Juan Ochoa:

Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan. I am Juan Ochoa, international public relations representative for the Michigan News Office. I want to welcome William Lopez, clinical associate professor of health behavior and health equity at the School of Public Health, who specializes in the effects of immigration policies and the health impacts of law enforcement on individuals. Welcome, Professor Lopez.

William Lopez:

Thanks so much, Juan. Happy to be here.

Juan Ochoa:

You recently talked about the heightened concerns and fears over the increase in deportations by federal law enforcement. Can you share some thoughts on how this has affected K through 12 and college students this year?

William Lopez:

Yeah, Juan, it’s such a good question, right? So one of the things that I’ll start with is that we often think about deportation and the people who are impacted as in who is being deported. And that is certainly important. But what’s also critical to understand is that there’s this fear, there’s this chilling effect about the possibility of deportation that really, to use a public health phrase, can change the behaviors of folks in a community.

And I’ll give just a couple of examples. One of the things that we see after immigration enforcement is that students often stop going to school. And the week following immigration enforcement, there’s just lots of absences. Now, the work that I did comes from studying deportation after immigration worksite raids, specifically six large-scale worksite raids that happened in 2018.

And one of the things that we saw after those raids is that schools, especially elementary and middle schools and high schools, continued to be impacted because often parents would either be detained or deported and those parents couldn’t take their kids to school. But also that other parents were simply scared to drive around and move around their environment and wouldn’t take their kids to school.

So we saw this just spike in absences in the days after these worksite raids. And I’ll note that it’s not just worksite raids. A colleague, J. Jacob Kirksey at Texas Tech, studied immigration enforcement generally, so just in communities with more deportations.

And what he found and his team found is that simply having more arrests, whether this all occurs in one day or over the course of a year, generally can mean more absences among students, especially Latino students, and specifically can mean lower test scores in things like language and math. So deportation and the fear of deportation definitely impacts school attendance rates as well as school test scores among K through 12 students.

Juan Ochoa:

You mentioned that parents were taking their children or stopped taking their children to school. Does that mean that they were pulling their kids out of school completely?

William Lopez:

That is one option. So I would say in the immediate term, in the day after a large-scale enforcement, parents simply weren’t bringing their kids to school. And again, I’ll reiterate, this generally tends to be Latino students and Latino parents are all immigrants Latinos, of course, not, but these are the communities with which I worked. So we’re also seeing just this grade discrepancy result and absentee and attendance discrepancy result between Latino students and white students.

What does happen in the long term is sometimes kids will, students will return to school, but also we do see higher rates of students leaving the district. And what research shows us is that when students choose to leave a district and attend a different school, they tend to do well, perhaps better, because they’re making a choice or their parents are making a choice to go to a school that’s a better fit.

But we see that when students are forced to leave a district, perhaps because of something related to poverty, homelessness, or deportation, we see students struggle to reintegrate into their new schools. So to return to your question, at a minimum, in the days following large-scale enforcement, we do see upticks in absences. Some of those students will return.

Some students, a smaller portion will leave the district. But we can also imagine from all of our research into psychology and into education that when students are worried about their families and their lives, they do worse in school, and nothing can distract the child like the fear of parental deportation.

Juan Ochoa:

For those that are being taken out of school completely or moving districts, where are they going?

William Lopez:

Often they’ll go to other districts, other districts nearby, sometimes districts in which they’re not as worried about enforcement. And for a small minority, we may see them return to their parents’ countries of birth. One of the things often missed, again, when we think about immigration enforcement and deportation is we think specifically about that individual who’s undocumented and who is deported, but we know from our research that families are mixed-status families and belong to mixed-status communities.

And what that means is that while one or more people in the family may be undocumented, others have visas, others are citizens. And when an undocumented parent is deported and returned to Mexico, often what we see is parents and spouses have to make the very hard choice about whether or not the children go with them back to I said Mexico, but back to the country of origin, which statistically in the US tends to be a Mexico and Central America, but can, of course, be other countries outside of the US as well.

Juan Ochoa:

Families and students are clearly affected by the mere fear of deportation, whether it happens to them or not. What are some of the impacts of living with this fear that people are not typically aware of?

William Lopez:

Yeah, this takes me back to one story that I was told when I did my work here in Washtenaw County. So my first book, Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid, looked at a home raid that happened seven miles from where we’re sitting, Juan, so pretty close in our own community. And one of the men that was detained in the raid, he was arrested, just happened to be a customer of the person who was the target of the raid.

And we’ll call him Antonio. And Antonio was detained for about a month, I believe. And then when he was released and his family did not know if he was going to be deported while he was detained. And when he was released, he told me this story about his kids who would now refuse to sleep in their own room and wanted to sleep in his room right next to his bed. And his son would tell him, “Well, dad, I’m scared. When I’m asleep, if I’m holding your hand, no one will be able to take you away from me.”

And that story really hit me because parents that I’ve spoken with throughout the country, and not just parents, but often teachers and church leaders and on and on, will tell stories of children who are fearful that when their parents leave, they may never see them again, or at least they may see them with a different family arrangement perhaps on the other side of the border.

One of the impacts of this fear of deportation is definitely children’s attachment and relationship with their parents and other guardians in their lives that they love, worrying that they won’t be able to see those people again. I’ll add one more that often people miss. When I studied worksite raids, one of the things that I learned is that they happened during the workday.

And with few exceptions during the workday, children and teens are in school. So one of the impacts of deportation is actually, first and foremost, again, on immigrant families themselves, but I’d say secondarily on educators. It tends to be teachers who always had to explain to these students that the parents who dropped them off may not be the parents to pick them up that day.

And going back to our conversation earlier, it’s teachers who have to make up for the achievement gaps that come when Latino students don’t attend school or see decreases in their grades. So primarily, mass deportation is going to affect families, but it cannot understate the impact it’s going to have on the lives and careers of educators as well.

Juan Ochoa:

If ordinary citizens with prior or no experience or training in immigration procedures start working with law enforcement officers and arresting individuals, what issues or problems might arise during these arrests?

William Lopez:

So DHS has been very clear that they’re aggressively working to expand ICE, and specifically detention officers. Stephen Miller said they’re seeking one million deportations a year. We remember thinking back to peak numbers, and these were during the Obama administration, that 500,000 people really, really shook up the country because this was so many people.

So a million. For one, it’s probably not possible, but I would argue that it gives the administration a number to chase and therefore funding to seek and people to hire. But as we all know, when you expand at this rate, any number of things can happen when the pieces aren’t in place to screen who you’re hiring, for example. And we certainly see this in recent arrests in Chicago and in LA where these arrests are overtly violent.

They often involve firearms being carried unholstered with fingers on the trigger of the weapon. And they often involve lots of racial profiling, as was confirmed by Tom Homan, the former director of ICE during the first Trump administration and the current border czar under the current Trump administration. What I also want to be clear about is that from a public health perspective, deportation is always something that should concern us.

What we know from our research is that separating people from their families and their communities will always be unhealthy. So before we get even into the critique of hiring more ICE agents, I want to go back to the very beginning and say, even if the hiring went “well” and everyone was screened correctly, deportation by the nature of what it’s doing is bad for individuals, families, and communities.

And no matter where you stand politically, this is something that should concern you. No matter how you’re voting or what you believe, you always want to know the health, financial, political, and social implications of your policies and of the politicians you support.

Juan Ochoa:

What are some of the ways that these parents and students can seek help?

William Lopez:

It’s a good question. So what are some of these ways that parents and students can seek help? One thing to keep in mind is that we’re as a country actively trying to remove millions of people from our community. And first and foremost, it’s important for those who want to support these communities to think about how we can strategize with resources we already have in addition to seeking other resources.

Going back to schools, one thing that we’ve seen is schools can always have a plan for what will happen when one or multiple parents are removed. Just to give some examples, what we saw is that schools had to pivot and react quickly because new adults were going to be picking up students, and those adults didn’t necessarily have approval to pick up those students.

So districts had to decide who will be allowed to pick up their students, and they had to prepare bus drivers so that bus drivers didn’t drop students off in homes where there were no parents. So one thing they can certainly be done is that schools can have a plan for when either large-scale enforcement happens, but even if one parent is detained, how can we support that student, the parent who’s left behind, and how can we reintegrate that student into the school?

Legal resources always have been and will always be needed in these situations, both low-cost legal resources, but certainly bilingual or multilingual resources that are accessible to individuals. And one thing that we see too is that the administration is aware that one way to decrease the odds that someone is able to access a lawyer is to detain them somewhere far from their home community.

And when someone’s detained at a remote location, it’s often hard for the lawyer or for family members to drive to visit them. So we need to not only find lawyers who are bilingual and low-cost, but often find community members willing to drive and able to drive to these remote locations.

Juan Ochoa:

Is that happening, schools, communities helping to deal with issues related to deportation?

William Lopez:

Absolutely. One thing that I’ve seen in this work is that communities don’t just sit by. When members are removed, historically and currently, families and communities have always found ways to support those when someone is removed. And that’s certainly true today. And as I traveled to the country and saw how communities responded, many of these resistance strategies were creative, were beautiful, tapped into cultural and linguistic and even musical heritages and fought the deportation, the efforts to deport community members in creative ways.

One of the ones we saw that I thought was unique in California is we saw a couple of instances of mariachi bands playing music into the night in hotels, so that agents who are going to deport family members the next day weren’t able to get the rest they perhaps planned. But we also see, of course, we see mutual aid networks pop up throughout the country. And what this means is that we’re starting to understand more and more that sometimes providing someone or finding a lawyer for someone is only one part of the strategy.

So that case may be winnable, but oftentimes in the current administration it’s not. What does that mean? It means an individual is going to be deported and the family left behind needs to find some ways to continue on as we talked about, integrating back into schools, but also simple things like filling the refrigerator with food. So communities will be able to raise money, get donations to be able to care for these families.

When we collected the stories for my second book, Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance, one thing that we saw is that churches often had food drives immediately after these worksite raids and collected food so that community members could have something to eat. After enforcement, one thing you constantly hear is that people are hungry.

A few reasons for this, one of which is folks aren’t leaving their homes. They’re scared to drive and be profiled and detained, another of which is the financial provider has been detained and deported, so families are just poorer. Food and diapers were constantly needed after enforcement events, and mutual aid networks popped up all over the country to be able to support these families.

Juan Ochoa:

Have you seen an increase in classmates being bullies to some of the Hispanic or other students?

William Lopez:

You asked earlier about the expansion of ICE’s hiring practices, and one thing that you see is that there’s also an aggressive push for advertisements for people to apply. And why that’s important is because we see in lots of these ads from ICE and from DHS this very, very often anti-Latino sentiment, pro often white American sentiment. And we see images that cast Latinos as, of course, dangerous and resource stealers. Very typical stories used to increase immigration enforcement.

This shapes how our country feels about Latinos. And yes, it can impact how students and children feel about their Latino classmates. I have come across instances of bullying. It’s not particularly what I study in my research, but those stories have shown up. I think to get at part of the core of that question as well, this shows up in adults when these ads from ICE and DHS use overt racial and prejudice messages, discriminatory messages.

This changes how we relate to each other. I’ll give two examples of tweets from DHS. They used the ASMR trend, which if you’re familiar with this, this heightened sound. And the first one was the sounds of deportation in the morning, and they focused on the sounds of shackles clinking on the ground as detainees were walked into a plane to be deported. And then the second was the ASMR, the sounds of the Venezuelan ships being blown up.

So you hear the machine gun fire and you hear the explosion of the ship. And why is this important? Because the deportation of Latinos in this case and the extra judicial elimination of this boat in international waters was presented as a joke, as a meme, and people were deported and people were killed in the latter example. And this changes how our nation thinks about Latinos, about immigrants, and even things like international jurisdiction and law and war.

Juan Ochoa:

Well, that’s all we have for this episode. Any closing thoughts? What do you want our listeners to take away?

William Lopez:

So many closing thoughts. When President Trump was elected for this second term, he clearly said he wanted to return to this era of mass deportation. He even referenced, which was unfortunately called, and it pains me to say the operation’s name, but it was called Operation Wetback that happened in the ’50s, returning to this era of mass deportation.

And I want people to realize that this is mass deportation on a scale that we have not seen in our lifetimes, and that is historic in the history of the US. The raid that happened in Ellabell, Georgia, in which nearly 500 people were detained in a single site, is the biggest raid in history. So we’re in a historic moment. And just as mass deportation has started, mass resistance has started as well. And we have to decide how we’re going to interact in this particular moment that is notable in our country’s history.

Juan Ochoa:

That was Dr. William Lopez. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts.

William Lopez:

Thanks so much for having me, Juan. And I look forward to talking again.

Juan Ochoa:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds produced by Michigan News, a division of the University’s Office of the Vice President for Communications.