the Empathy List #173: Back-to-School Means Lockdowns (and Good Trouble-making)
In America, being a mom of school-aged kids means adding ICE to the list of back-to-school anxieties.
Hello friends, Liz here.
For many parents, back-to-school means grief—and not just because their five-year-old (or 18-y-o) is leaving home for the first time. [And not just grief. Believe me, I’m happy for my workday to return!]
However, the United States of Stupidity has refused to ban guns of almost any lethality. This is especially true in my very purple state of Colorado, where some of the most deadly school shootings have occurred. Despite the fact that we’ve had a Democratic governor for 26 years straight (and we’re not about the break the streak with this weirdo on the ballot for the GOP), no governor has been willing to cross the NRA lobby.
And now, added to the danger of too many firearms, my children will face another threat: ICE.
I live across the street from a middle school. The demographic of this middle school, like my neighborhood, is largely Latinx. The family who lives directly next-door to us are Mexican, and though they have lived in the U.S. for years, the father and mother only speak Spanish. They speak to neighbors indirectly through their teenagers.
I have often thought, maybe I should tell them that they can come hide in my house if they ever need to. Maybe I should secure my door, just in case.
Because when I look on ICEwatch, the site that tracks the activity of DHS in my area, I see agents collecting from the sidewalks, homes, and streets all around my neighborhood—on the corner by the Dollar Tree, at the community pool, at the apartment complex where a neighbor left the car locked and running while agents handcuffed him and drove him to the nearest detention center. ICE is here.
And like they have elsewhere, DHS in my state will likely catch on, soon enough, to the fact that the schools may be ripe for the picking.
Supposedly, the public school districts of Denver and the adjoining suburbs have refused to cooperate with these federal agents. But who’s to say that, like in other places, the orders directed from district legal offices in 2025 will be applied, especially in the case of a planned raid without any clear target beyond filling the backs of SUVs to their fullest capacity with “illegals”? Education leaders in my state have not yet decided on a plan for dealing with a deportation effort like other cities—Chicago, Minneapolis—have experienced. We remain unprepared. And so students remain vulnerable to the whims of these angry men.
Though DHS has claimed that agents do not target schools or children specifically, the ACLU has reported exactly the opposite.
In a report that analyzed 1,200 actions performed by ICE agents in eight states during 2025, ACLU activists found 86 ICE actions near or in areas related to schools (such as playgrounds, buses, parking lots nearby schools, etc.).
This includes multiple documented incidents in my own home city of Aurora and in the school district where my kids attend public school—
“In Colorado, federal raids forced five buses to reroute and prompted the Denver Public Schools superintendent to stop at the scene himself. An armored vehicle was deployed just north of Hinkley High School in Aurora, and a high school classroom looked out onto a staging area in a parking lot. [So that students could see the vehicle from their classrooms] Attendance dipped in Aurora and Denver Public Schools when immigration officials were rumored to begin raids. DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero said that when he visited schools in a suit and tie, he heard students whisper in Spanish, “Is he one of them?” He understood why: “The way I’m dressed is enough to scare them.”
The ACLU’s report also documented 157 incidents in which children were present during a raid or targets of an immigration enforcement raid. Both citizen and noncitizen children experienced ICE actions, by the way, with the common denominator being the shade of their skin: they targeted the brown kids.
54 times, agents “directly interrogat[ed] or detain[ed] children”—214 children in total were detained, including 32 U.S. citizen children. And these numbers only represent information from eight states and 1,200 documented actions. Meaning, the number of children and schools affected by DHS actions is exponentially higher.
And of those children who were detained, several have reported that ICE agents abused them. [Trigger warning on this footnote1]
These agents are not just “bad apples,” write the authors of the ACLU report, “Their abusive actions directly trace back to orders and demands by senior administration officials to engage in reckless, abusive tactics. The system of accountability—courts, Congress, and public pressure—failed to stop agents who routinely threatened public safety in communities across the country. The severity of conduct we have described suggests a systemic breakdown in professional norms and standards, and exposes major gaps in our accountability structures.”
At this point, not one of us is surprised to read this. I want to yell, of course there has been a breakdown of professionalism, of norms, of standards, of institutions, of accountability. Do you know who’s running this country?
But even I was surprised to hear about the reddit thread where a user asked,
Thousands of people commented. Because of course we know these people. They are Americans, and they are immigrants, and they are veterans, and they are the people we went to high school with, and they are family members, and they are cops, and they are church-goers, and they are neighbors.
These are the people who elected Trump, the people who want a Christo-fascist government, the bigots and misogynists and homophobes, the fearful and ignorant, the people who love money more than people, who refuse to raise taxes to fund schools and who hate the democracy of the public library. They have always been among us, waiting for their moment. They are the United States of America, too.
It’s possible that they joined up for a good reason, or it’s possible that they joined for a bad reason. Both are equally likely. They may be staying to mitigate harm, or they may be actively committing harm, trying to get away with whatever they can while they (and their guy) sit at the top of the pyramid.
This is not new. But it is blatant power and abuse like we haven’t seen in a long time in my country.
An International Business Times article summed up the reddit thread where Americans told the stories of the ICE agents they know personally. The most insightful comment, to me, wondered about the prevalence of Right wing extremism amongst agents:
“One comment claimed, ‘All the 2nd Amendment militia and Proud Boy groups magically evaporated when ICE started hiring. It’s not that they changed — they found new employment.’ Others echoed the sentiment, arguing that ICE shifted from a bureaucratic enforcement agency to one driven by ideology, leaving ‘regular people’ to exit while extremists stayed.”
While the opacity of ICE’s operations makes it impossible to study their hiring trends or the demographic make-up of agents, IBT pointed out that, “Federal agencies have acknowledged for years the risk of white-supremacist infiltration in law enforcement, and outlets such as The Atlantic have reported on concerns that extremist rhetoric overlaps with immigration enforcement messaging.”
Actually, we don’t need federal agencies to tell us to be afraid of ourselves and our worst impulses, because we know the names of those we fear. This is America. And this is the America that my kids and yours and theirs have to grow up in.
For me, the grief of back-to-school encompasses all of this—the violence inherent in my nation, epitomized by too-much access to guns; the violence of the government toward some of the most vulnerable citizens and noncitizens in our borders; and the fear that children have to lasso just to walk into the doors of a public institution like their neighborhood school. (Add to this the fact that my children are GROWING UP SO FAST that, any second now, I’ll be sweating college payments in a few years!!)
My children may be citizens and we do not own guns as a family. Still, because of attending school outside of our home, the likelihood that they encounter ICE and/or a school shooter is still high. That makes back-to-school season difficult for us grown-ups, who know the dangers our children may have to face with a greater clarity than our kids can imagine.
Times like these make me feel so small and so ineffectual. I find myself unconsciously praying the help prayers, as the world presses in.
And also, thinking of school clashes with ICE makes me remember the resistors. I recall the muscle of the mothers of Minnesota, the protesting clergy of Chicago, and the immigration attorneys of every city USA who move heaven and Earth to keep our neighbors safe.
We still have each other. That is a collective power that ICE cannot match.
And that’s why, next week, I plan to march over to the school across the street for the second time in a year to register as a volunteer, so that, just in case ICE comes knocking, I can be the obnoxious white lady from the neighborhood who stands across the sidewalk to record an encounter on her phone, whistle in her mouth and furious love in her heart for the families whom ICE is choosing to arrest.
It’s honestly the very least I can do.
And I encourage you to make the same kind of good trouble, my friends. Would you tell me some good trouble you plan to get up to this year? [Comment or DM me and I’ll share some of your ideas anonymously!]
Thanks for reading.
Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant
A Worthy Rabbit Hole
You’ll be relieved, no doubt, to learn that I resisted screenshotting allll of the fascinating comments in the reddit thread I mentioned above. But here are a few that you must read [and that I must remember]. Here’s the question again—
And the comments…
“In Colorado, a father driving his 12-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son to school was pulled over and all three were detained, even after agents realized he was not the person they wanted. After several weeks in a Texas detention center, the father and two children accepted voluntary departure to Colombia, despite their active asylum case. They were removed roughly six weeks after their traffic stop. Before their removal, the mother told the Durango City Council that her 12-year-old daughter reported being inappropriately touched by an agent.” [HER F-CKING 12-YEAR-OLD!!!!!@!!!!!!]
And, as it turns out, abuse by ICE agents of women in detention is not a new problem, either.