As parents dropped their children inside a Spanish immersion day care in Chicago Wednesday morning, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers stormed the building to detain a child care worker, a scene that before this year would have been unheard of in the United States.
Child care centers were previously protected under a “sensitive locations” directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares. But President Donald Trump removed that protection on his first day in office. Arrests near centers have increased across the country, but rarely have reports surfaced of an arrest inside a facility in front of children.
Video capturing a portion of the arrest shows two ICE agents aggressively detaining the worker inside Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Learning Center on Chicago’s North Side at about 7 a.m., shortly after the center opened. The agents pull her outside the center and push her against a gray sedan while she shouts. Then one of the agents heads back inside.
“I have papers,” she tells them in Spanish.
Rep. Mike Quigley, a Democrat representing Illinois, said ICE agents followed the teacher into the school “without a warrant and abducted her in front of her students.”
“This woman is a trusted, loved member of her community with a work permit who has dedicated her life to caring for children,” Quigley said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that ICE agents were pursuing two people, including the teacher, after a traffic stop.
“They ran into the daycare and attempted to barricade themselves inside the daycare — recklessly endangering the children inside. The illegal alien female was arrested inside a vestibule, not in the school,” DHS said.
Alderman Matt Martin, who represents Chicago’s 47th Ward, said at a news conference that video he saw from inside the building is “some of the most chilling video footage I have ever seen, certainly in my time in office.”
“We had agents with guns who were walking around the facility with teachers inside, with children inside, and so, we are, of course, demanding that she be released immediately,” Martin said. “I saw dozens of parents and educators weeping, hugging each other, consoling one another. Children who are crying as well who thankfully are too young to understand the whole gravity of what happened this morning.”
As the arrest unfolded, Martin said other teachers pleaded with the agents to leave, telling them the teacher had a work permit and that they couldn’t be inside the school. The agents went into multiple rooms looking for teachers while children were present, U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Democrat representing Illinois, added during a press conference. One teacher hid with a child in her care while the agents stormed the facility, “afraid that she may die today,” Ramirez said.
The school closed for the day.
Tara Goodarzi, who has a child at the center, told Block Club Chicago that the teacher who was arrested was a mother herself.
“Our community has been shattered. Our families have been traumatized. The children were crying, the parents were crying,” Goodarzi said. “It’s a scene that I don’t think any of us have ever witnessed before and will ever forget.”
Parents sent their children to Rayito de Sol to expose them to Latin American culture and Spanish, said Maria Guzman, a parent with children at the school, during a press conference.
Parents “want their kids to have access to diversity and access to other experiences. That is what founded this country,” Guzman said. “We are a country of immigrants, and it is absurd and horrific that they have now targeted our day care centers.”
In recent weeks, ICE enforcement in Chicago has ramped up, with multiple violent arrests taking place across the city, as well as clashes between protesters and agents.
Nationwide, 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrants, most of them Latinas. In Chicago, it’s 1 in 4. Increased ICE enforcement has created significant fear for workers, some of whom have stopped showing up to work for fear of getting caught in a raid.
Many of the arrests this year have been taking place in parking lots near child care centers or schools and parents have been detained on the way to drop their kids off.
Wendy Cervantes, the director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, an anti-poverty nonprofit, said the center has long been working to inform child care providers that they have protections under the Fourth Amendment, including requiring that agents have a signed judicial warrant with a person’s name and address before they raid a private space.
This year, however, they have faced more questions about what to do if ICE doesn’t follow the law.
“Over the past few months, ICE’s aggressive tactics have increased, making it much more difficult to advise child care providers on how to implement procedures for keeping their staff and children safe,” Cervantes said. “Providers can no longer guarantee that their locations are safe havens, and instead are increasingly relying on how to best document enforcement actions near their locations and creating procedures for how to notify parents or staff about ICE presence. The fear is real.”
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