Keeping Immigrant Students Safe Means Talking About ICE

In the Atlanta area, administrators have been telling teachers not to talk about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We have heard this from teachers in JOLT Atlanta, a justice-oriented teacher collective, and from teachers in the Atlanta Association of Raza Educators. One teacher shared that an administrator at a DeKalb County school instructed them to remove from the board a hotline number for a community organization supporting immigrant families. This administrator told teachers to focus on teaching content, assuming that teachers were not teaching academic content through students’ lived experiences. Part of the rationale was that talking about ICE makes students feel anxious and unsafe.