Heather Curtis and Kendra Yoshinaga
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON (WMAL)- School officials in Arlington County are telling parents of illegal immigrant children that their kids can come back to school.
Superintendent Patrick K. Murphy has sent a letter to families after hearing that some parents were keeping their children home from school for fear that federal immigration raids would lead to their deportation.
“I want to reassure all of our families that children in our care will be safe,” Murphy wrote.
In recent months, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has undertaken a broad crackdown on undocumented immigrants under Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.
Arlington County School Board Chair Emma Viola Sanchez says that the raids spread fear among students who heard about their peers being deported.
“One of our students, at night, he was taken by Homeland Security. Then other students found out and they started to get very worried,” she says.
While it’s difficult to get a sense of exactly how many students have missed school, Sanchez says that teachers were noticing.
“It has really actually been the teachers who have raised those concerns,” she says. “Especially at the high school level, they wanted for the students to come to school and to feel that they are safe and that Arlington Public Schools support them.”
Activist Greg Letiecq of Richmond-based anti-illegal immigration group Save the Old Dominion says that if parents were afraid to send their children to school, that wasn’t the superintendent’s problem.
“Is it the responsibility of a school superintendent to address what role the federal government is doing in the enforcement of its laws?” Letiecq said. “Really, they should be referring anyone with questions about how the law is enforced to the Justice Department.”
But at the end of the day, Sanchez says, it was important for the school system to get the message out to parents.
“I think it’s very important for us, as a community, to understand the struggles that especially our unaccompanied minors from Central America face,” Sanchez says. “We just want them to know that they are safe, and that’s why we wanted to send that message.”
Copyright 2016 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (Photo: Flickr user barrettelementary)
