CHICAGO and LOS ANGELES—Teachers in the Chicago schools and the nation’s two big teachers unions acting jointly in California are hatching plans to protect their students, and specifically their undocumented students, from Donald Trump-ordered raids on schools.
The danger is especially acute in Chicago, where anti-migrant, anti-Hispanic hardliner Thomas Homan delivered a direct threat in the Windy City in the first week of December. Homan, whom Trump named as a “Border Czar,” ordered the Chicago Public Schools to “negotiate” about deportations, or else.
Countering him, plans to protect the migrant students in Chicago are advancing there, both in direct action by the Chicago Teachers Union/AFT Local 1 and in bargaining with the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education, union President Stacy Davis Gates told members in a bargaining update video on December 12.
“It will be our collective bargaining agreement that will behave as a force field against all the encroachments we believe will happen to school districts across the country unless they have a strong flank. And CTU/AFT Local 1 is the strongest of flanks.
“It [the contract] has to provide the supports inside the schools for young people who will need sanctuary.”
Meantime, the union is starting a three-part “Sanctuary Training Series” on how to protect the kids from federal raiders. The first session will be on December 19, entitled “Understanding the Immigration Landscape Under Trump in 2025.” The others will be on January 9 and February 13.
“Students can’t focus on learning when they’re worried about whether their parents will come home at the end of the day, when they see themselves dehumanized in the press, or when representatives of the federal government come to their city to say, ‘You’ll be first in line for removal,’” Gates explained.
Out in California, Kent Wong, Vice President of the California Federation of Teachers, said his union and the National Education Association “are working together to make sure schools are safe spaces for children.
“We saw the trauma about separating children at the border,” he told a recent session of the Progressive Democrats of America. As acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) during Trump’s prior term, “Homan bragged about it.”
“And a thousand children are still separated” from their parents, Wong reported.
“We want to make sure teachers and administrators create that [safe] space and that they disseminate their rights to their students.”
Trump, who hates Spanish-speaking people—legal or undocumented, citizens and migrants—has made it his priority to start mass detentions and deportations of all 10 million-11 million undocumented people in the U.S., starting on his first day in the White House next month.
He also will put Homan in charge of the ICE sweeps and subsequent concentration camps for them, before ejecting the migrants back south of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Homan’s threat led to a mass meeting at the Acero School on the South Side on December 11, and a march to the Chicago Board of Education’s South Side meeting the following afternoon.
At meetings and in bargaining, the local made clear that despite his promises to protect migrants, the union doesn’t trust CPS Chancellor Pedro Martinez to back his words with strong action against ICE.
“We need leadership in the CPS who intend to protect you from the tyranny of Trump and his troops,” CTU President Gates told the crowd at the Acero meeting.
“Pedro Martinez claims they’ve done enough to Trump-proof our district,” a male teacher told the crowd. “But we cannot give in to complacency.”
“Homan is the first saying Chicago is on their target list, but he won’t be the last,” the union said before the school board session. “The CEO and our elected leaders need to be doing at least as much as the educators and mothers of our district are doing with the power we have.
“We put clauses in our contract proposals that build on the sanctuary protections we secured in 2019 and protect against other Project 2025 attacks,” referring to Trump’s Republican platform:
- “Prevent school staff from collaborating with deportation agents.
- “Provide resources to newly arrived families.
- “Ensure flexibility and policies to support impacted employees seeking remedies and legal support.
- “Put our values of teaching the truth and honoring our communities at the center of our education system through protecting academic freedoms that help tell the multidimensional, rich, and complicated history of our country.
“This includes teaching Black history and ethnic studies and establishing broader protections for students and staff from targeted populations—including special education and LGBTQIA+ students, faculty, and staff.
“Threatening mass deportations, banning books, removing civil rights protections, and truncating the teaching of the truth doesn’t serve anyone or anything other than Trump’s white nationalist agenda. It does however serve to instill fear and uncertainty into our school communities and attempt to create division between us.
“Under Trump and Project 2025, our collective bargaining agreement and collective organizing are going to be more important than ever,” CTU President Gates warned.
Trump and Homan hate Hispanics so much they don’t realize how vital those workers are to the U.S. economy, says UCLA’s Wong, who teaches at the school’s Labor Education Center.
“Immigrants comprise a huge share of the workforce that cares for our elderly, our disabled, and our children. In all of the recent disasters” including hurricanes in the Southeast and forest fires in the West and lower New York. “They’ve been cleaning up debris, clearing the streets, and taking away the fallen trees. And during the pandemic, they fed us, as restaurant workers and farm workers,” he said.
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