In southern Minnesota, small-town schools plan as fears of Trump deportations rise

Principal Mike Fugazzi remembers the pain last month when one of his St. James Middle/High School students saw their father deported just before Christmas.

“Right before winter break. I mean, the kid’s 12. He totally fell apart in December,” Fugazzi said. When school officials reached out to the family, Fugazzi said they’d already accepted their new reality — “Dad’s gone now,” they said.

It was a gut punch for the family, but Fugazzi worries it may be a glimpse into his school’s future. Nearly 60 percent of the kids in his small-town school district are Latino, and fears of mass deportations are increasingly real as a second Trump administration nears power. 

Since the election, districts across Minnesota have started planning how to support students and staff should large-scale deportations happen. Last month, an online seminar on the issue drew more than 100 leaders from districts across the state.

“There’s a real sense of anxiety, of uncertainty,” said Carlos Mariani Rosa, a former state lawmaker and executive director of the Minnesota Education Equity Partnership, which hosted the seminar. “School districts have already begun to have structured conversations around this.”

It’s especially concerning in small towns like St. James and nearby Butterfield, where most of the kids in school are Latino.

“Most of these kids are going to stay. Their families are going to get torn apart,” Fugazzi said. “And when you’re in St. James, and there’s 600 kids in this building, and we all know each other. Like, we pick up on that pretty quick.”

‘What are we going to do to help the kids?’

The hallways in St. James Middle/High School were crowded on the first day back in session after winter holidays. Students in hoodies and sweatshirts filed into classrooms speaking English and Spanish.

The district’s Latino students are a diverse mix of first-, second- and third-generation immigrants from a wide variety of Latin American countries. Many are in families where parents work jobs in the agricultural industry or nearby meatpacking plants. The kids and their families have helped keep the schools well-funded.

Immigrants have added businesses to the city center and families who support school plays, sports games and the local economy.

“It’s really a picture of how the world works and what the world looks like,” said Steve Heil, superintendent of the St. James schools.

Minnesota has about 36,000 children who live in households where at least one family member lacks permanent legal status in the United States, according to the nonprofit advocacy group American Immigration Council. 

Schools don’t track the immigration status of their students or families. Heil, though, said he worries about students being left on their own if their parents are deported. 

“If deportations were to happen — let’s say some of our parents left. Those students are going to come out of school, they might walk into an empty home,” Heil said.

“What resources do we have as a community, and the school here in St. James? What are we going to do to help the kids? What are we going to do to help families if this comes to fruition?” he asked. “It’s about the health and safety of our students and making sure they have what they need.” 

In the nearby Butterfield-Odin school district, superintendent Dan Blankenship said he’s planning to help families in the same way he’d prepare to help if a tornado hit.

“We’re just trying to be proactive,” Blankenship said. “I don’t want to come to school and I have 10 little children sitting here at school, and … they don’t have a place to go after school, because their parents are, you know. I mean, that could happen now.”

School leaders and other advocates are trying to work on the problem without ratcheting up the fear. They’re asking questions about the law and how they’re obligated or restricted from cooperating with immigration enforcement, Mariani Rosa said. 

For decades, schools have been designated as “protected” areas where immigration authorities are not supposed to make arrests or conduct “tightly controlled investigations” in order to avoid hindering children from attending school.

Jose Galdamez, a cultural liaison in the St. James schools, works with Spanish speaking students and their families and said he knows they’re worried. 

“Students are kind of skeptical, you know, because they don’t know what’s going to happen,” Galdamez said. “It’s hard to tell them it’s going to be alright, because we don’t know if everything’s going to be alright.” 

‘We know them’

St. James’ mayor, teachers and representatives from local clergy, county leaders, businesses, clinics, the food shelf, other nearby districts and nonprofit organizations are working together to prepare for whatever happens. The group has also reached out to law enforcement.

Nidia Zelaya, a community liaison for Watonwan County, said she tries not to think about the worst case scenario, but she doesn’t want her community caught unaware if they’re among those affected. 

She’s working with the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations to help people understand their rights. And she’s been walking people through the process of filling out “delegation of parental authorization” forms. 

“We are just trying to get people informed with their rights, also letting them know who they can trust … who they can go to and ask for help,” Zelaya said. 

To her, the effects large-scale deportations would have on St. James and other nearby communities are hard to imagine. 

“The amount of people that are in our factories that if this were to happen, it would take down communities,” she said. “It would take down the economy of a community. It would take down the workforce, it would take down schools.”

School and city officials say the worries bubbling now are frustrating, too, because Latino students and their families strengthen and sustain the community and its schools.

Without them, St. James Middle/High School “wouldn’t exist as it is, for sure,” said Carissa Lick, the district’s English language development coordinator. “We do have more to offer because we have these larger numbers of students,” she added. “Immigrant children, families and workers are such a huge part of this community.”

The school can offer expanded programming to everyone in the community because of increased numbers of immigrant students. 

“While many small towns find their enrollment dropping and struggle a lot with school budgets because of (immigration), we have seen our enrollment grow,” Lick said. “We do have more to offer because we have these larger numbers of students. And just in the community, more broadly, there are numerous Spanish speaking owners of businesses … it just brings a lot of vitality.”

For Fugazzi, watching out for kids is a requirement. In St. James, he said, there’s an expectation that neighbors know each other and school leaders take care of their students, part of what he said “makes us us.”

“We know them by name, and we probably know the parents and grandparents too, you know, like, they’re not very separated, they’re probably here Friday at the basketball game, or, you know, the gymnastics meet, or we had wrestling this weekend too,” he said. “I mean, they’re in the building. They’re here … we know them."

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