The 74 reports on how immigrant students fleeing ICE raids are given books, cards, signed T-shirts and soccer balls to remember their teachers, classmates and the life they leave behind.
As immigrant students flee in fear of ICE raids, teachers offer heartfelt gifts
A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a newcomer how much they were loved in a place they once called home.
These are among the items teachers have given their multilingual learners after hearing their families planned to leave rather than risk being detained by immigration agents.
"One of my students told me last week that their family had decided to go back to Brazil because they were afraid of deportation," said teacher Joanna Schwartz. "It was his last day here. I scrounged up a T-shirt with our school's logo on it and a permanent marker and my student had all of his friends and teachers sign it."
She said she taught the fifth grader for three years.
"It's nothing big, but it was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him," she said.
Some immigrant students wrestling with the fear of deportation leave school with no warning, The 74 reports. They simply stop showing up and ignore the calls and emails that follow.
Other times, they give their teachers just a few hour's notice, often a single afternoon, to process and accept the loss of a relationship that might have lasted for years. A tight hug, a kind word and then … gone.
Such scenes are unfolding throughout the country as the Trump administration ratchets up immigration arrests and removals and opens schools to enforcement actions, striking terror in the hearts of the undocumented and their advocates.
Faced with the fallout, teachers who've spent their entire careers advocating for immigrant students—fighting battles even within their own districts to ensure they have a robust education—are left fumbling for the right words to say or gift to give a child under extreme stress.
Schwartz, who teaches multilingual learners in Philadelphia, uses her prior training as a therapist to help kids through these toughest of moments.
She said she often gives these children "transitional objects," something tangible, like the signed school T-shirt, to help them feel connected to their friends in the United States as they move back to their homelands.
Schwartz wrote her departing student a letter in which she "reminded him of his many strengths and told him how much he will be missed," she said. She added drawings, stickers and her email address.
"I wish I could do more," she said.
Areli Rodriguez was devastated when, last winter, during her first year of teaching in Texas, one of her most promising and devoted young students left for another state: The boy's family was growing wary of Gov. Greg Abbott's anti-immigrant policies and headed to Oklahoma, where they hoped they'd be safer.
"He was my first student who left for this reason," she said of the fifth grader who had arrived in the United States from Mexico less than a year earlier. "It was so gutting. It just broke my heart."
The family didn't know the Sooner State would impose some of the harshest immigration restrictions in the nation. Those included state schools chief Ryan Walters saying he would comply with Trump's order allowing immigration enforcement in schools and a failed edict that Oklahoma parents be required to report their own immigration status when enrolling their kids in school. That proposal was rejected by the governor this week, who said children should not be used as "political pawns."
Rodriguez is not sure where the child is today. As a parting gift, she gave him a soccer ball signed by all his classmates.
The boy, who was chosen as student of the week when he departed, led the class in a call-and-response chant by Rita F. Pierson just moments before he was gone from the district for good.
I am somebody.
I was somebody when I came.
I'll be a better somebody when I leave.
I am powerful, and I am strong.
… I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go.
And, his teacher noted, she wasn't the only gift-giver that day: The boy left her one of his favorite toys, a Rubik's Cube.
In a diary entry, he wrote to Rodriguez and another beloved teacher: "To say goodbye to all of you, Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. [S], I want to tell you that you are my favorite teachers, and I'm sorry for any trouble I may have caused. Maybe I wasn't the best student, but I am proud of myself for learning so much."
Rodriguez didn't need the note to remember him.
"I think about him all the time," she said, adding that he embodies what she loves most about multilingual learners. "For him, school was a gift, an opportunity, a privilege. He just worked so hard. We had academic competitions. I coached him. He did creative writing in Spanish and he placed. His parents were so supportive—they looked at education as something they wanted to seize."
His classmates felt the loss, too, Rodriguez said.
"There would be times when I would sit there at recess and watch them play without him and you could tell there was an element missing," she said.
The Department of Homeland Security is urging undocumented people to leave the country immediately. This isn't the first time they've felt such pressure: Former President Joe Biden deported some 4 million people in a single term, double that of Trump's first four years in office. But many of those he turned away were newly arrived at the border. Unlike Trump, Biden shied away from raids.
The current president is targeting this population in other ways, too. Trump signed an executive order Feb. 19 aimed at ending federal benefits for the undocumented. It's unclear how this might impact education: Schools receive federal money, particularly to help support low-income children, but they also cannot turn away students based on their immigration status, according to the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe.
That landmark ruling, however, is under attack by conservative forces, most recently in Tennessee where lawmakers this month introduced a bill saying schools can deny enrollment to undocumented students. The sponsors say it's their intention to challenge Plyler.
'We hugged long and hard'
In addition to the T-shirts, cards and other mementos, educators are preparing something else for withdrawing students, a far more practical gift meant to help them resume their education elsewhere—and quickly.
Genoveva Winkler, regional migrant education program coordinator housed in Idaho's Nampa School District, said she's given more than 100 families copies of their students' transcripts in English and Spanish.
"This school year, we are preparing 'packets' for the families with all that information," Winkler wrote in a Facebook message, adding her district also gave them textbooks supplied by the Mexican Consulate that parents can use to prepare their children academically and bolster their Spanish. "The students are not 100% bilingual. Parents are taking all steps necessary to make the transition easier for their children."
Indianapolis teacher Amy Halsall said four children from the same family, ranging in age from 7 to 12, left her school system right after Inauguration Day, headed back to Mexico.
"They didn't specifically say that it was immigration related but I would guess it was," Halsall said. "This is a family that we have had in our school since their sixth grader was in first grade. The kids were really upset that they had to leave."
The youngest and the eldest told Halsall they want to be ESL teachers when they grow up, she said. The two middle children hope to be mechanics and one day open their own shop. Halsall gave them a notebook full of letters written by fellow students and pictures of their classmates.
"I told the kids that they had learned a lot and always did their best," she said. "I told them that they worked hard and were on their way to being bilingual. We hugged long and hard. I told them if they ever came back to Indianapolis that they should call us or visit.
I told them if I was ever in Mexico, I would call them. I tried hard to keep things positive but it was hard for all of us. Everyone had tears in their eyes."
The anxiety continues, Halsall said. Just last week, another child, age 8, told her he worried that "La Migra"—ICE agents—would take his mother away while he was out.
"I told him that he was safe at school and if he got home and no one was there to call me," she said.
Another teacher, in Virginia, said she had two such students leave school so far this academic year. One hailed from Guatemala and the other from Mexico. Both were in their mid-teens and had impeccable attendance, she said.
The boy from Guatemala, a solid student who wanted to accelerate his path toward graduation, would often say how perplexing it was that some of his peers didn't show the same dedication to their studies that he did.
Both teens expressed concern to fellow students about possible immigration raids shortly before leaving school for good. Their teacher did not have a chance to say goodbye in either case. Their departure, she said, left her feeling "completely empty."
"I've loved watching them integrate in our school and seeing how they realized they can have this pathway if they choose," she said. "Watching that choice ripped away by fear is devastating."
This story was produced by The 74 and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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