How to Prevent NY Schools from Colluding with ICE

Parents should not have to worry that sending their children to school will lead to an interaction with immigration enforcement. But that’s exactly what’s at stake in New York as President Trump terrorizes families with his deportation blitz, leaning on schools to do his bidding to fuel the school-to-deportation pipeline.

Schools’ complicity with immigration enforcement predates the second Trump administration. Back in 2018, we received repeated reports from families on Long Island that ICE was targeting children for removal after school officials had –  in coordination with the Suffolk County Police Department (SCPD) – disciplined students for “gang-involvement” based on flimsy evidence and vague criteria.

After the SCPD failed to respond to our Freedom of Information Law request, we sued and won. The judge found that the police department was unlawfully withholding documents, even when it claimed it didn’t have any.

The court forced the SCPD to produce more than one hundred pages to us, including affidavits from school resource officers and police, policies, letters, and incident reports. These documents revealed that despite federal protections for student data, Suffolk County schools were actively sharing student discipline information with law enforcement, including video surveillance from schools. The documents also showed the SCPD delivered letters to students at schools deliberately meant to scare them and used information provided by school officials in police reports.

This discipline meted out by Suffolk County schools was often for something trivial, like wearing a Chicago Bulls t-shirt, wearing Nike Cortez shoes, or writing their area code on a notebook.

Schools collect mountains of data on their students. Our lawsuit showed how all that data could be exploited by immigration authorities.

During the first Trump administration, a disturbing pattern arose. Information from Suffolk County schools and the SCPD would get funneled to ICE, and shortly afterward, students would be detained by immigration authorities.

Now, schools are once again being misused by Trump to try to deport New Yorkers. In his first days in office in 2025, President Trump rescinded the “sensitive locations” policy that prohibited immigration enforcement raids at churches, hospitals and schools. Trump’s border czar, New York resident Tom Homan, proudly stated he would authorize ICE to enter schools.

The Trump administration wants to intimidate immigrant families and scare them away from school. But all children have a legal right to attend school, including undocumented children.

New York has an obligation to protect our students from Trump’s mass-deportation agenda that is ripping families apart across the state. One way to do this is for the state legislature to pass the New York For All Act.

This legislation would protect people’s sensitive information – including student data – and broadly prohibit the misuse of state and local resources for civil immigration enforcement. Specifically, New York for All also prevents school employees from questioning students about their immigration status, unless doing so is necessary to help students get certain public benefits, and forbids the disclosure of student’s personally identifiable information without a court order.

The bill also prohibits ICE and Border Protection from entering non-public areas of state and local property – like schools – without a judicial warrant.

New York for All would help ease the fears many New York students have about going to school in the Trump era, and make clear that our state wants nothing to do with ICE’s dirty work – in schools or anywhere else.