Students and staff plead with the School Committee to stop sharing information with ICE
“We are supposed to be safe with you”
First of three articles
A new policy in the making
Over the past few months, the School Committee has heard from dozens and maybe hundreds of teachers and students by email, in person, and in public testimony, and received a petition with more then 2,000 signatures, all urging them to stop the Boston Public Schools from sharing information about students with the Boston Police Department.
The police say they have “never knowingly participated in an intentional procedure of sharing student information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement” (ICE), but whatever their intentions, the police do file BPS reports with the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), where ICE agents can read them.
The School Committee is considering a new policy to govern the reporting of student information to the city police. It was proposed at the April 15 meeting and would normally have been scheduled for a vote April 29, but opposition from School Committee members led Chair Michael Loconto to put off the vote at least until the following meeting. However, the Committee is scheduled to discuss the policy again on April 29.
A fight that didn’t happen, a deportation that did
The uproar over BPS information sharing with ICE began in 2017 when an immigration lawyer was surprised to hear an ICE agent using information from a BPS report in a deportation hearing. The East Boston High School student involved was alleged to have gang connections. The BPS report said he and others had planned to have a fight, but when administrators found out, they mediated the dispute and the fight never happened.
The student was detained by ICE for 16 months and then deported.
At first, BPS officials insisted they never shared any information with ICE. However, a public records lawsuit by Lawyers for Civil Rights uncovered 135 reports by BPS school police that were forwarded to the Boston Police Department. Some of the reports explicitly said the BRIC would get a copy.
Tighter rules, but what are they?
BPS officials then said the rules were tightened in March 2018 and that only the chief of the school police is now authorized to send information to the Police Department. BPS spokesperson Jessica Ridlen told Bianca Vázquez Toness of the Boston Globe that information is turned over only in criminal investigations or if it “is useful to ensure the safety of the school, public, and the city’s neighborhoods” — a very vague and subjective criterion. BPS officials have not responded to a request that they release the actual policy now in force.
This history hasn’t helped to build the immigrant community’s trust in the BPS administration.
Today, we are posting two messages to the School Committee, one from an undocumented student and one delivered at the April 15 Committee meeting by a school librarian.
Tomorrow, we’ll post more about the differences between the proposed BPS policy and what immigrants and their supporters are proposing.
Testimony from an undocumented student: Trust in school officials turned to fear
When I learned that I wasn’t documented, the first people I spoke to were school officials. I felt safe enough to speak to them about a subject that nobody else knew about.
No one knew how to help me, so I went to school, and I asked for help, knowing that was something I could do back then.
But now, I am not able to, because I don’t feel safe. I want to like let you know, that is a huge betrayal to your students and to the parents who send them every single day to get a better education for better opportunities. And just because a dumb mistake is made does not mean that a kid should get deported.
We are just like everyone else and you have to understand that we can lose stability, we can lose our families, we can lose everything if you share our information with BRIC.
We are supposed to be safe with you.
Our education comes from you, so please stop that practice. We’re just trying to get a better education, trying to prosper. There’s no clear purpose for you to be working with ICE or with FBI. I understand it’s not directly, but indirectly still means you’re collaborating. So please, I urge you to be transparent with us and tell us what is going on.
Testimony from Fenway High librarian: How a minor issue could have led to deportation
My name is Bonnie McBride and I’m the teacher-librarian at Fenway High.
I’m here to speak about the serious concern I have that there are no clearly defined criteria to ensure that routine school disciplinary measures do not become law enforcement issues.
This frustration and concern stems from my own experience regarding what happens when a school disciplinary issue was brought to law enforcement.
Two years ago when Fortnite the video game was just becoming popular, a group of four boys were bored in class one day, and instead of doing group work, they started doodling the different guns available to be used in Fortnite, and writing down the catchphrases in Spanish.
An “exceedingly dumb idea,” but not a crime
This was an exceedingly dumb idea, but it did not warrant what happened next. The teacher who found the drawing turned it into a student support counselor who, following current procedure, reported it to administration. The admin it was given to not only reported it to school police, but she also chose to call and report it to the Boston Police Department.
All of this happened without any adult speaking to the students in question. No one asked what the drawing was for or why they did it. Instead, they went directly to the police.
These students’ lives and their families’ lives were put in danger because there was no clear protocol in place that would instruct disciplinary issues to be dealt with at a school level first. And the next day, when the students were interviewed by school administration, there were no consequences given.
So something that was deemed to be not worthy of punishment had already been shared with the Boston Police Department and potentially with BRIC.
These students were all immigrants, with mixed-status families. The terror they felt for weeks was real, not knowing if something would come out of the report to BPD. There is nothing like trying to console a student in tears because he feels his family will be deported, now that the police have a record of him in their system.
All because of a Fortnite drawing.
I ask Boston Public Schools to create a clear consistent policy that puts students first. Disciplinary issues should not immediately be shared with the police. There need to be clear limits on what is shared and when with law enforcement. Our students already deal with so much in their lives. Their school should be a safe place, and not a place that creates new traumas by unnecessarily causing harm through partnership with law enforcement.
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Part two of this series, April 27, 2020: Blocking the BPS — ICE pipeline: A closer look at the two approaches
Part three, April 28, 2020: Blocking the BPS–ICE pipeline: School Committee members speak up, students and educators press their case
More on BPS and ICE
June 21, 2018: What’s the story on BPS sharing student information with ICE?
January 6, 2020: ICE had access to 135 BPS student “incident reports,” groups say
January 21, 2020: Personal stories of immigration, loss, and fear
January 22, 2020: What is BPS’s policy on letting ICE see student “incident reports”?
