I blogged earlier this month about educators who went out of their way to help Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is undocumented, to succeed in this country. I pointed out how teachers and administrators are sometimes very active in helping undocumented students with their affairs outside of school while others steer away from it, not wanting to get involved in the complexity of the legal issues affecting these students.
But the Associated Press took the extra step of interviewing the educators who helped Vargas and published an article that is worth mulling over. (I was on vacation, so I just saw it this week.)
“We’re educators. We don’t work for the I.N.S.,” says Rich Fisher, a retired school administrator who helped Vargas find a scholarship to pay for his college education, in the article. (He uses the old name, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, for the federal entity charged with enforcement of federal immigration laws. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, often called ICE for short, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security now has that job.)