Keeping Our Students Safe

I was born and raised on the southwest side, a second-generation Chicagoan. My maternal grandparents came to the United States from Santiago, Chile, in 1969 to lead a Spanish-language Baptist church. They modeled what we owe each other as human beings, as members of our communities. But, as a child, I saw inequality in Chicago all around me. As early as nine years old, I saw the disparities not just between different schools but across neighborhoods, with far less wealth and resources in predominantly Black and Latine neighborhoods than in white ones.

Then, in 2010, I saw the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) elect a new slate of leadership and begin to question and fight these disparities. I was only 15, but it was striking to me to see my grandparents’ values applied by the CTU to problems throughout the city. Now I have been a proud member of the CTU since 2020. With the Trump administration targeting immigrants, I feel compelled to continue this tradition to protect students and families from abuses by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

With more than 325,000 students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS), we have thousands of students who are immigrants—and thousands more who are the children and grandchildren of immigrants. How do we keep our students safe?

How do we make sure that when kids get dropped off at school in the morning, they’re there in the afternoon to go home? And how do we make sure their parent or guardian is safe—that someone is there at pickup?

In 2019, during President Trump’s first term, we won sanctuary provisions in our contract, and we reaffirmed them in our 2025 contract.* The contract language supports employees who are becoming citizens and makes it clear that CPS employees will protect our school communities and only comply with ICE as required by law. We will not let any unknown person—including ICE agents—simply walk into our schools and take our students. We are responsible for our students’ safety until they are released to a guardian. An ICE agent has no business interrupting the school day; until this administration, our schools, hospitals, and places of worship were off-limits. If an ICE agent wants to enter a Chicago school, they must have a criminal judicial warrant issued by a federal judge.

Building on these provisions, the CTU has worked in cooperation with our allies to distribute know-your-rights materials and related resources for families,^† held workshops to ensure members are well-versed in the law and our procedures, and supported school staff in creating what we call “sanctuary teams.”

A sanctuary team is responsible for knowing people’s rights and school policies in detail—and they are the staff who respond when ICE arrives, by calling lawyers, for example. These teams are also the dissemination vehicle when the CTU has new information to share, and they help families prepare for ICE encounters.

The world saw our sanctuary teams in action when federal agents came to Hamline Elementary and the school clerk swung into action. The district was called, they were denied entry, and the community mobilized in defense.

I won’t name schools that haven’t been in the media, but several close colleagues have shared ICE sightings. At a high school last school year, ICE agents asked for a particular student but had no warrant and were denied entry. We’ve gotten reports of students who were home when ICE came to knock on their doors. One student came to school after his uncle had been detained by ICE at 5 a.m. In another case, ICE targeted a father at drop-off, taking him away in front of his children and leaving them with the school principal. At other schools throughout the spring, unknown vehicles were seen waiting just outside of schools for hours. Members of sanctuary teams began approaching the drivers to ask basic questions: “What’s your name? Can we see your identification?” Agents are supposed to identify themselves, but we’ve found that the vast majority of the time, they leave after such questioning.

What we have in place is working well, but there’s room to improve. And while educators are leading, it should be the work of every school district to implement policies and protocols to protect their students and make school not just the safest place students can be but the most joyful place they can be. In the context of Trump’s attacks, that means having enough counselors, nurses, and social workers to deal with the unprecedented trauma our students are facing. That shouldn’t be a bargaining demand, it should be a given in these times.

In other tragic situations, such as a kindergartner who died of cancer at my school, CPS has a team that arrives immediately with resources and additional personnel. We need something like that for students who live through the trauma of having a family or community member detained.

This work is hard. But it also shows me the best of people. Every day, I find people who are willing to give of themselves to make a community. As a student of history, I know that many people have experienced authoritarianism and emerged from it. We will continue to offer mutual aid, and we will survive.

Kathryn Zamarrón is an elementary school music teacher at Walt Disney Magnet School. She serves on the Chicago Teachers Union’s Latinx Caucus and Elementary Education Committee, among other roles.

*For details on those provisions, see go.aft.org/ats. (return to article)


^†For the AFT’s resources, see go.aft.org/dms. (return to article)

[Photo by Paul Goyette]