NYC public schools brace for increase in anti-migrant rhetoric after Trump's election

NEW YORK — New York City public schools are fearful that anti-immigrant rhetoric will reverberate in classrooms in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as president amid political tensions running high and an increasing focus on the possibility of mass deportations.

Teachers and students on the East Coast woke up to the news on Wednesday that voters had again elected Donald Trump as president of the United States in a decisive victory that seized on the country’s fears over immigration and the economy.

While Trump’s message failed to resonate with a majority of residents in New York — close to 68% of voters casting their ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris — his rhetoric could have ripple effects in local classrooms. School administrators are looking for ways to get in front of it.

The morning after Election Day, Martin Urbach found out a student was making offensive jokes at school about Mexican immigrants.

Urbach, the restorative justice coordinator at Boerum Hill School for International Studies, asked his colleagues how they could help the child, who is Latino, take accountability for his actions and make amends with his classmates. The goal, he said, was not to give the student busy work or punish him through academics. They planned a brief lesson on immigration.

“This is not my first Trump election as an educator,” Urbach said. “So the main thing is to hold space with students to actually inquire what were your intentions when you made that joke? What did you mean?”

Boerum Hill School for International Studies is a joint middle and high school in District 15, a segment of northwest Brooklyn that in 2019 implemented a district-wide diversity plan. As a result, a student from Cobble Hill, a neighborhood whose residents almost exclusively voted for Harris, may attend school with a classmate from Sunset Park, where some pockets went for Trump.

Urbach planned two voluntary circle discussions for Friday — one for teachers and staff, the other for students — where the school can talk about the election, share their feelings, and rebuild a sense of community.

‘What fears or concerns do you have moving forward,’ one slide asks. Others pose the questions: ‘what brings you hope?’ or what questions does the group have about the winning candidate’s policies.

“We’re in a diverse community,” Urbach said. “So many students are devastated. The energy’s a bit bizarre. It’s somber and sad. But you can tell some people are happy, but they perhaps don’t feel like they want to share.”

In the immediate aftermath of the election, Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos in a systemwide email on Wednesday urged people to treat each other with civility and respect. Throughout his campaign, Trump pushed disproven theories that migrants were waging a campaign of crime and chaos, repeatedly pointing to his hometown, New York City.

“I encourage us all — educators, school leaders, families, and community members — to discuss this election with our students and to model thoughtful civil discourse in doing so,” Aviles-Ramos wrote. “We must support our students to ask questions, learn the facts, and express their perspectives respectfully.”

Tazin Azad, an education advocate and certified translator and interpreter, said the rhetoric is hardly new.

Azad represented Brooklyn on the Panel for Educational Policy, the city’s school board under mayoral control of the public schools, when an emergency migrant shelter was erected on Floyd Bennett Field, sparking conflict in the community.

Those tensions boiled over last school year when during a storm, the families living in tents on an airfield stayed overnight at a nearby high school, James Madison in Midwood. The school principal shifted classes online, prompting a right-wing media frenzy, followed by hate mail and a bomb threat. Trump claimed students were pushed out of school because of the migrants.

As Trump heads back to the White House, Azad feared that language, and the resulting anxiety for 45,000 newcomers enrolled in local schools, would get worse.

“What I’m worried about is this election result will really green light a lot of that rhetoric,” she said. “We’ve heard there are going to be mass deportations, and I’m wondering what that means for our schools that have welcomed thousands of children. I don’t know if anybody is considering what that means, to have that big of a fear that everybody has to live with for the next few months.”

Azad added that after Trump was elected president in 2016, some undocumented immigrants stopped sending their children to school, wanting to stay close to their families and fearful of contact with the government.

“We had many families pull out, keep them home, because of their undocumented status,” she said. “Today, we’ll see if that is the case again.”

At a news conference this week, Mayor Eric Adams’ deputies said inter-agency coordination is underway that will help families understand their rights and local sanctuary laws, which protect immigrants from certain types of law enforcement.

“I’ve already spoken with the schools chancellor early this morning to talk about how we best support our immigrant families who have children in the schools,” Manuel Castro, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, said Wednesday at City Hall. “That’s top of mind for us. We do not want our immigrant parents to stop sending their children to school.”

Martina Meijer, a Spanish dual-language teacher at a Brooklyn elementary school in District 22, shared the election results with her class this week, explaining the electoral college. A couple of students were happy with the outcome. Some cried. In a class exercise, one student, whose family is undocumented, worried she’ll have to move either this year or next.

The president’s job is to take care of everyone in the country, she explained during the class activity, and make important decisions. She asked students to write on post-it notes what they want the new president to do or how they could help.

“I have a lot of immigrants,” she said, “who are scared of the rhetoric.”