Thousands of undocumented students in America’s largest public school system are testing the boundaries of how much a fiercely liberal, "sanctuary city" can do to protect some of its most vulnerable. | AP Photo Undocumented students in New York City test boundaries of 'sanctuary schools'

Tami, an undocumented immigrant from Bangladesh and a Brooklyn high school student, recently offered a bleak assessment of New York City’s ability to keep young immigrants safe under President Donald Trump’s administration: “sanctuary schools don’t exist.”

Tami and thousands of other undocumented students in America’s largest public school system are testing the boundaries of how much a fiercely liberal, "sanctuary city" can do to protect some of its most vulnerable students as the Trump administration pursues more aggressive deportation policies. There are roughly 38,000 undocumented students in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx, according to the Migration Policy Institute.


“We are thinking about worst case scenarios that we never thought would ever happen that now can happen,” said Abja Midha, the immigrant students’ rights project director for Advocates for Children. “There is this feeling that anything is possible.”

Interviews with over a dozen students, parents, teachers, government officials and immigrants rights advocates illustrate the legal complexities and myriad obstacles Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration faces as it works to make its 1,800 public schools sanctuaries for undocumented students.

Flanked by officials from the city’s police, immigration and law departments and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, de Blasio and schools chancellor Carmen Fariña last week convened a press conference in the hope of sending a message that would resonate with the city’s immigrant students and parents.

“The best place to send your children on a day to day basis is your school,” Fariña, who is the daughter of immigrants from Spain, said then. “In every single school in New York City, you are welcomed, you are respected, you are an asset.”

That day, the Department of Education released what de Blasio called “deepened” guidance for principals about what to do if an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer showed up at a school, a still-hypothetical scenario. Current federal policy discourages immigration raids in “sensitive locations” like schools, but ICE agents can still enter a school or check student records in some circumstances.

The new city policy mandates that principals have ICE officers wait outside their school building and immediately consult the education department’s lawyers for further instructions. ICE agents will have to produce legitimate warrants before they can enter a school, de Blasio announced, and parents of affected students will be notified of any ICE activity in schools. The city is also planning over 100 “know your rights” workshops for immigrant families in the next few weeks.

The new policy, which came following public pressure from educators asking the city to take more action to protect students, also stipulates that school safety agents positioned at the entrance of each school building should consult with their superiors at the New York City Police Department so that individual agents don't just use their discretion.

“No one is going to make an individual decision,” Fariña, who has met with immigrant advocates, said, responding to concerns that inexperienced agents could jeopardize students’ safety.

“There are families in New York City now who are afraid to go out and do their laundry, who are buying plane tickets to leave the country,” said Kim Sykes, the senior manager of education advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition. “This level of anxiety really permeates their entire life, so I think it was very important that the city did take the step and put out additional guidance that explains what will happen if ICE comes to a school.”

The city’s large charter school networks have mostly followed the Department of Education’s lead on issuing safeguards for undocumented students.

Officials at KIPP sent home a letter to families in February assuring them that ICE agents cannot enter schools without a warrant, and that KIPP staff do not record immigration statuses. The network is hosting "know your rights" workshops at schools and training staff through the Immigrant Defense Project. Administrators at Achievement First sent families a similar letter, telling parents, “we will keep our schools safe and supportive.” Uncommon Schools’ officials designated their director of operations to be a point person in case ICE agents approach a school, and reaffirmed that they do not record their students’ immigration status. Trump’s immigration policies “are against our school’s values and in opposition to the safe and inclusive world we want for our students,” Uncommon officials wrote in a letter to parents.

Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter network, has been a notable outlier. The network’s CEO, Eva Moskowitz, repeatedly declined to answer questions about how she would protect undocumented children in her schools following Trump’s inauguration. (Moskowitz was briefly on a short list to serve as Trump’s education secretary.) When a group of Success staff wrote Moskowitz a letter asking her to release a statement making her support for immigrant students clear, she said she was limited in how much she could advocate politically.

After facing criticism for that response, Moskowitz told parents they could reach out to their school’s principal if they had legal concerns about their immigration status. Spokespeople for Success did not respond to a request for information about the network’s protocols around ICE agents in schools.

BUT EVEN WITH THE STEPS New York City has already taken, officials can and should go further to meet the standards set by other so-called sanctuary cities, immigrant advocates say.

Since January, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston each adopted protocols requiring a district’s superintendent to personally approve any request by ICE to enter a school. In New York City, those requests currently go through individual school principals, but they'd likely be approved by Fariña herself under a centralized set-up. Running the process through the chancellor’s office rather than having individual principals manage a potential crisis would take some of the uncertainty out of ICE interactions in schools, advocates say.

Minneapolis, Sacramento and des Moines now require ICE agents to give advance notice when they plan to visit a school building, a practice activists want New York to adopt, too. And clarifying policies around exactly where ICE agents should wait while attorneys are contacted and warrants are checked could ensure that ICE remains off school property for as long as possible.

Educators also say an immigration adviser in every school to coordinate the needs of immigrant and undocumented students could help calm nerves.

“It feels like the legal situation is changing under Trump every week, and there needs to be a clear person in every school that staff and students can go to with their questions,” said Jennifer Queenan, an eleventh grade teacher at Sunset Park High School who has served as an unofficial immigrant liaison in her school for the last several years.

Even minute logistical changes to the Department of Education’s record keeping practices could potentially prevent students from being detained or deported, advocates say.

Student records are largely protected under federal student privacy laws, but immigration information could be provided to ICE agents if they obtain a court order or subpoena. While most undocumented families do not provide information about their immigration status, some parents do reveal their status on forms to enroll their children in school to prove age or residency.

Midha of Advocates for Children said the Department of Education should commit to “never recording” a family’s immigration status or change in status.

The Department of Education could also help manage situations that would affect students outside of school. Advocates are pushing schools to update each student’s emergency contact list to ensure that there is always someone to pick up a child if his or her parent or parents are detained by ICE officers.

“We’re going to face a scenario where a student’s parents are picked up by ICE,” Midha said. “What is going to happen to the child?”

That’s part of what’s made one undocumented immigrant from Mexico, a single mother of two, so nervous after Trump’s election. (She asked that her name not be used due to fear about her immigration status.)

“I’m worried for my kids if [ICE] comes to my house to pick on me,” the mother, who now attends a community college in the Bronx, said in an interview.

Fariña said last week that the department has not seen any precipitous drops in attendance at schools with large immigrant populations since Trump’s inauguration. But there have been scattered instances when parents have kept their children home out of fear. After ICE conducted raids around New York City in February, 32 children did not attend a Head Start pre-Kindergarten program in the Bronx immediately after the raids were made public, Sykes of the New York Immigration Coalition said.

Toya Holness, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the department shares advocates' sense of urgency.

“In the event that a federal agent goes to a New York City school building, schools have been given clear direction to have officers wait outside of the school building while staff members consult with DOE attorneys," she said. "The DOE does not track immigration status and will not provide information or allow federal agents to enter schools unless absolutely required by law."

Principals have also been encouraging families to update their emergency contact information, Holness said, and school administrators have been instructed to refer families with questions to ActionNYC, a free legal services program for immigrants.

THE SUDDENLY IMMEDIATE QUESTION of how to protect undocumented students in city schools has illuminated the complex patchwork of federal and local immigration laws governing schools. Federal immigration agents and the city governments are each constrained in their abilities to detain undocumented immigrants or shield students by laws, protocols and practices.

The 2011 sensitive locations memo encouraging ICE officers to “generally avoid” raids in schools is a policy, not a law. Immigrant advocates are concerned Trump could alter or overturn it, or that newly emboldened ICE agents could just ignore it. And the policy only covers the school building, not the immediate area around it, as an undocumented man from Mexico discovered earlier this month when he was arrested by ICE agents immediately after dropping his daughter off at school in Los Angeles.

“The Department of Homeland Security is committed to ensuring that people seeking to participate in activities or utilize services provided at any sensitive location are free to do so without fear or hesitation,” Carissa Cutrell, a spokeswoman for ICE, said in a statement. ICE officers can enter a school with “prior approval from an appropriate supervisory official or [in] exigent circumstances necessitating immediate action.”

Lawyers for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office pointed to a different set of laws to argue that the state has real discretion to protect its students.

The New York Family Court Act requires any police officer that takes a child under the age of sixteen into custody immediately notify their parent or guardian. And the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler vs. DOE found states must provide students a free public education regardless of their immigration status.

But that doesn’t mean the city’s schools can be considered completely safe for undocumented students under the city’s sanctuary city designation.

That’s because "sanctuary schools" have lost their original meaning, said Anna Law, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College. Under the original sanctuary campus movement in 1980s, sanctuary schools clothed, fed and sheltered scores of immigrants from Central America who were fleeing violence in their home countries.

“It’s simply not true that you can go to a physical space and be protected from and off-limits to federal enforcement,” Law said.

Tami feels that uncertainty acutely.

“There are times when I wake up on time and I’m still late to school because I spent thirty minutes on my bed just thinking, ‘should I go to school today? Is it safe for me to go to school today?’” Tami, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used, said.

His parents, who still live in Dhaka, call him every day, once in the morning and once at night, to make sure he is safe. “They’re scared I won’t make it home at night,” he said.

That wasn’t the case before Trump’s election. When Tami came to Brooklyn three years ago, he marveled at the freedoms his classmates enjoyed and slipped into an easy routine at school. He and his older brother, who he lives with, let their tourist visa expire. “I have never really been home, home,” Tami, who left Dhaka when he was five to live in India, said.

Now, he said, “I just feel like, ‘who am I? I'm just an undocumented immigrant.’”