Urban Districts Urged to Prepare for Immigration Raids

Students whose parents are detained said to need many types of assistance.

Houston

School district leaders urged their colleagues recently to make concrete plans for taking care of students whose parents have been picked up in workplace raids by federal immigration agents.

As the federal government focuses on employers who hire large numbers of undocumented immigrants, school districts with large immigrant populations will see more students’ lives disrupted by the sudden disappearance of one or both parents, said superintendents, school board members, and a policy analyst who spoke about the raids at an Oct. 24 panel discussion at the Council of the Great City Schools’ annual conference here.

Rosa Maria Castañeda, a research associate at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank that co-authored a report last year detailing the impact on children of three large-scale workplace raids, said that when such arrests occur, children often find themselves at school or day care with no one to pick them up, or alone at home...