What The ICE Reign Of Terror Is Doing To Our Kids

And yes, they are all our kids

Hello friends.

This post is going out a day late because of yesterday’s national shutdown.

When I think about the victims of our current reign of terror I think about children.

Six children teargassed inside a van in Minneapolis after the family was caught between federal agents and protesters on the way home from their son’s basketball game. Destiny Jackson, 26, told CNN that she had to administer CPR to her six-month-old baby.

family photo of Yuanxin Zheng via The New York Times

Five-year-old Liam Ramos, in his blue bunny hat, taken with his father 1300 miles from home to Dilley, Texas, to a family prison run for profit, in likely violation of a longstanding court order, where there are allegations of spoiled food and inadequate access to medical care. You can see drone footage of detained families, including children, protesting ICE, at great personal risk, there last week. Ramos, reportedly, has become very ill in detention.

Six-year-old Yuanxin Zheng, deported with his father from New York City.

Six-year-old Annabella Rodríguez, found wandering the streets, crying, asking “Where’s Papi?” after her dad was grabbed by ICE in Morristown, New Jersey.

The six-year-old son of Renee Good, who had just been dropped off at his new school, whose stuffed animals were peeking out of the glove compartment, when federal agents shot his mother dead. His charter school has had to switch to remote learning for students’ safety after becoming the focus of right wing hate and death threats.

But these children, whose names we know, are not the only child victims of what the Trump administration is calling immigration enforcement. Nor are the reported 3,800 children taken into immigration detention between January and October 2025, including children as young as one or two years old.

What’s happening is hurting a startling percentage of the nation’s school children in ways that will be measurably felt for decades.

Photo via Instagram

It Is Unconscionable That Our Government Is Choosing to Harm Children Like Liam

As of 2022, one in four children in the United States had at least one foreign-born parent. That’s about 18 million children who could plausibly worry about they or their families being targeted by ICE / CBP.

Many are staying home from school because of that worry. Which is rational, because federal agents are making schools a target of their operations, after decades in which public schools were considered sanctuaries.

L. is a high school senior in the Minneapolis suburbs and the child of immigrants from West Africa. “One of my friends is Hispanic and her parents aren’t letting her go to school,” she told me. “She has to carry her birth certificate and passport when she leaves the house. My little brother is scared to go out with his friends. He’s only 12. We got a message last week about ICE coming to another school in our district. I wasn’t surprised. It gets to a point where you’re disgusted, but you’re not shocked anymore.”

In November, Education Week surveyed principals who work with immigrant families. One in four reported reduced student attendance, and 15% said they had seen reduced enrollment. In a second national survey of high school principals, nearly two-thirds reported lower attendance from immigrant families. A research paper found that after crackdowns in the Central Valley of California, where a high percentage of students are Hispanic, missed days went up 22% compared to previous years. Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country, counted an 8 percent enrollment drop this school year among English language learners who have been here less than three years. In the most-targeted neighborhoods in Minneapolis, school attendance has been off an estimated 20 to 40 percent.

Even more school leaders are saying their students are showing fear, anxiety, distraction, disengagement. Trauma.

But let’s focus just on students’ physical presence in school, for a moment, because that happens to be a civil right.

The United States broadly lacks a social safety net compared to other rich countries. Our public school system is the one exception. It steps into the breach for millions of children who otherwise could miss out on regular meals, access to basic health care like eye exams and immunization, and connections to nonprofit social services.

This access is particularly notable for undocumented immigrants, who are denied many other services and protections of the law. In the 1982 case Plyler vs. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the children of undocumented people have the right to attend K-12 public schools. The state of Texas had attempted to bar them. The opinion authored by Justice William J. Brennan was that this violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The Trump regime is thus, arguably, betraying millions of children’s rights under the Constitution by making them reasonably afraid to go to school or even to enroll in the first place.

And lest you imagine that the occasional missed day is a minor inconvenience, we have evidence that that’s not so. When students miss more than 10 percent of the school year, just 18 days throughout the year, it hurts. It’s highly correlated with children not learning to read by third grade, and not graduating high school. Chronic absenteeism, as it’s called, is on the rise generally, a lingering problem from the pandemic that is dragging down students’ achievement and connection to community.

The Minneapolis and St. Paul public school districts outright canceled school for a few days around Renee Good’s killing, which coincided with an ICE raid on a high school. Then they announced a shift to “hybrid learning”. Hybrid learning, as anyone who was a parent or teacher during COVID will recall, means that the same teachers and staff are having to offer classroom-based and virtual instruction in parallel.

While this is a laudable attempt to offer some stopgap to the many children who are too terrified to attend in person, we all learned during the pandemic that remote learning is a “force multiplier for inequality,” in the words of MIT researcher Justin Reich. Students in crowded homes, those with spotty wifi, too few or older devices, with parents who are not native English speakers, will be less likely to be able to benefit meaningfully from Zoom school. And these are some of the exact students who will be staying home. They will be socially and emotionally isolated as well, with mental health impacts we all witnessed.

“It’s one of the many tragedies of this moment,” says Kenzie O’Keefe, who works with high school student journalists in Minneapolis and St. Paul and is also a mother of two young children. “We have some of the worst educational disparities in the country already and there’s no doubt in my mind that this is not the same quality education.

“We’re missing out on so much, at at time when we’re just starting to see students break free of the real struggles that were created from COVID isolation.”

This is a tragedy, yes, but it’s arguably also a violation of law. And I would again invoke the words of Justice Brennan in Plyler vs. Doe, who pointed out that it’s incredibly shortsighted to deny children an education. It doesn’t just hurt the children, it harms the society of which they are a part, he argued:

“Children who do not receive a public education … will result in a net burden on society because they cannot contribute to civic institutions, which would be a greater loss to the state than the cost of educating them now.”

These losses will linger for a generation, even if MAGA goes away tomorrow. And any reckoning our country goes through should include justice for all the children affected in this way.

PAY PEOPLE’S RENT IN MINNEAPOLIS: Following Garrett Bucks and Erin Boyle, I’m matching donations up to $500! Just reply to this email with a screenshot of your receipt.

---

Come study and practice with me!

I’m offering a 5-week online program, February 26 – March 26, 2026, in line with my forthcoming book, to examine our collective emotional responses to the crises of our time and learn to find inspiration even in the depths of despair.

Explore your emotions with curiosity – building resilience and working with the energy within our bodies. The Institute for Jewish Spirituality has a number of wonderful offerings you can check out here; you don’t need to be Jewish to sign up!