This Arizona high school district projected growth. Now with ICE threats, enrollment is down

It used to be that federal immigration agents were told to avoid places like schools, hospitals and churches. Certain places were sort of sacred. But the Department of Homeland Security rescinded that memo on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Now schools are preparing for Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity. As the new school year has gotten underway, we’ve already seen reports of families arrested by immigration agents walking their kids to school. ABC15 released a video of an ICE agent walking a kid to school in south Phoenix — after his parents had been detained, advocates say.

Tolleson Union High School District Superintendent Jeremy Calles says even the fear of ICE on school campuses is causing real harm already. While his name has been in the headlines of late for questions about the district’s finances, Calles came into KJZZ's studios to talk about how his heavily Latino district is working to protect students in this environment.

Full conversation

JEREMY CALLES: I'm seeing more fear than I am actual activity. It's more of a fear of activity. We're a growing district, we're actually in the process of building a new school right now. We are projected to have continued growth and we saw a decline this year. We've reached out to some of the families and some of the families have left the country. Some of the families are, you know, just in fear, not sending their students to school, so, we're actually declining this year, which was a shock to be declining when we're, when we're projected for so much growth.

So there's, there's definitely a lot of fear. There's fear, you know, among students, among staff, parents, community. It's just the perception of what will happen when ICE comes. And anytime we get a rumor that there's ICE, we have, you know, everyone calling, everyone nervous. A lot of times it doesn't check out. It's been like the game of telephone. It's been overhyped by the time it gets to my desk, and, you know, I'll make some calls and find out that none of that is actually happening. I mean, like I think the ice cream truck could go by at this point. People would be nervous.

LAUREN GILGER: It's and it spreads quickly on social media, right? Is that what you're seeing? People will start to see a post here or there saying, "Oh, there's ICE activity in this area." And you get a lot of calls.

CALLES: And then it's the calls, it's the emails, it's, it's mostly it's the fear. It's the fear factor that's it so far.

GILGER: So I want to ask about what the implications of that are, not just for the school community and like, you know, your job, trying to make sure that there's enough funding and that you calm nerves when somebody thinks that there's an ICE agent nearby or an ICE raid nearby. But I mean, what does it do to students' ability to learn?

CALLES: I think it makes a severe impact. When you have problems going on that are bigger than the math problems that we're giving you, it's always a distraction. And we work hard to eliminate those distractions. For instance, you know, one that we've dealt with for a number of years is a hungry child showing up to school. Well, we offer free breakfast, free lunch, free supper. Things going on at the home that make them feel unsafe, we do everything we can to make them safe at school.

But now there is this new threat of ice and it is, how do we make them feel safe? And not just the students who, you know, may be directly impacted. But even those indirectly impacted, because you may have a good friend, and you don't know if your friend is here legally or not. Like you could be in fear for your friend. You could be in fear just seeing an officer come on campus. You know, we've dealt with things before where we had to work with police officers, and we have processes for that.

I have tried to ground both staff and community to let them know like, OK, so we have something that we've dealt with before, right? Police officers have had to at times come to our campuses. Let's start from there and then start talking about what is going to be different with ICE now when it could be federal agents instead of a local officer that's coming to the campus.

GILGER: Right. So tell us what those conversations are like. I'm sure these are legal conversations, maybe security conversations. How are you preparing for this?

CALLES: Well, the toughest part is them not knowing how to respond. So the first thing that we did is we took the form that we would normally give a police officer, and we adapted that to now be able to have it ready to give to an ICE officer. The extra hurdle involved in this is that if you say the wrong thing, you personally as a school secretary, a receptionist could be held liable and taken to jail for interfering with immigration.

So what I've instructed all the staff is in the event that an ICE officer does arrive to campus, the first thing they are to do is to contact me, so I can personally go talk with the officer.

GILGER: So you plan to be there?

CALLES: Yes, if they're there, I plan to be there. And you know, I'll have our lawyer on the phone as I'm reviewing the warrant and seeing exactly what the warrant entitles that officer to and what type of warrant it is. But I don't want my staff to have to worry about handling that conversation and about them personally being held liable either for, you know, doing too much and violating district policy, not doing enough and violating federal policy.

I'm like — I want to take that worry out of your mind so you can get focused on educating our children again. All you have to do is call me. I'll come down and handle that conversation.

GILGER: So you mentioned a warrant. They would have to have a warrant to come into a school at this point as far as you can tell legally?

CALLES: Absolutely, we've worked this over with our lawyer. It would have to be a judicial warrant to get any type of access to the student. And access to the student does not necessarily mean free rein across the campus. It means access to the student.

So, you know, again, we've seen similar things on the police side of things when, when police have shown up with an arrest warrant for a student. We know how to process that. And so we take what we know and then we adapt it to what's different about this situation.

GILGER: What rights do you have kind of beyond the school property itself? Like can you protect students when they're not on campus?

CALLES: No, and that's the scariest part, and I think that's why we see that students haven't all returned to school, and our jurisdiction ends at our sidewalk. So we really can't do anything over there. For the rumors that I have heard, the stories that I have heard — which, you know, again, I can't completely validate. But I have heard of students on their way to school and getting stopped and either their parents getting picked up or the student getting picked up.

When ICE takes a parent, they give a simple piece of paper that states we've taken the parent. The parent has put this name on a piece of paper and told us this is who’s in charge of taking care of their child now. Which is an issue, because we need far more documentation than that to change over guardian rights in our system than just, you know, a parent getting detained has essentially tried to handwrite over guardian notes.

GILGER: Were you in public education here during SB 1070.

CALLES: I was. I've been in education for 20 years now.

GILGER: What was it like then? Does this remind you of that?

CALLES: It does. I was over in Kyrene Elementary at that time, and we didn't have as many students that were directly impacted. I'm originally from the West Valley, grew up in the West Valley though. And I, yes, I'm well aware of the impact. I had plenty of stories coming back to me.

GILGER: Yeah. So I wonder what you make of this moment, I guess, like, do you think this is all about politics kind of crossing a line? Or do you think that there's really something to be said here about rule of law?

CALLES: No, I think politics has clearly crossed the line. You know, there's a reason why schools were considered sanctuaries. Schools are a place where students should come to be educated. It's not a place to invoke a political agenda. You know, we've had police departments before ask if they could have 24/7 access to our cameras. I've told them no, we are not your convenient place to be policing the community. Like that type of stuff needs to happen outside the school campus.

You know, our prime responsibility is that we've been entrusted with someone else's child. The one thing that we have to do is return that child to them at the end of the day.

GILGER: What would you say to someone who says, you know, these are people who are not in the country legally, and the law has to rule the day, you're interfering in that essentially.

CALLES: I would tell them they have a home address. If you could figure out where they went to school, you could figure out where they live. Take care of that activity over there. You don't need to bring that to the school campus.

GILGER: Where do you see this leading?

CALLES: Well, I mean, considering where we're at with politics right now, I don't think we're making an abrupt change within the next three-plus years. I can imagine it, it is only going to get worse. And at some point they are gonna believe they have free rein to breach campuses. And we're gonna have to legally test that theory and see how that plays out.