President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out the largest deportation measures in U.S. history, targeting perhaps millions of people suspected of being in the country with questionable legal status, are well underway. Arrests have made and fears in Florida are mounting as schools are no longer off-limits to immigration raids.
"It is un-American. It's not right. Is unjust, and it's really not fair. Children are not criminals. Since when (have) children became criminals?" said Beatrice Jacquet Castor, the co-founder and president of the Haitian American Community Coalition of Southwest Florida.
She said Trump’s long-standing and now amplified hardline stance against immigrants is crippling people and families in the state — a state where one in five people are foreign-born, Jacquet Castor said. "Some of them are afraid to go to work. Some are afraid to leave home, and some are afraid to actually go grocery shopping or even get gas or even send their children to school, because they don't know what's going to happen. So it's my heart, is very heavy at this time."
Last week the Trump administration told immigration officials they could raid schools, churches and hospitals — places previously off-limits.
The Florida Department of Education sent the following statement: "Florida schools will cooperate with all law enforcement working to enforce the nation’s laws on illegal immigration and keep our schools safe."
Denise Carlin, Lee County’s new superintendent of schools, said law enforcement may not roam the schools randomly trying to speak with schoolchildren. Rather, they must have warrants and court orders for specific children.
"There needs to be an order or warrant," said Carlin. "We don't allow law enforcement under any circumstances, just wander around campus and start questioning students. We follow the law. And the law says there must be an order or warrant, so we follow the law in all cases."
Public schools in Florida and across the country are required to educate children regardless of immigration status. And generally speaking, because of this, that status isn’t tracked.
The number of schoolchildren who are receiving special services to learn English at school because it is not the spoken language at home in Lee County is tracked and that is around 20,000 schoolchildren, though that number does not mean all the children are undocumented or have questionable status.
"We are going to continue educating children because they have a right to be educated," Carlin said. "Our job is to educate children. Our job is to take good care of them, and from there, you know, we follow, we follow the law."
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