An ICE Raid Has Turned The Lives of Hundreds of Tennessee Kids Upside Down

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The repercussions of immigration raids like the one in Bean Station, Tennessee, reach far beyond those who were detained.Photograph courtesy Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition

In the spring of 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested three hundred and eighty-nine workers, most of them Guatemalan, at a kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. The headines at the time focussed on the fate of those who’d been arrested, but the consequences of the raid went much further. For months afterward, parents and teachers in and around Postville reported that their children had trouble focussing at school. The kids studied less, and acted out more. Their performance in class generally declined. “Young kids are developmentally sensitive to stresses involving family separation, and large-scale raids are an extreme form of that stress,” Nicole Novak, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, told me. Novak led a study that examined the birth certificates of children born in Iowa in the year after the raid: among the babies born to Hispanic mothers, there had been a spike in the number who were born abnormally small, a mark of maternal duress during pregnancy.

Earlier this month, federal officials conducted the largest work-site raid in the U.S. since Postville, arresting ninety-seven people at a meat-processing plant in in Bean Station, Tennessee. Once again, kids suffered. A hundred and sixty children in the area, all U.S. citizens, had a parent arrested in the Bean Station raid. Schools in nearby Hamblen County—where most of the workers arrested at the plant lived, and where the student body is twenty-five per cent Hispanic—reported five-hundred and thirty absences the day after the raid. (There are ten thousand students in the school district.) Two weeks later, attendance has picked up, but things still aren’t back to normal. “You can tell the kids are trying to go on, but they’re just going through the motions,” a local high-school teacher told me. “The kids whose parents are in detention tend to be quieter, more withdrawn, but some of the kids who are most upset, who are outspoken about it, or crying, aren’t even the ones whose parents were arrested. They’re just scared something similar will happen to their families.”

One elementary-school teacher told me that her students were worriedly asking whether they, too, were going to be taken away. “They don’t all understand the full scope of what happened, but they know something happened, and they’re still scared,” she said. The school district has brought in counsellors to speak with students. “The situation is certainly not normal,” the school superintendent, Jeffrey Perry, told me. “But we’re trying both to acknowledge the problem and to help students move on.”

Last week, I spoke by phone with a sixteen-year-old boy—I’ll call him Juan—who had been a sophomore at West High School, in Morristown, Tennessee. His mother was arrested in the raid, and he’d moved in with his aunt, in Knoxville, some forty miles away. “I was at school when the raid happened,” he told me. “It was during lunch. My friends came up to me saying that there had been some social media, that ICE was taking people. I tried to call my mom to let her know, but I couldn't get through. No one picked up the phone. That was how I knew.” Last Monday was his first day at a new high school, in Knoxville, where there are fewer Hispanic students. When some of his white classmates learned where he’d come from, they taunted him in the hallway, telling him he should have been deported, too. “I don’t feel normal. I don’t feel the same. I feel lonely, like there’s no one around me anymore,” he said.

The same week Juan started school in Knoxville, the Tennessee Board of Education began administering its annual set of standardized tests, called TNReady, at elementary, middle, and high schools across the state; the testing can take as long as four hours a day and lasts for about a week and a half. High-school students sit for exams in each of their academic subjects—English, science, math, social studies, and geography. Juan had hoped that he could take his exams in Morristown, where school felt more welcoming and familiar, but it was too far to commute, in part because his aunt was reluctant to drive long distances for fear of getting arrested herself. In Knoxville, “It’s hard to pay attention,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about going back to school in Morristown, or about my mom. I also have a girlfriend back at West. I want to be back there. While my teachers talk, I keep forgetting to listen.”

Juan could at least describe his feelings in detail—younger children can be harder to reach and to reassure. At a church in Morristown, I interviewed a woman, named Maria, who’d been arrested in the raid but was allowed to return home while her deportation case is pending, because she has small children. One of them was seven years old, and she was still trying to figure out how to explain the uncertainty of her legal situation to him. “His attention seemed to be off, like he was distracted,” she told me. Several days after the raid, she went through his backpack and found a folder with some class worksheets. “He hadn’t filled them in all the way,” she said. “It concerned me. He doesn’t talk to me clearly about how he feels, but I could see, just from looking at his schoolwork, that something’s off.”

While in Tennessee, I met a twenty-year-old woman named Rita, who grew up in Morristown. None of her family members had been arrested in the raid, but ten years ago her own father was deported back to Mexico. “I never cried in front of my mother, and she never cried in front of me,” she told me. “When I was a kid, I only cried alone.”

One afternoon, Rita joined me as I spoke with people who’d been arrested, or who had family members who’d been arrested—many of them knew Rita, and her presence during the interviews put them more at ease. Together, she and I spoke with a quiet forty-two-year-old construction worker. His wife was arrested in the raid and was still in detention. He’d been caring for their three kids—who are ten, twelve, and thirteen—alone. “My grades went down in sixth grade, after my father got deported,” Rita told us. “I got put in all the lowest classes at school, none of the honors or intermediate classes. After it happened, I didn’t care about school.” Turning to the construction worker, she added, “But it passed, and eventually I worked my way back up.” Her voice quivered, and he put his hand on her shoulder; the two of them were crying now.

“I tell my kids, ‘You have to do well in school. I don’t want you to be like me, stuck on a roof for hours, working,’ ” the construction worker said. He has been open with them about their mother’s situation. “I say to them, ‘I’ll never lie to you. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But, when you’re taking your exams at school, think about it like this—that your mom is away on vacation right now.’ ” His daughter, who’s ten, told him, “All right, Dad. I’m going to imagine mom is on a beach somewhere.”