DeKalb students raise fears about ICE raids; teachers told not to talk about it
Sequoyah Middle School teacher Jonathan Peraza Campos said he has children coming into his classroom almost every single day anxious and crying after a loved one was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
That’s why he had a hotline number for a community organization helping immigrant families posted in his classroom — until a school administrator told him to remove it and not to talk about ICE at school, he said.
“We are human beings who have been targeted and humiliated at our school for supporting our students and neighbors — who are targeted every single day and night, right outside the school doors — that we are told to ignore and censor by our school leaders‚" he told the DeKalb County Board of Education at the Dec. 8 meeting. “If our school staff and faculty doesn’t know how to help our students, we are lost.”
He, as well as other educators, students and community advocates, implored the state’s third-largest school system this week to better support students who fear ICE will raid their school or detain their families while they’re in class.
The issue has been brewing in the Doraville community, which has a large immigrant population, since Donald Trump took office as president and began working on his promise to deport millions.
Peraza Campos and several other speakers asked the district to allow teachers to continue to educate students about their rights; to strengthen its protocols to better protect students; to equip teachers with culturally responsive and trauma-informed resources; and to recruit and retain staff members who are Latino, Maya and from immigrant heritage communities.
In a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, district spokeswoman Jennifer Caracciolo said the district is investigating the situation and is reviewing its protocols with principals — but that all teaching and discussions in schools must align with the state’s academic standards.
“We remain committed to protecting student privacy, securing educational records and maintaining safe school environments,” interim Superintendent Norman C. Sauce III said in a message to DeKalb families this week. “The safety of our students is and will always be our highest priority.”
ICE in metro Atlanta
Although one of Trump’s first acts as president was to empower ICE officers to enter sensitive areas like schools and churches, there haven’t been any confirmed reports of ICE raids in a DeKalb public school. But there have been reports of officers detaining people near school property in metro Atlanta or in communities where students and their parents live.
School officials have a great deal of authority over who they let onto school property, said Atlanta-based immigration attorney Charles Kuck, and can bar people from entering the property.
“I suspect some principals would have the fortitude to do that with ICE and some may not,” he said. “It’s truly being between a rock and a hard place, where these principals are — they want to help their students ... (but) they’re balancing this with an administration that’s frankly out of control.”
DeKalb leaders sent a notice to principals before the school year started reminding them of the correct procedure in case of a visit from any law enforcement agency, including ICE. The officers should be immediately directed to an administrator who will notify the district’s police department. The officers would have to produce a warrant, and the district’s police department would verify that it’s valid before they would turn someone over.
“As with any unauthorized visitor, entrance beyond the primary office and access to students or their information is prohibited without a court order or exigent circumstances,” Caracciolo said.
Public schools do not keep information about students’ immigration status. But Latino immigrants make up the largest group in the U.S. and have been a particular target for the Trump administration. Nearly one in five Georgia students is Hispanic, according to state enrollment data. The number has grown by almost 70,000 in the last decade, to about 336,000 Hispanic students in 2025.
Georgia also has the seventh-highest number of children living with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent, according to a recent report from the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. The majority of those children are U.S. citizens.
‘This is a crisis’
Georgia has ramped up immigration enforcement efforts and seen a sharp increase in the number of arrests under the Trump administration, federal data reviewed by the AJC shows. Atlanta’s ICE field office — which oversees immigration enforcement in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina — accounts for the fifth-highest number of immigration arrests in the nation.
And Doraville, where Sequoyah Middle School is located, is “ground zero,” Kuck said.
Despite the threat of ICE detention that feels constant for people in migrant communities, there’s a dissonance about what they’re facing, said Angela Camila Chiquiza. She’s a Sequoyah Middle School alumna and an organizer with the Atlanta Association of Raza Educators.
At the same school board meeting where speakers asked the district to better support students on the issue of immigration, another group of speakers thanked the board for naming a new football stadium at Dunwoody High School after Ryan Seacrest.
“It was just kind of like, dystopian a little bit,” Chiquiza said. “To see the scenario of the board getting thanks for what school should really be about — stadiums and sports ... and then there we were like, ‘Our kids are getting kidnapped, our parents are getting kidnapped.’ So I hope that people understand that this is a crisis. It affects everybody.”
About the Author
Cassidy Alexander covers Georgia education issues for the AJC. She previously covered education for The Daytona Beach News-Journal, and was named Florida's Outstanding New Journalist of the Year.
