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A soccer ball, a T-shirt: teachers scramble to say goodbye to students fleeing under Trump

A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a newcomer how much they were loved in a place they once called home.

These are among the items teachers have given their multilingual learners – students who learn in more than one language – whose families fled their school districts rather than risk being detained by immigration agents.

“One of my students told me last week that their family had decided to go back to Brazil because they were afraid of deportation,” said Philadelphia teacher Joanna Schwartz. “It was his last day here. I scrounged up a T-shirt with our school’s logo on it and a permanent marker and my student had all of his friends and teachers sign it.”

She said she taught the fifth grader for three years.

“It’s nothing big, but it was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him,” she said.

Some immigrant students wrestling with the fear of deportation leave school with no warning. Other times, they give their teachers just a few hours’ notice to process the loss of a relationship that might have lasted for years.

Such scenes are unfolding throughout the country as the Trump administration ratchets up immigration arrests and removals and opens schools to enforcement actions, striking terror in the hearts of undocumented people and their advocates.

Faced with the fallout, teachers who have spent their entire careers advocating for immigrant students – fighting battles even within their own districts to ensure students have a robust education – are left fumbling for the right words to say or gift to give a child under extreme stress.

Schwartz, who teaches multilingual learners in Philadelphia, uses her prior training as a therapist to help kids through these toughest of moments.

She said she often gives children who are leaving “transitional objects”, something tangible to help them feel connected to their friends in the United States.

two law enforcement officers detain a person

Schwartz wrote her departing student a letter in which she “reminded him of his many strengths and told him how much he will be missed”, she said. She added drawings, stickers and her email address.

Areli Rodriguez was devastated when, last winter, during her first year of teaching in Texas, one of her most promising and devoted young students left for another state. The boy’s family had been growing wary of the anti-immigrant policies of the governor, Greg Abbott, and headed to Oklahoma, where they hoped they’d be safer.

“He was my first student who left for this reason,” Rodriguez said of the fifth grader who had arrived in the United States from Mexico less than a year earlier. “It just broke my heart.”

The family didn’t know Oklahoma would propose some of the harshest immigration restrictions in the nation, including a plan to require parents to report their own immigration status when enrolling their kids in school.

Rodriguez is not sure where the child is today. As a parting gift, she gave him a soccer ball signed by all of his classmates.

Fifth grader leaving Areli Rodriguez’s classroom leads classmates in chant about self-worth – video

Moments before he left, the boy, who had been chosen as student of the week when he departed, led the class in a call-and-response chant by Rita F Pierson that the class had previously learned:

I am somebody.

I was somebody when I came.

I’ll be a better somebody when I leave.

I am powerful, and I am strong.

… I have things to do, people to impress and places to go.

The boy left his teacher one of his favorite toys, a Rubik’s Cube.

In a diary entry, he wrote to Rodriguez and another beloved teacher: “To say goodbye to all of you, Ms Rodriguez and Ms [S], I want to tell you that you are my favorite teachers, and I’m sorry for any trouble I may have caused. Maybe I wasn’t the best student, but I am proud of myself for learning so much.”

“I think about him all the time,” Rodriguez said, adding that he embodies what she loves most about multilingual learners. “For him, school was a gift, an opportunity, a privilege. He just worked so hard … His parents were so supportive – they looked at education as something they wanted to seize.”

The Department of Homeland Security is urging undocumented people to leave the country immediately. This isn’t entirely new: Joe Biden deported some 4 million people in a single term, double that of Trump’s first four years in office. But many of those he turned away had been newly arrived at the border. Unlike Trump, Biden shied away from raids.

Trump has also signed an executive order aimed at ending federal benefits for undocumented people. It’s unclear how this might affect education: schools receive federal money, particularly to help support children from low-income households, but they also cannot turn away students based on their immigration status, according to the 1982 supreme court decision Plyler v Doe.

That landmark ruling, however, is under attack by conservative forces, most recently in Tennessee, where lawmakers this month introduced a bill saying schools can deny enrollment to undocumented students. The sponsors say it’s their intention to challenge Plyler.

‘We hugged long and hard’

Educators are also preparing more practical gifts meant to help children resume their educations elsewhere.

Genoveva Winkler, the regional migrant education program coordinator in Idaho’s Nampa school district, said she’s given more than 100 immigrant families, who may have to suddenly return to their home countries, copies of their students’ transcripts in English and Spanish, along with textbooks supplied by the Mexican consulate to improve their Spanish.

Indianapolis teacher Amy Halsall said four children from the same family, ranging in ages from 7 to 12, left her school system right after inauguration day, headed back to Mexico.

a person holds a sign that reads ‘abolish ice’

“They didn’t specifically say that it was immigration related, but I would guess it was,” Halsall said. “This is a family that we have had in our school since their sixth grader was in first grade. The kids were really upset that they had to leave.”

The youngest and the eldest had told Halsall they wanted to be ESL (English as a second language) teachers when they grew up, she said. The two middle children hoped to become mechanics and one day open their own shop. Halsall gave them a notebook full of letters written by fellow students and pictures of their classmates.

“We hugged long and hard. I told them if they ever came back to Indianapolis that they should call us or visit,” she said. “I told them if I was ever in Mexico, I would call them. I tried hard to keep things positive, but it was hard for all of us. Everyone had tears in their eyes.”

The anxiety continues, Halsall said. Just last week, another child, age 8, told her he worried that “la migra” – ICE agents – would take his mother away while he was out.

“I told him that he was safe at school and if he got home and no one was there to call me,” she said.

Another teacher, in Virginia, said she has had two students leave school so far this academic year. One hailed from Guatemala and the other from Mexico. Both were in their mid-teens and had impeccable attendance, she said.

Their teacher did not have a chance to say goodbye in either case. Their departure, she said, left her feeling “completely empty”.

“I’ve loved watching them integrate in our school and seeing how they realized they can have this pathway [to further their education] if they choose,” she said. “Watching that choice ripped away by fear is devastating.”