The arrest of a parent near a Portland elementary school by ICE agents last week has focused attention on how President Donald Trump's enforcement agenda could affect immigrant students and families.
The Portland city council this week passed a resolution calling for more transparency from federal law enforcement agencies.
To better understand the legal questions at play, All Things Considered host Ari Snider spoke with staff attorney Max Brooks from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, which recently published a back to school guide for immigrant families and other groups.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Brooks: Immigrant families still have a basic right to a public education under the Equal Protection Clause [of the 14th Amendment] and under Supreme Court precedent, and there's related rights that folks should not be required to provide certain documents, like their birth certificates, to show residency to be able to go to public schools. And there's lots families can do, kind of on their own, to just prepare for the possibility of an arrest where you record different information — maybe bank accounts, or about passwords, or about where certain documents are kept, so that if the worst were to happen, and if there were an arrest by ICE, you wouldn't be scrambling to do some of the most useful things that would be good to have in place ahead of time. So we encourage families that are worried about something like this to go ahead and complete a family preparedness plan and make sure they're doing as much as they can ahead of time to be in as good a position as possible if the worst does happen.
Snider: So what kind of information can schools request about students' immigration status or their residency?
School districts cannot ask about a student's citizenship or immigration status as proof of the student's residency within a district. They can, you know, ask for a birth certificate, but you have the right to withhold that, or you have the right to provide alternate documents that prove what your age is that may not reveal as much about your immigration status.
Should families be concerned at all about their information that they file with the school district ending up in the hands of the federal government?
There's no absolute guarantee that, you know, an ICE agent couldn't get a judicial warrant to try to get information from a school district. And a school district would have to abide by a valid judicial warrant. But there are policies that school districts can put in place, like insisting on a judicial warrant to provide that kind of information, or not collecting certain kinds of information when other information would serve the same purpose, that make it less likely that something like that would happen.
So to the point of federal agents accessing school property, are ICE agents allowed to enter schools and school grounds? Under what circumstances would federal agents be allowed on campus?
It's a bit of a complicated question, but it's certainly clearer that federal agents would not have access to nonpublic areas of a school if the school did not consent to their accessing those areas, and if it was really clear what those areas were. Now, if ICE were to obtain a warrant, a judicial warrant, they likely would have the ability to enter the school grounds. But short of that, if they were to have just an administrative warrant, a warrant that they issue internally — which is often what an ICE warrant is — that is not something that a school district would have to honor to allow that officer into non-public areas of the school.
So I guess one thing I'm taking away here is that a lot of this does depend on the individual district and what information they collect.
Yeah, so school districts themselves can create policies that are more protective or less protective of the immigrant families in their district, and so folks within these communities can research what policies their schools do have and advocate for better policies, if they don't like what the existing policies are.
