Five hundred teachers, principals and superintendents across the state logged onto a Zoom call last week wondering: What do we do if immigration raids affect our school?
Among the concerns raised and detailed during the two-hour call:
What do we do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers enter our school’s front door?
What should our students know about their rights? How should parents prepare?
And what if there’s a workplace raid, and our students are left alone because their parents have been detained?
“Your obligation is to your students’ rights,” ACLU Nebraska attorney Dylan Severino said on the call. “It’s not to ICE.”
Advocates, lawyers, local leaders and Nebraska immigrants have spent the months since Election Day preparing for scenarios like workplace raids, separated families, ICE presence at courthouses and more.
They are leading “know your rights” info sessions in Lexington and passing out planning pamphlets in Grand Island. Immigration attorneys are fielding calls from churches in Lincoln and schools in Schuyler asking whether their buildings are safe. Grassroots groups are meeting on Zoom to create contingency plans should Nebraska see workplace raids.
All are bracing for President Donald Trump’s promise of the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
“It’s like preparing for a storm. You board up your house, you take precautions,” said Elsa R. Aranda, director of the League of United Latin American Citizens of Nebraska. Only in this case, “you assign people to have access to your bank account. You say, ‘my sister-in-law is authorized to take care of my children.’
“We don’t want to incite fear. But we also cannot run and hide.”
Deportation on the scale that Trump and his allies have described could impact the more than 150,000 foreign-born immigrants living in Nebraska, say immigration attorneys – the undocumented workers in fields and factories; the teens waiting for hearings in their asylum cases; community members who have lived here legally for decades on temporary protected status; mixed-status families made up of children born in the U.S. with undocumented parents.
“It’s not just documented vs. undocumented,” said Kevin Ruser, who runs the Nebraska College of Law’s Immigration Clinic. “You’ve got shades of gray in here … it’s way, way more complicated than that.”
***
Once a month, about 700 families line up on Saturday morning for food bank distributions in the parking lot of First-Plymouth Congregational Church.
The church sits in Lincoln’s Near South neighborhood, where a quarter of residents speak English as their second language. The church houses a bilingual early childhood center, said Juan Carlos Huertas, a First-Plymouth minister.
“Those families are coming into our building every day,” Huertas said. “We want to make sure it remains a safe space.”
Huertas and church leaders are talking to immigration attorneys to answer the question: What happens if ICE tries to come into church?
ICE has long avoided sensitive spaces like churches, hospitals and schools. But the Trump administration is considering reversing that policy.
“We’re just watching what happens, and making sure that we’re just responding to actual facts on the ground,” Huertas said. “That’s all we can do.”
Trump, inaugurated Monday, has repeatedly said that deportations will ramp up on Day 1 of his presidency. What that will look like remains murky.
“He’s said a whole lot,” the ACLU’s Severino said in an interview. “So we’ve got a lot to prepare for.”
Trump has said main deportation targets include migrants with criminal records, and those with outstanding removal orders – meaning the courts have ordered them to leave, but they’re still in the country.
There are an estimated 40,000 undocumented immigrants in Nebraska – likely an undercount, since it’s a population that censuses and surveys often miss, says a 2024 Pew Research Center report.
Trump has vowed to deport those undocumented immigrants.
But there are other subgroups of documented immigrants he’s said he’d try to deport as well.
Last year, he said he’d end temporary protected status, a program that since 1990 has allowed people to remain in the United States if natural disasters or armed conflict keep them from safely returning home. Immigrants with this status have no path to citizenship, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security decides whether to extend their status.
In Nebraska, there were an estimated 1,700 people on temporary protected status in 2018, according to the National Immigration Forum, a Washington-based immigrant advocacy group. Some have lived in the state for decades.
“They’ve built their homes here,” said Heidi Oligmueller, a South Sioux City immigration attorney. “Their kids have been raised here.”
Trump tried to roll back temporary protected status during his last presidency, but was challenged in court.
Also murky: The fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. In Nebraska, there are about 2,620 DACA recipients, often called “Dreamers.”
The confusion is widespread, both urban and rural, said Roxana Cortes-Mills, associated legal director for the Omaha-based Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement.
“People who are experiencing this uncertainty are in every pocket…across the state,” she said.
A new poll of Americans suggests broad agreement on removing immigrants here illegally with criminal records, with some 87% saying they should be deported. A slight majority, 55%, support deporting all immigrants here illegally in the poll by the New York Times and Ipsos. But Americans’ support erodes when asked about deporting children or Dreamers. Only 34% support “ending protection from deportation for immigrants who were children when they entered the U.S. illegally.”
There’s also the dangling question of whether the country’s immigration system can handle deportations on the scale the newly inaugurated president is proposing.
Omaha’s immigration court is so backlogged that people already wait three to four years for a hearing, said Ruser with the Nebraska College of Law. Dump more cases into that system and “they’re going to be setting hearings 10 years out.”
“It’s going to completely overwhelm an already overwhelmed system,” Ruser said.
Trump and advisers have suggested using laws like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – a law signed by John Adams allowing the president to detain and deport non-citizens in times of war – to bypass immigration courts. That would likely be challenged in court.
Amid the confusion, advocates and attorneys are looking to the past as a blueprint of what to expect.
“Food production plants in the Midwest and Southwest are the most likely targets for workplace enforcement actions,” said Anna Deal, legal director with CIRA. “National-level organizers are focusing on those as the most likely location for future raids, because that’s where they’ve been concentrated in the past.”
***
Superintendent Steve Joel’s phone started ringing in the pre-dawn hours a few days before Christmas 2006.
ICE officers had just raided Grand Island’s meatpacking plant, then owned by Swift & Company. By day’s end, they had rounded up 250 suspected undocumented workers.
Joel and the Grand Island Public Schools district he then ran were left with kids who had both parents picked up by ICE. Frightened high schoolers refused to go home. Teenagers were tasked with taking care of their younger siblings. In the weeks following, families were scared to return to school – at one point, Joel sent principals door to door, trying to convince families it was safe to come back to class.
“It tore the guts out of the Grand Island community,” Joel said. “We had to create a plan on the fly. The message that I’m trying to present to superintendents and school boards is, you need to stay out of the politics and you need to stay focused on the most important responsibility that you have. And that’s the kids.”
Trump and his advisers have promised to bring back workplace raids, a practice that slowed under the Biden administration.
Gov. Jim Pillen, along with 25 other Republican governors, has pledged to follow the president’s lead, whether through state law enforcement or deploying the National Guard.
“We’re trying to find out any activity that’s taking place so that we can be part of the solution,” Pillen said on a radio show in July. “So, you can be rest assured we haven’t put our head in the sand and say, ‘All the things that are taking place, nobody’s coming to Nebraska.’”
In the past 20 years, Nebraska has seen two large-scale raids: The 2006 Grand Island raid and a 2018 raid in O’Neill, where ICE officers raided a tomato greenhouse and potato processing plant. That raid targeting 17 people for exploiting illegal workers, fraud and money laundering also led to the arrest of 133 people for immigration violations.
Advocates and lawyers who remember those incidents are preparing for more like them.
“We know what worked and what didn’t,” Severino said. “And what worked was people being educated.”
In Lexington, where 41% of the community is foreign-born, nonprofits have hosted “know your rights” presentations at the public library, walking people through what to do if they encounter ICE. Rocio Casanova, secretary of the local nonprofit El Camino, is leading a citizenship class in February for residents trying to get permanent citizenship.
“People feel safe at the library,” said Casanova, who also works at the Lexington Public Library. “We want to continue that.”
ACLU Nebraska is lining up volunteer attorneys to respond if a workplace raid hits Nebraska. The Omaha-based Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement is circulating a pamphlet on safety planning for families – information like how to assign a temporary guardian in case your kids are left alone after an ICE raid; or documents you need if you want your kids to come with you should you be deported.
“Mainly, the concern is disruption to the family,” Ruser said. “It’s almost more of an estate planning process than an immigration process. But we would be doing a disservice to folks if we didn’t encourage them to think about stuff like that.”
In the Zoom call the week before inauguration, CIRA and the ACLU walked Nebraska teachers and principals through how they should prepare.
If ICE shows up to school with a subpoena, contact your superintendent and school attorney, Severino said. Take the time to verify it’s valid – ICE can wait.
Make sure your students know their rights, he said. They have the right to remain silent, and to refuse a search of themselves, their locker, their backpack. They have the right to a lawyer, and should try to remember badge numbers and names if they do interact with ICE.
The students should try to stay polite and calm, even in a stressful situation, he said.
If a workplace raid leaves schools in the care of kids whose parents are now detained, you must have a plan, lawyers said on the call, maybe turning to churches, local nonprofits or even teachers for help. The group plans to hold similar sessions for business owners, hospitals and nonprofits soon.
In Lexington, Casanova fears a crackdown could fuel an increase in hate crimes and racism.
She said she can already see her community dividing between people who voted for President Trump and those who didn’t. There’s also a divide between people who are worried, and people who don’t think deportations will affect the town of 10,816.
“Some people are preparing. They’re scared. They’re like, what do I need to do in order for me and my family to be safe? Do we stay home? Don’t go out?” Casanova said. “And then there are others who are like, ‘no, we shouldn’t be worried, we’re fine. Nothing like this is going to happen.
“A lot of us are feeling a little bit overwhelmed,” she said, “and a little bit divided, too.”
The Seacrest Greater Nebraska reporter covers issues across the state of Nebraska. It is named in honor of philanthropist Rhonda Seacrest and her late husband James, who proudly led several Nebraska newspapers through Western Publishing for 40 years.
