The Urban Institute followed up the release of its report, “Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children,” commissioned by the National Council of La Raza, with a panel discussion on the topic of how children have been affected by workplace immigration raids.
You can listen to the two-hour discussion held Nov. 8, co-sponsored by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, online.
I dipped in and out of the audio recordings of the panel presentations and didn’t hear anything pertaining particularly to schools. The report, however, recommends that schools create plans to respond to immigration raids in their communities (See earlier blog entry, “Report: Immigration Raids Affect Children”).
Randy Capps, one of the authors of the report and a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, mentions in his presentation that more than 500 children had at least one parent arrested in raids occurring in the three communities studied—Greeley, Colo.; Grand Island, Neb.; and New Bedford, Mass. Many were young children, he noted. In New Bedford, Mass., for example, half of the children who had at least one parent arrested were age 5 or younger. Two-thirds of the children who had a parent arrested in all three communities were U.S. citizens, he said.