Betsy DeVos Says Schools Should Call ICE on Undocumented Students
Betsy DeVos has spent her brief but disastrous tenure as secretary of education by fighting against students at every turn. Whenever she's had the opportunity, she's chosen to make education more hostile, more expensive, and now, more dangerous.
Earlier this week, DeVos appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. While there, she was questioned by Adriano Espaillat, a Democratic Representative from New York and a formerly undocumented immigrant himself, about what she thought schools' roles were regarding ICE. Per The Independent:
“Inside the school,” Mr Espaillat asked, “if a principal or a teacher finds out that a certain child is undocumented, or his or her family members are undocumented, do you feel that the principal or teacher is responsible to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to have that family reported?”
Ms DeVos replied: “Sir, I think that’s a school decision. That’s a local community decision. And again, I refer to the fact that we have laws and we also are compassionate, and I urge this body to do its job and address or clarify where there is confusion around this.”
DeVos is right, we do have laws—laws that forbid exactly what she's directing schools to do. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that schools cannot deny children their right to a free education based on their immigration status. That's because, despite what DeVos seems to think, even undocumented immigrants have protections under the U.S. constitution. Unsurprisingly, the specter of arrest and deportation is more than enough to keep children from school. The Huffington Post points out that schools see sharp drops in attendance after local businesses are raided by ICE. In an attempt to clarify DeVos' seeming ignorance of laws protecting students without actually retracting what she said, a spokesperson for the Department of Education told HuffPo, "Her position is that schools must comply with Plyler and all other applicable and relevant law."
Condemnation came quickly. Rocío Inclán, the former director of the Center for Social Justice at the National Education Association, told NBC News, "We are shocked, incredulous and we're really upset that the leader of our public schools, the Education Department, would be so uninformed and wrong." The ACLU released a statement the same day, with director of immigration policy Lorella Praelli saying:
“Let’s be clear: Any school that reports a child to ICE would violate the Constitution. The Supreme Court has made clear that every child in America has a right to a basic education, regardless of immigration status. Secretary DeVos is once again wrong.”
That's the legal angle, but consider the moral one as well. According to DeVos, every school should decide for itself whether or not to turn over students to an unaccountable, militarized police force that's abducting people off the street. She's empowering schools to put students into an overwhelmed and massively flawed system that had already lost track of nearly 1500 children before Trump directed Customs and Border Patrol to forcibly separate children from their parents. It's a system where CBP is accused of routinely abusing child detainees—verbally, physically, and sexually.
The best case scenario is that DeVos is as uninformed about ICE as she is about basically everything in her own department. The worst case scenario is that she knows the horror she's exposing students to and just doesn't mind at all.
