Mixed-status families fear becoming pawns in looming immigration showdown

Ruth Rodriguez was playing outside her Los Angeles neighborhood when she and other children spotted uniformed “ICE” officers across the street. It was 2006 and several nationwide demonstrations saw millions take to the streets to protest immigration policy and anti-immigrant rhetoric, yet the 6-year-old still felt unsafe.

Rodriguez ran back toward the apartment complex where she lived with her friends and hid under the dark stairs waiting for the agents to leave.

“I’ve never lived in a state of feeling safe and secure,” Rodriguez, now 22, told Reckon. “Being naive as a kid was never a reality for me.”

Rodriguez was born in Los Angeles to migrant parents from Guanajuato, Mexico. She and the other children who ran and hid were all U.S. citizens but their parents or other family members weren’t.

They belong to a small group — about 12 percent of all Americans — who have at least one undocumented family member, according to Patricia Gándara, a research professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and co-author of the book “Schools Under Siege: The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Educational Equity.” Gándara led a national study, which surveyed 3,600 educators from more than 700 schools across 13 states.

The study found that in 2019, 5 million children under 19 -– 7 percent of all kids in the country — lived in a mixed-status family. About 90 percent were born to undocumented migrants and are American citizens, but are nonetheless negatively impacted by a “broken” immigration system that touches everything from education to wellbeing, Gándara said.

“They’re U.S. citizens with all the rights and privileges, but as long as their parents are under the gun and don’t have citizenship themselves, as long as the family is at risk that way, then the kids are at risk,” she added.

The study’s update, which was published in early December, comes ahead of a “showdown” election year and amid reports of the Biden Administration using immigration policy to negotiate for additional aid to Ukraine and Israel. Gándara said “total focus” on the border has drawn attention away from the 11 million immigrants and their families who have lived in the U.S. for decades.

“We cannot continue to bargain with the lives of people seeking asylum and immigrants who are already in the country,” said Guerline Jozef, the co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, during a press conference on Friday with other immigration advocates.

Immigrant roots are seen in public schools, with about 28 percent of all pre-K-12 students coming from a mixed-status family, according to the study.

More than 61 percent of teachers surveyed in the study said they saw an impact on students’ academic performance due to increased fears about their mixed-status families’ safety.

Rodriguez said she remembers praying that her mother would be there every weekday after school to pick her up and that her dad would come home every night “because that meant the cops didn’t get them.”

Teachers reported that students of these communities were “spacing out” and were overall less engaged in class, and 58 percent said fear of immigration raids in their neighborhoods led to more school absences. Researchers found that higher rates of arrests correlated to a decline of roughly one month of learning loss for English language learners.

Children ages 6 to 13 had an increased chance of repeating a grade and high school students were 18 percent more likely to drop out.

At Golden Valley High School in Santa Clarita, California, Assistant Principal Gwendolyn Delgado and world languages department chair Erika Cedeno, both members in the nonprofit education leadership organization Teach Plus, said they’ve noticed that students from immigrant families have become more secretive and are afraid to talk about their family status.

Cedeno said they try to cultivate an open and inclusive environment at Golden Valley to encourage families to share their experiences and find community with others. Cedeno said her daughter attends the high school and told her mother how happy she was to be able to speak Spanish and have nobody “mocking me or laughing.”

Though the student population is diverse, the school administration is predominantly white males, Delgado said. Their school is the only one in the 16-school district with a Latino principal, and Delgado said she is pulled into several meetings across different schools.

“That puts pressure on me as a Latina administrator to be providing a lot of support for our community,” Delgado said.

Overall, students of mixed-status families were less engaged at school and less prepared for college, according to the study. Parents were also afraid their children would be seen as different if they spoke another language or disclosed the family’s immigration status.

So students become “totally dependent” on their counselors to navigate their education, Gándara said.

“Whether they’re documented or undocumented, if your parent is an immigrant, it’s pretty certain that they didn’t go to school in the U.S., so they don’t know how the school system works,” Gándara said. “They don’t know how to monitor how well the school is serving their children.”

Fifty-one percent of teachers surveyed said parents expressed concerns about arrest and deportation and sought help from school staff.

According to the study, teachers reported feeling anxious due to anti-immigrant sentiments and felt responsible for creating a safe environment at their schools. Latine teachers were more likely to take on additional responsibilities like translating and advocating for students, researchers said.

Delgado, who is first-generation from a mixed-status family, is used to taking on additional responsibilities. When she was a child, she was her parents’ biggest advocate.

“You have to maneuver a lot of these systems for your parents,” she said. “You are taking on all these different parental roles that you’re not prepared for as a child. Every childhood was just about getting by.”

Now as an educator, she tries to take the pressure off of her students by making translators and multi-lingual educators available during parent meetings and open houses.

Researchers suggest that districts hire more counselors from immigrant and diverse backgrounds in order to provide better support, as well as provide educators with trauma-informed training, offer resources and guidance to immigrant families and partner with advocacy organizations to learn best practices.

Gándara said comprehensive immigration reform that provides pathways to citizenship and permanent legal status would ensure the stability and wellbeing of immigrant families and their children.

Rodriguez recently graduated from UCLA, where she did undergraduate research on mixed-status families like her own. She works as a college prep counselor at a Los Angeles high school because she wants to make sure other students like her can attend university.

“It’s not naive to be hopeful,” Rodriguez said. “Documented children of undocumented immigrants like us exist and we’re here to be allies on the frontlines, putting our privilege on the line.”