President Trump recently injected $170 billion into immigration enforcement funding amid the Southern California immigration raids that have made national headlines since June. Immigrant students are facing fear in classrooms alongside other members of immigrant communities.

Federal immigration arrests continue to instill terror in the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD, community where I teach. Our community was quietly fearful long before it made headlines. Hypervigilance is now supercharged by a supercharged budget.

Seventy-four percent of teachers support the guaranteed right of undocumented students to attend public school — schools that provide physical and psychological safety and are well-resourced with academic and social-emotional supports. This is true across party lines: More than half of Republican teachers agree.

More than 40 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that children cannot be denied a free public education regardless of immigration status. But now, the Trump Administration seems hell-bent on depriving immigrant students of exactly this, and immigrant students are facing fear amidst lost protections.

I’ve seen this firsthand. In April, I was approached by a colleague on my way to coach my after-school robotics club. He asked me whether a smiley and silly fourth-grader I’ll call Daniel was in the club. I confirmed, and he insisted — urgently, and more than once — that I ensure that when Daniel headed home, he did so with his dad. No one else, and not alone.

I stood by Daniel’s side at pick-up time at the school gates until he bounded off to his dad’s pickup truck as usual. I assumed I was playing a minor role in a run-of-the-mill divorce custody battle. It wasn’t until the next day that I learned I was actually shielding Daniel from a “welfare” check by Homeland Security Investigation, or HSI, agents seeking out immigrant children.

Daniel had been one of a handful of kids on a list of names HSI agents had brought to my school that afternoon. They arrived unannounced with no uniforms and no warrants, armed with a list not of criminals, but of children under the age of 9. I had no idea I was safekeeping Daniel, just a hallway away, from potentially being separated from his family without their knowledge or consent.

Read the full article about the threats facing immigrant students by Misti Kemmer at Chalkbeat.