Hillary Clinton supporter, and the nomination of DeVos, "just felt like a low blow," she says. "I had been calling and emailing and writing letters about how I thought she was incredibly incompetent, regardless of your position on school choice."

Kruk spent two and a half hours in the office of Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., before she was finally escorted out by security, but not without an official audience scheduled on the Monday before the vote.

Over the weekend, she collected 11,000 signatures on a petition from educators all over the state, plus letters from parents and teachers, all of which she hand-delivered.

When Toomey nevertheless cast his vote for DeVos, Kruk's reaction was immediate: She decided to run for school board.

By all accounts, the election has sparked a surge of political interest among young Democrats and progressives. Similar upwellings have happened after other presidential campaigns, such as the Tea Party movement's surge after Barack Obama's election in 2008.

"Since Betsy DeVos' confirmation, we've had a flood of people come and say specifically, 'I want to run for school board to protect the schools in my hometown,' " says Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, a newly launched progressive political action committee dedicated to drafting Millennials for down-ballot races from state legislatures on down. Run for Something offers advice, introductions and, for some candidates, help with fundraising.

NPR Ed spoke with four young first-time school board candidates from around the country.

All say they were influenced by the national energy around politics and education, but Betsy DeVos Made Me Want To Run For School Board : NPR Ed : NPR:

Trump Drops Defense of Obama Guidelines on Transgender Students - The New York Times

Trump Drops Defense of Obama Guidelines on Transgender Students - The New York Times:

Trump Drops Defense of Obama Guidelines on Transgender Students

The Trump administration has dropped the federal government’s challenge to a nationwide injunction issued last year that blocked the fulfillment of Obama administration guidelines stating that transgender students’ access to bathrooms and other gender-segregated school facilities was protected under existing federal civil rights law.

The injunction was issued in August by Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas as part of a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen states over the Obama administration’s position that Title IX, the federal law that bans sex discrimination in schools, protects transgender students.

Under that interpretation, transgender students have access to facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity, a proposition to which social conservatives strongly object. They argue that allowing transgender students to use those facilities poses a threat to the privacy and safety of other students.

The Obama administration appealed the injunction and requested that it apply only to states involved in the lawsuit and not nationwide. Oral arguments in that case were scheduled to begin on Tuesday, but on Friday, the Justice Department withdrew the previous administration’s challenge.

“The parties are currently considering how best to proceed in this appeal,” the department said in a legal brief to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

The decision changed little in the short term because the nationwide injunction has been in effect since August, but it signaled a significant change in the government’s approach to transgender issues under President Trump. Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, called the move a “callous attack” on “the dignity and safety of transgender students.”

“While the immediate impact of this initial legal maneuver is limited, it is a frightening sign that the Trump administration is ready to discard its obligation to protect all students,” she said in a statement. “Transgender students are not going away, and it remains the legal and moral duty of schools to support all students.”

The Obama administration evolved into an ardent defender of transgender students, suing North Carolina over a law there restricting transgender people’s access to public bathrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms. In May, the administration warned public school districts that they could face lawsuits or a loss of federal funds if they did the same.

“A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other Trump Drops Defense of Obama Guidelines on Transgender Students - The New York Times:

How Local Leaders Can Resist Trump’s Deportation Machine | The Nation

How Local Leaders Can Resist Trump’s Deportation Machine | The Nation:

How Local Leaders Can Resist Trump’s Deportation Machine
They should “explicitly remove immigration enforcement from the purview of their local law-enforcement departments.”

On Wednesday, a 35-year-old mother of two named Guadalupe García de Rayos was arrested in Phoenix. Her original contact with police came eight years ago, when Sheriff Joe Arpaio raided the water park where she worked and charged her with using a fake Social Security number. Since then, de Rayos, who came to the United States as a teenager, checked in annually as required with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. Each time they chose not to deport her—with no major crime on her record, she was not a priority.

That changed with Donald Trump’s election. Though Trump’s Muslim-travel ban has gotten the lion’s share of press attention, there’s another group of immigrants he’s moved to target: people like de Ravos who have come into contact with the criminal-justice system. After her arrest on Wednesday, a group of protesters (including her two American-born teenage children) managed to block the van as it carried de Rayos out of the ICE facility. The halt was dramatic but temporary: De Rayos was deported on Thursday. By Friday, immigration agents had staged raids in at least six states, marking the beginning of a crackdown.

Trump calls people like de Rayos “criminal illegal immigrants,” or, simply, “bad dudes.” As president-elect, he claimed they number “2 million…even 3 million.” But such a number is possible only through a dramatic expansionof the term “criminal.” Executive Order 13768, which Trump signed January 25, specifies that the group being targeted for detention and deportation includes immigrants who have been convicted, charged, or suspected of any criminal offense, however minor. The extraordinarily wide net includes both undocumented immigrants and legal residents. It also includes anyone who “in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose[s] a risk to public safety or national security.”

The executive order’s nearly boundless discretion, coupled with Trump’s full-throated commitment to mass deportations, will likely result in intrusive police tactics that violate the Fourth Amendment’s limitations on searches and seizures. This comes at a moment when litigation and Black Lives Matter protests are challenging many cities to move away from invasive, aggressive policing. Now Trump’s agenda forces local authorities to make a choice: uphold the protections guaranteed in the Fourth Amendment, or be co-opted into a mass deportation project?

The Fourth Amendment was key to the litigation that forced New York City to end its stop-and-frisk practices. Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights—the group that brought the lawsuit—anticipates more will be required in the age of Trump. “The Fourth Amendment,” Warren says, “will likely be a battleground over the next four years, particularly with respect to Black and Brown communities.” With Trump rallying his troops to “aggressively profile and surveil our communities,” Warren believes that “mayors, governors and local legislatures should be publicly positioning themselves between the federal profiling and surveillance initiatives and their residents.”

Many local leaders seem primed and ready to take such a stand, primarily by designating their jurisdictions as “sanctuary cities.” At a rally immediately after the president signed EO 13768, San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen invoked Malcolm X, telling Trump he “better be ready for a fight because we are protecting our sanctuary city and our immigrant communities by any means necessary.” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh seemed to be restraining himself from shaking a fist as he promised “to anyone who feels threatened today or vulnerable…we will do everything in our power to protect you—if necessary we will use City Hall itself to shelter and protect anyone who is targeted unjustly.”

What defines these and other jurisdictions as “sanctuary cities” is, largely, their decision to ignore ICE detainers. Detainers are requests from ICE to a local jail asking it to hold someone past the time the person would normally be released, so that ICE can investigate their immigration status. The innocuous-seeming document is critical to ICE, allowing the agency to turn jails into a nationwide lake from which to fish for deportable individuals. The overwhelming majority of the 11.5 million people admitted to local jails each year are there for traffic and other minor offenses, making ICE’s How Local Leaders Can Resist Trump’s Deportation Machine | The Nation: