Trump’s relentless attacks on immigrants are front of mind for students, teachers, and working families headed into the 2025-26 school year. Following the ramping up of ICE raids in Los Angeles last spring, as well as cases like the detention and separation of fourth-grader Martir Garcia Lara from his father, many Latino and immigrant students stayed home for graduation events at the end of last school year, fearing the crackdown. The spectre of Trump’s ICE looms just as large now as then, in the context of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of DC and stated plans to send troops into Chicago.

The fear of ICE descending upon our schools is real, and is not just circulating on high school campuses either. High-profile detentions and visa revocations on college campuses have been a clear feature of Trump’s administration, most notably with the arrest and disappearance of pro-Palestine antiwar activist Mahmoud Khalil in March. Not only this, but the rise of Trump has further emboldened far-right organizing on college campuses. Last semester, there were reports of students dressing up as ICE agents and student groups organizing events to call ICE on their undocumented classmates. This has contributed to the atmosphere of fear and disunity among students and workers that Trump’s administration has been actively stoking. From elementary schools to universities, school communities are desperately seeking ways to protect themselves and defeat Trump’s deportation agenda.

Get Organized To Kick ICE Off Campus!

To seriously push back Trump’s deportation agenda, our schools need to become bastions of opposition to Trump’s plans for immigrant detentions and deportations. Many educators and their unions have already taken to distributing “Know Your Rights” leaflets to parents and students at school thresholds. Such was the case for Alondra Garcia, an immigrant elementary school teacher in Milwaukee who was suspended without pay for providing families with information about legal services available to them in case of deportation.

Importantly, in an action initiated by Socialist Alternative members, hundreds of community members, union educators, and immigrants rights activists rallied outside of her school on the day of her suspension to defend Ms. Garcia and all immigrants under attack right now. This action helped put enough pressure on the Milwaukee Public School district to win back-pay for Ms. Garcia for her wrongful suspension and to strike the file from her personal record.

This points towards the type of rapid-response organizing and solidarity needed to protect immigrant students and community members from ICE. While it is important for immigrants to know their basic legal rights as individuals, it is more important that working-class communities, especially unionized workers and those who are native-born and with legal status, are prepared to respond to raids by ICE and local police with direct action!

Educators’ unions, especially those like the Chicago Teachers’ Union who are already discussing creating “sanctuary teams” in their schools, should take the lead in organizing defense against deportations. Even in places where schools do have a formal policy of non-cooperation with ICE, we cannot have blind faith in the goodwill of school administrations. Alondra Garcia’s case demonstrates this, as her right-wing principal threatened to charge families 50 cents a page for the district’s “Safe Haven” policy and intimated that he would not stand in ICE’s way if they were to arrive at Allen-Field Elementary, where Ms. Garcia teaches. 

Student clubs can be a basis for this type of organizing, especially where educators’ unions aren’t actively taking it up. Students across the country have been the lifeblood of protests and walkouts for students and community members targeted by ICE. As this school year starts, this trend has persisted with recent protests in Queens against a six-year-old girl being detained and ripped from her family following a visit to immigration court. It is obvious to many young people that Trump’s draconian policies affect all working-class people, regardless of age. 

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

There is no shortage of energy among young people willing to fight deportations. Joint organizing of educators and students against Trump’s attacks can lay the groundwork for building deeper community-based structures that could democratically organize emergency defense networks capable of frustrating ICE’s operations. These struggles can’t just stop at defending against single deportations or attacks, but need to go on the offensive. 

Driving ICE out of our communities completely, a more ambitious political task, will require workers’ strongest weapon: shutting down workplaces with strike action. Educators’ unions can lead this fight, along with organized student, parent, and community support but other sections of the labor movement would need to join the fight to create enough of a crisis for the system.

Ultimately, Trump’s deportation agenda is a part of deepening divide-and-rule and ruthless attacks on the most vulnerable layers of capitalist society. The only way our schools can truly confront and defeat Trump, ICE, and the right wing is through a multiethnic, multigenerational movement of working people. 

Our fight for safe schools can also push to tax corporations and the rich to fund our public schools, which have been under attack by billionaires and both the Democratic and Republican parties for decades. Trump is a symptom of a broken capitalist system that only the working class and the oppressed can change. If we are to end the vicious cycle of precarity, xenophobia, and deportations, the struggle to defeat Trump’s deportation agenda in our schools must point to the need to end capitalism altogether.