ICE's War on Schoolchildren
What kind of country hunts children? House Democrats demand answers.
COLUMN — It was just after the first bell at P.S. 89 in Queens, NYC, when the news spread: Dayra, the six-year-old with the sweet smile and the neat handwriting, wasn’t coming back. ICE had taken her. She and her mother were put on a plane to Ecuador before her classmates even knew what happened. Two of her siblings remain here, orphaned in the way only this government can orphan children — by decree.
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That’s what brought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Adriano Espaillat, and Dan Goldman to the front steps of Trump’s bureaucracy this week. They signed their names to a blistering letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, demanding an answer to the same question every teacher and parent is asking: What kind of country hunts children?
The Trump people call it “law and order.” The numbers call it something else. Nearly 2,000 kids arrested by ICE between January and July. Children dragged from courtrooms, from the subway, from their schools. Dylan, a Bronx high-schooler with a medical condition, is now marooned at Moshannon Valley, a prison in Pennsylvania with a reputation for solitary confinement and worse. Mamadou, a Brooklyn student, vanished into ICE custody before his teachers marched in the August heat to get him back. Joselyn, a Queens teen, spent ten days begging for water in a federal holding cell, “like animals,” she said.
Seventy percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record, by the agency’s own data. Yet Trump’s enforcers brag they’re only going after the “worst of the worst.” If Dayra, age six, is the “worst,” then the promise was a lie from the start.
The letter from New York’s Democrats is not just policy — it’s an indictment of cruelty. They want the curriculum in the detention camps, the job descriptions of the so-called teachers DHS hires, the class sizes, the lesson plans. They want to know whether these children — ripped from their schools — are taught anything at all, or if the only lesson is despair.
The Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that every child in America has the right to an education, regardless of where they were born. The Trump administration answers with buses to the border and chains on the wrists of teenagers.
Meanwhile, the principals, the classmates, the teachers — they are left to explain empty chairs. They write letters, like the one from P.S. 89’s principal, pleading with ICE agents to release a little girl because “her unexpected removal will cause significant disruption to her learning and will likely have a deep emotional impact on her classmates.” Letters that, like so much in this season, go unread.
In the end, the children themselves write the truest testimony. “We had to beg… they didn’t even give us water,” Joselyn said. That line should be carved into the marble walls of DHS headquarters, a memorial to what was done in America’s name in 2025.
And now a dozen lawmakers, with names as New York as Clarke and Torres, Nadler and Velázquez, have drawn a line. They gave Noem and McMahon until October 15 to answer. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But the question isn’t going away. It’s the question humming in every cafeteria, every playground, every classroom where a seat now sits empty: What kind of country hunts children?
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As a parent & a retired public school teacher, I am furious!
At these times Only two fascist behaving countries come to mind that specifically hunt children :(
The deteriorating state of our world has me speachless.