Utah teachers address immigration crackdown, how it's impacting their students

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A contingent of educators spoke at a forum about the challenges they and their students face due to the immigration crackdown.
One speaker said teachers need to speak out. Another said instructors need to understand the trauma kids may be facing.
Uproar Utah, which emerged in opposition to talk of building an immigrant detention center in Utah, hosted the event.

SALT LAKE CITY — Kids in Utah are feeling the impact of the ongoing crackdown on illegal immigration, and it's forcing teachers to figure out how to properly respond.

Students "used to be afraid of gangs. Now they're afraid of the government. It's our own government that has created this crisis," said John Arthur, a teacher at a Salt Lake City elementary school and a member of the Utah House.

On learning the father of a student in one of her classes had been detained by immigration authorities, it got Michelle Alba, also a Salt Lake City grade school teacher, thinking about the pressures the boy faces.

"He's unsure of the fate of his family. He doesn't know how they're going to pay their rent," she said. Meantime, she's "expecting him to behave and to listen to my expectations and to do his very best to achieve. And most of the time, they're doing it while they're learning a second language."

The two instructors and others spoke at a forum Tuesday in Salt Lake City focused on the adverse impact the U.S. government's ongoing immigration crackdown is having on kids, schools and teachers. Uproar Utah, a new group that emerged last June in opposition to talk of building an immigrant detention center in Salt Lake City, hosted the event.

"Our politicians are failing to act adequately or coherently. Uproar Utah hopes to get their attention while we explore how teachers can best respond to the trauma being created by government policies that separate families and traumatize children without making communities safer," Uproar Executive Director Marie Cornwall said in announcing the forum.

Participants offered anecdotal information about the impact to students of the U.S. government's increased efforts to detain and deport immigrants in the country illegally. The crackdown has prompted fear and led to deportations of some parents. They also addressed how teachers can or should respond and the impact the situation is having on them.

"We are obligated to use our voices, to use our privilege in a lot of ways, and to use these platforms to do what we tell kids every single day that they have to do," said Arthur, a Democrat who represents District 41. "You got to stand up to the bullies ... You got to use your voice to speak out for yourselves, your families and your communities."

If an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer were to enter his classroom, Arthur said, he would wrap his arms around the targeted child and hold on to him, preventing agents from taking the youngster.

"I promise you, they're going to have a hard time getting me to let go of that kid because every parent who drops their kid off at school does so with the understanding that their child is safe in our classrooms," he said.

Alba said teachers are "learning in real time" how to contend with the effects of the immigration crackdown on kids and their classrooms. Outside the specter of an immigration agent entering a school, she said teachers have to contend with the trauma students are experiencing.

"I think our responsibility as educators is to try to figure out what that trauma is and how to understand the context so that we can teach them effectively," she said. Fear and instability will "affect a student's learning, on top of all of the other trauma that comes along with being an immigrant or a refugee student."

Teachers, she went on, can offer predictability and stability to kids and listen to their fears and concerns, if the kids are willing to open up.

Allison Moschetti, who works in the Alpine School District and has studied how stress and trauma impact the capacity to learn, is intent on giving "a voice to those who need it, (to) the families working hard, honest labor, not criminals, contributing to our communities," she said. "Many are suffering in silence, afraid to even show their faces at the grocery store or the doctor's office."

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.