Thousands of children are afraid to go to school amid deportation threats: ‘If one day I don’t come to pick you up from the bus, don’t cry

Widespread fear is gripping immigrant families following recent ICE raids and the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Many parents are keeping their kids home to avoid possible separationThousands of children are afraid to go to school amid deportation threats: ‘If one day I don’t come to pick you up from the bus, don’t cry’
Widespread fear is gripping immigrant families following recent ICE raids and the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Many parents are keeping their kids home to avoid possible separationBaby, we don’t have papers, we weren’t born here and they’re getting us. If that ever happens to us, baby, if one day I don’t come to get you from the bus, don’t cry, your aunt is going to send you to Mexico with me,” she tells him.
Eva’s heart clenches when she sees the child off. He leaves his home in the Bronx on the school bus at 6 a.m. and doesn’t return until 6 p.m. At 16 years old, her eldest daughter has a rough idea of what deportation means — that men load people like them onto trucks and take them back to the place it took so much to leave for them to leave two years ago. She has asked her mother if she can stay home from school. Eva sometimes gives into the request. Last week, she let her kids skip two days’ worth of classes.When I send them to school, I pray to God because we don’t know what’s going to happen. But I tell them they have to go, because the school keeps track of absences, and it affects their grades. They ask me, ‘What happens if they catch me, Mom? What do I say?’ And I tell them, ‘Well, don’t say anything. Don’t talk,’” she says.
Nothing, at first glance, indicates that New York is a different city than it was a month or a year ago. Passers-by stop on Fifth Avenue a take photos of the gigantic suitcases of the Louis Vuitton building that barely fits in their phones’ cameras. Here’s the disheveled man who was once an award-winning chess teacher and now charges $5 a game in Washington Square Park. There, a young graduate who wants to spend some time working as a waitress at an Upper East Side bar.
But there’s a sense of sadness here that not all perceive, a fear that the passers-by, the former chess teacher and the young waitress may not notice, but which is felt by the florist on a Bushwick corner who lets you buy a bouquet on credit one day, who even slips you an extra bloom as a gift. It’s felt by the delivery guy who ferries dozens of McDonald’s orders during each shift, and the Nahuatl-speaking woman who sells tacos dorados and chicharrones in green salsa on a street in Jackson Heights.