Why We Should Care about Trump’s Targeting of Schools, Hospitals, and Places of Worship for Immigration Enforcement Actions
Among the flurry of executive actions announced during the first week of the new Trump Administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rescinded decades of old guidance requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to avoid carrying out enforcement actions at sensitive locations, which allows federal officials to execute immigration actions in schools, places of worships and hospitals in communities around the country. This new federal action does not have the support of the majority of Americans, according to a recent poll released this month.
How Had the “Sensitive Locations” Guidance Been Implemented and What Changed Now
Since 2011 and updated in 2021, the Department of Homeland Security had in place guidance on “sensitive locations” or “protected areas,” which stated that “broader societal interests” and the impact of their activities on communities should be considered in conducting immigration enforcement activities. Those trusted community institutions included schools, places of worship, hospitals and other health care facilities, shelters, relief centers and public demonstrations like rallies and protests.
However, now, the Trump administration has issued a directive that rescinds the “sensitive locations” policy and replaced it with…rhetoric. The directive states the administration seeks to
“enforce our immigration laws and catch criminal aliens—including murder[e]s and rapists—who have illegally come into our country. Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”
The Trump administration’s bombastic language obscures its potential harmful impact on our communities:
For starters, the new policy is completely unnecessary.
As former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas once stated, “We can accomplish our law enforcement mission without denying individuals access to needed medical care, children access to their schools, the displaced access to food and shelter, people of faith access to their places of worship, and more.”
The reason is simple: the “sensitive locations” guidance had never been an absolute ban on enforcement activities in sensitive locations; indeed, if DHS (or any law enforcement agency) had specific knowledge that a murderer or rapist was hiding in a school or church, it would obtain a warrant and carry out an arrest. And typically, the federal government would carefully coordinate with school or church officials to protect the safety of teachers, children, parishioners or other innocent bystanders.
Why the Administration Should Not Target Sensitive Locations
There are good reasons to limit immigration law enforcement in sensitive locations, absent exceptional circumstances. The essence of the previous “sensitive locations” directive is that communities have places that are sacrosanct where people need to go in and out freely. Keeping places such as schools and hospitals as protected areas benefits all of us, and in fact is the same “common sense” that the administration allegedly claims to embrace.
Impact on Our Hospitals and Medical Centers:
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Deploying immigration enforcement agents around places such as hospitals and medical centers could have a chilling effect on people seeking medical care. It could:
- Deter people from seeking preventative care for themselves and their families,
- Keep immigrant parents from taking their U.S. citizen children, who are fully eligible for medical care, to the doctor or health clinic should they need to, and,
- Reduce childhood vaccination rates, exposing other children, their parents and others such as seniors and at-risk populations to communicable illnesses.
That’s bad for everyone. There’s a reason why hospitals are required by federal law to screen and provide stabilizing treatment to any individuals who show up in their emergency rooms, regardless of immigration status. As a society, we don’t want people to die on the doorsteps of medical facilities.
Impact on Our Schools:
We want all children in school to fulfill their educational potential and become productive members of our communities. But the new directive will likely result in increased arrests in and around school campuses, as we witnessed during the first Trump Administration. The impact of these immigration actions is not limited to undocumented children or American kids who have undocumented parents. There is a damaging ripple effect to take such federal actions in our community spaces. Teachers and children are naturally concerned when their classmates suffer major trauma. This kind of indiscriminate enforcement adversely affects the emotional health — and thus educational achievement — of all the children in the school. An UnidosUS survey of K-12 educators in 2019 found that 92% of respondents stated that their overall classroom climate has been impacted by enforcement concerns, directly and indirectly affecting their students’ ability to learn.
Impact on Our Constitutional Freedoms:
Finally, this new federal action will undermine two of our most cherished freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment: the right to religious liberty and the right to free speech. If ICE agents are given license to conduct enforcement operations at places of worship, the ability of all Americans to exercise their religious beliefs safe from government intrusion will be damaged. Likewise, if ICE agents are deployed around peaceful protests, Americans could be denied their right to express and hear from those most likely to be affected.
Bottomline
We support immigration enforcement activities targeting murderers, rapists or others whose presence in our country poses a threat to our safety and security. Indeed, those were the top targets for enforcement by all recent administrations — except this one, which has now declared open season on anyone and everyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant.
If this week’s executive action is nothing more than overheated rhetoric, then we can chalk it up to yet another Trump tactic that delivers far less than promised. But there is every reason to believe that it’s more than that.
Violating the ability for everyone to participate in activities at schools, shelters, places of worship and medical centers will harm and destroy that sense of community for all. And it is up to all of us who value our basic freedoms to speak up, document abuses and challenge unwise policies like this on every front — in the courts, in Congress and in public discourse.
Rita Fernandez, Director of Immigration Policy, and Laura Vazquez, Associate Director of Immigration Project at UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization.