Drawing a Line

Communities red and blue are rallying to protect immigrant students. We need more of that.

The Nation recently ran a piece entitled “America Is Now One Giant Milgram Experiment,” a reference to the infamous experiment conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram to determine whether ordinary Americans could be convinced to inflict pain on strangers. The answer, of course, was that they could. Participants proved shockingly willing to administer electric shocks, escalating in intensity, to so-called ‘learners.’ Fast forward six decades, and “the Milgram Experiment is being conducted not in a laboratory setting but on the United States writ large,” writes Sasha Abramsky.

It’s a powerful and disturbing analogy - but it’s also incomplete. Yes, there are plenty of ordinary Americans right now who are all too willing to participate in the Trump administration’s infliction of pain on strangers. But focus only on them and it’s easy to miss the resistance: the regular people who are refusing to just go along, and by their refusal, inspiring others to do the same.

Red line?

We got a vivid glimpse of what this looks like over the past few weeks as school officials and teachers pushed back forcefully against Trump’s ever-expanding immigration dragnet. Let’s start with the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Alberto Carvalho, better known for the corporate, edu-CEO style that ruled in the Obama era. Yet here he was rebuffing federal agents who sought to enter two elementary schools in search of of two elementary schools, five students in first through sixth grade under what have since been revealed to be false pretenses. And when asked to explain his actions, Carvalho laid out the sort of clear and forceful explanation about why it’s completely unacceptable for federal agents to be creeping around an elementary school that’s in short supply these days.

You’ve no doubt heard of the principal of a school in upstate New York who led a heroic effort to secure the release of three undocumented students and their mother after they were swept up in an ice raid on a local dairy farm. Jaime Cook and several teachers at the school got right to work, launching an effort that rallied their entire town. Because it turns out that even in a small town that Trump carried by double digits in 2024, and which happens to be home to his immigration ‘czar,’ Tom Homan, the round up of kids is still viewed as unacceptable.

Cook has received the lion’s share of the attention, but what’s truly inspiring here is the level of organizing involved:

The local teachers union sent around a list with the phone numbers and email addresses for officials across New York, and school officials began to make calls in between classes and during planning periods. In their first calls and emails, they reached out to local, state and federal representatives and advocacy groups and pleaded for help to get the children and their mother released.

And it worked. Cook and the teachers were able to secure the release of the kids by rallying the entire town—red and blue residents alike—shaming state and local officials into speaking out, exposing Czar Homan as a thin-skinned blowhard in the process.

A divided GOP

Then there is Tennessee, where odious legislation that would have given public schools the right to turn away undocumented students, or charge them tuition, collapsed this week due to widespread opposition. A broad coalition of groups, sixty five strong, including the Tennessee Chapter of NAACP, Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM) — one of my favorite grassroots organizing groups—and an array of immigrant rights organizations helped bring this thing down.

Local school officials played a key role too. The Hamilton County School Board, representing the largest school system in the home district of Bo Watson, the sponsor of the Senate version of the bill, voted unanimously to condemn the legislation last week, and every one of the district’s 79 school principals came out in opposition.

But the most interesting—and encouraging development—in Tennessee is the extent to which the legislation divided Republicans. As in New York, the idea of going after kids proved to be an uncrossable line, even for Trump supporters. Some of the most effective opposition came from small business owners. The Tennessee Small Business Alliance pushed back forcefully against the claims of Watson et al that undocumented students are hoovering up resources (and don’t deserve an education anyway.)

Senator Watson and Rep. Lamberth claim their bill denying education to undocumented children is about starting a fiscal conversation — but that’s not true, and they know it.

Undocumented immigrant families already pay into Tennessee’s public schools through sales tax—just like everyone else. Tennessee immigrants contribute $4.4 billion in tax revenue every year, including over $900 million from undocumented families alone. Going after children to deny them an education when he knows it is already paid for by immigrants in our state isn’t just cruel — it’s unethical, fiscally irresponsible, and politically desperate.

In the end, it was probably money rather than shame that brought the legislation down. Because that pesky Fourteenth Amendment requires that public schools accept undocumented students (more on that in a moment), Tennessee risked losing more than $1 billion dollars in federal funds with this clear denial of civil rights. And when officials reached out to ED secretary Linda McMahon about whether this particular denial of civil rights would be acceptable, she was apparently too busy rooting our ‘reverse discrimination’ and ‘gender ideology’ to respond. Lawmakers, fearful of the backlash from their constituents over funding cuts to local schools, caved—for now.

From the beginning, the architects of the Tennessee legislation have been crystal clear that their goal is to challenge Plyler v. Doe, the landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that state laws denying public education to undocumented children violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1977, Texas passed a law allowing public schools to deny enrollment to ‘unauthorized children.’ Five years later, a Texas school district enacted its own policy, charging tuition to undocumented students. SCOTUS struck them both down, and the reasons are worth revisiting today. Texas was punishing kids for the actions of their parents, and through that punishment would likely contribute to "the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime.”

Plyer is one of the great American public education success stories, the slow and often tenuous opening up of our schools to more and more kids through the course of the twentieth century. Brown v. Board, IDEA, Plyler—all are grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment and its promise of equal protection. Same with the push to expand the rights of LGBTQ students. As we argue in The Education Wars, schools today are arguably the key site of civil rights expansion and enforcement. It’s also why they’re under such ferocious attack, and why the Trump administration has moved so aggressively to gut the civil rights wing of the Department of Education.

As we close out month three of Trump 2.0 (could that really be all??), it is increasingly apparent that the Fourteenth Amendment—and the entire modern civil rights framework—is a target. That’s abstract stuff, especially in these slop-filled times. But when the lives and futures of immigrant students are on the line, the fundamentals of what’s at stake spring into stark relief. Kids aren’t responsible for the actions of their parents. Targeting them risks consigning them to a permanent underclass. That’s a vision that’s unacceptable to most Americans, even Trump’s own supporters. It’s up to us to keep reminding them of that.