Earlier this year, immigration officers detained 20-year-old Dylan Lopez Contreras at a routine court date in New York.
At the time, Contreras was a freshman at the city’s English Language Learners and International Support Preparatory Academy, or ELLIS Prep, where students ages 16 and older can complete a high school education after entering the United States with limited or interrupted formal schooling.
Contreras, originally from Venezuela, remains at a Pennsylvania detention facility, as reported by Chalkbeat. Advocates say his arrest in late May was part of a nationwide effort from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to detain individuals at routine court hearings. Contreras had entered the U.S. border under a Biden-era entry program and was seeking asylum.
On May 6, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement saying it “rescinded the Biden Administration’s guidelines for ICE actions that thwarted law enforcement from carrying out immigration enforcement arrests in courthouses and emboldened criminal illegal aliens.”
Eric Marquez, a history teacher at ELLIS Prep who taught U.S. history to Contreras last school year, spoke with Education Week about what it’s been like to teach immigrant students when a classmate is detained by immigration officers, and what teachers can do to help assuage students’ fears.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was Dylan Lopez Contreras like as a student?
I would say that he did not speak a lot, even in Spanish. He was a little more contemplative.
He was already supporting his mother with his siblings. You could see right away that he was a compassionate person. He created a new Uno game that kids would play every day at lunch. There would never be any need to say, ‘Dylan, can you have a seat?’ or ‘Dylan, attention please.’ Especially at his age, and what [he’s] been through, he just kind of was ready to study.
[After he was detained,] we had a letter-writing campaign that sent something like 140 letters, individually stamped and handwritten, by students talking about their feelings about what Dylan was going through, giving him well wishes.
We just heard back from him recently ... he is still connected to us, even now. In August, he sent a note through his mother, and it came out not only to us, but to other schools that had supported him.
One of his responses [in Spanish] was, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t really understand the English letters very much. But I want to say thank you to all my inglés-hablantes.’
What kind of advocacy work is the school engaged in for Dylan’s release?
Dylan’s mother called the school and the [9th grade] counselor immediately. She said, ‘I don’t understand what’s happening. They’re taking him away. They just said his case was dismissed or something.’
[The counselor] and a number of others from my school, and individuals from the community [provided Dylan with] legal connections who are willing to do some pro bono work.
Another teacher at our school created a GoFundMe page that brought in something like $43,000 [because Dylan’s mother] has had a rough time without her child, who was one of the breadwinners of the family. There were protests on the steps of the downtown courthouse. Recently, some of our advocacy has been with media outreach.
How are Dylan’s classmates handling the news now that we’re at the start of a new school year?
The kids are resilient in a way that, at least, they seem more resilient than even the adults sometimes.
If it’s brought up, or if there is some update, they’re asking teachers and each other. They are an oddly gentle class of 70 or 80 students who are not rude, who are respectful of authority, but also curious and willing to push back on it. They take care of each other, and they express their need for us.
They reach out to [Dylan’s mother] through WhatsApp.
They are the ones helping me. They show me pictures that they’ve gotten through his mom of him in Venezuela, before he even left. He has sayings that he will tell the kids. And it’s kind of like he’s a wise man doing a fast or a monk because he remains just so humble and hopeful. We’re then unbelievably hopeful. So, when it comes to how my kids are doing, they are hopeful from the brilliance that Dylan continues to shine.
How do you feel as an educator trying to navigate moving forward with a missing student?
I get a pang in my heart when I hear you say the word missing, almost like desaparecidos, like disappeared people. It really is.
It is the first time that I’ve dealt with this directly, in terms of seeing it in my face and hearing updates by the moment from the counselor, and having meetings about it. Dylan [was] taken outside of the school where we couldn’t even feasibly protect him. You trusted that the scheduled hearing was a safe space.
What advice do you have for teachers across the country with students fearful of immigration arrests?
On a personal level, I have an open-door policy. I have this sign-in sheet where people can talk about whatever they want.
If it’s an English-as-a-second-language student or undocumented student in a general population, and they don’t necessarily communicate well with the teacher because of a lack of English, get to know the kid. I’ve seen far too many of our type of students, our kids, isolated, where the teachers don’t really reach out or don’t know how to necessarily.
Compassion is number one. Number two is, be as transparent as possible when it comes to parents and as protective as possible when it comes to students.
Our kids still come to school despite their fear, because [parents] can depend on their child’s safety at our school. They know they’ll get a good education. They know they’ll be cared for like family.
