Immigrant Populations and Sanctuary Schools

Abstract

In the summer months of 2018, the world watched as thousands of young children were separated from their families and detained by immigration officials at the border between the United States and Mexico. On television screens and smartphone updates, it seemed the world collectively gasped at this cruel familial trauma and asked, “what can we do? How can we be in solidarity?” In this essay, I situate this state practice in a long-standing tradition of governance of who has rights and who does not. I also provide specific challenges for material solidarity that reaches beyond media soundbites.

Migrant Populations, Sanctuary, and Literacy

Sanctuary is often considered to be a safe space, although it is more than that. Utterance of the word conjures the associations of haven, sanctuary, and even sacred.

Sanctuary in Today’s Times

It is an undeniable fact that schools have never been unilaterally safe spaces or even places of sanctuary. The examples abound through the time line of the nation. From the U.S. Indian Bureau of Education that sought to strip Indigenous culture from sovereign Native peoples (Deloria, 1969), to the outlawing of literacy and schooling for enslaved Black peoples (Cutter, 1996), to the sequestered, substandard English-only mandates that have not so subtly told immigrant populations that they would only be liminally welcomed if they could approximate the practices of U.S.-born monolingual students who grew up speaking standardized academic English. As Salomone (2010) put it,

Schooling by its very nature is a prime vehicle for indoctrinating the young in a common core of values and political principles. Thirteen State constitutions expressly declare that a central purpose of their educational system is to promote good citizenship, democracy, and free government. (p. 5)

Schools, unfortunately, have played an unseemly role in this colonization and have used literacy, partly because of its catalytic power, to do this work. Put another way, literacy has been used as a door to close cultural groundings, and in defiance, as a window to refresh sovereignty.

With the Trump presidency adding refreshed xenophobic rhetoric to the vilification of immigrant populations, many schools and school districts have stepped up to the call and are pursuing becoming sanctuary spaces. Some schools have refused to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, and others have developed safety plans for their undocumented students. They have done so in response to the appalling and heartbreaking practice of undocumented parents being seized by ICE when dropping off their children at school during broad daylight and at checkpoints in major cities. Educators have also done so out of outrage at the subhuman containment of children at the border. They may also hold the ethic that schools are intended to, in many way, act in loco parentis for children and youth while they are in school (Patel, 2013). Although this ethic is undeniably found in the beliefs and practices of many fine educators, the aforementioned roles of schools as places of racialization, selective inclusion, and cultural eradication must also be reckoned with as long-standing systems that are far from any definition of sanctuary.

ICE was created shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Commenced as a federal agency to oversee the threat of potential terrorist attacks from non-U.S. residents, it was fortified as a paramilitary force with a budget of US$8 billion during the Obama presidency. President Trump has proposed to increase its budget by almost another billion dollars. It is important to note that the cities where migration checkpoints have been initiated are also those cities that have proclaimed themselves sanctuary cities. In response, the Trump administration has attempted to apply financial sanctions by withholding federal grant monies from municipalities that defy federal orders to detain and deport migrants. The City of Philadelphia recently received a ruling in its favor against this type of financial sanction, which the mayor celebrated with both a high five and a somber note about the treatment that Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Japanese immigrants have received in the United States (Gammage & van Wagtendonk, 2018). This uptick in action and reaction, along with the fact that school records were used as government records for undocumented youth applying to the Obama administration’s now-canceled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), raises the question of what sanctuary in its truest and most material instantiation can be. Beyond the threats of deportation and detainment that undocumented youth face, schools increasingly employ more school safety officers than restorative justice or mental health counselors. Becoming a sanctuary space has become further complicated by the proximity between militarized immigration enforcement and schooling. The susceptibility of migrant children in schooling is not a new phenomenon, but the intimacy between schooling and state law enforcement presents fresh challenges for educators working to create spaces in which children thrive fully as human beings (Sojoyner, 2016).

Literacy and Human Fulfillment

Literacy itself has been a contested and restricted pathway to human fulfillment as long as the United States has been in existence. The country was established by European settlers who quickly killed and/or forcibly removed and concentrated Indigenous peoples away from their lands; one of the ways the cultural eradication of Indigenous people was completed was through mandatory schooling and church sessions conducted in English. When the Wôpanâôt8âôk (Wampanoag) peoples, led by Jessie Little Doe Baird, began to rebuild their oral language in 1993, they faced a significant challenge of re-searching—literally refinding sounds, words, and meanings that had been vanquished over the generations. Ironically, it was biblical documents from the 1600s that played a pivotal role in mapping back their language (along with connecting it to other terms and sounds used in sister languages in the Algonquin system), thus helping the language reclamation project to resuscitate their language and, by association, their way of being in the world. Linguistic sovereignty, a form of sanctuary, was at once complicated in its intricate relationship to texts that had been used to destroy this peoples’ language. This example provides an apt marker for noting how complex sanctuary is in a land when one of its first and ongoing moves was to attempt to erase Indigenous peoples through force and cultural eradication

The United States also used, and continues to use, racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983) to enslave Black peoples as chattel labor. As part of both this Indigenous erasure and this containment of Blackness, literacy was outlawed for enslaved peoples or mandated to be in standardized academic English for the few Native peoples forced into boarding schools. Enslaved Black people literally built the nation’s most elite universities but were legally barred from being able to read to access formal learning (Wilder, 2014). To put it bluntly, in building the wealth of the United States, restricting literacy was a key component of eradicating the literate and oral cultures within Indigenous and Black populations.

Literacy as Sanctuary

And yet, settler attempts to eradicate cultures have always, in many ways, failed. From the tracing of the alphabet by an enslaved parent into the palm of a young child in the 1850s to the revitalization of Indigenous languages in many Native peoples’ cultures, those cast as the underside of humanity have created sanctuary for themselves, and literacy has been a key feature of that sanctuary (Bellamy, 1974). Social movements now and in previous eras have established freedom schools to teach literacy, spread political education, and bring together collectives. These practices were sometimes overt and sometimes done “under the radar” to create a sanctuary from state surveillance (Kelley, 2002).

Contemporary immigrant populations, now overwhelmingly from the Global South, arrive to the United States and other “developed” nations, where accrued wealth for a few has been amassed at the expense of many across the globe. Migrants of all ages face many borders, but youth are particularly vulnerable due to the ways that they may not be aware of their status and the ways that English language learners are sociolinguistically racially minoritized (Rosa, 2016). It is vital that teachers and administrators think deeply and practice rigorously what sanctuary truly is. Would this mean obstructing student enrollment records from the federal government, for example, and if so, what consequences, legal and punitive, should school leaders think through? Would this also mean confronting and dismantling the widespread belief in meritocracy and learning a more accurate history of the nation? The history of formal teacher preparation and development does not provide us with these critical historical analyses and readily accessible strategies. On the contrary, physical and cultural containment are long-standing practices that must be reckoned with to engage sanctuary as a collective practice. In addition, schools, which most consistently acted in concert with the nation’s project of deculturalization (Battiste, 2017), would be breaking bonds with that assimilative mission in favor of protecting and creating space for children to develop academically and socioemotionally. Literacy is, in fact, crucial to this development of a self-determining space that is created within but is not of oppressive policies (Baldwin, 1963; Ball, 2009). It is also a crucial mediating force for fostering solidarity and sanctuary among differently oppressed peoples (Martinez, 2017).

Sanctuary cannot merely be given or proclaimed as public rhetoric, as some cities have done. This has invited ire and the predictable backlash of an administration led by a seated bigot in the highest office of the land. Instead, I wonder what sanctuary would look like as a network of teachers and administrators who have learned what being undocumented or seen as a foreign threat means and feels like for their students. What would that learning necessitate in terms of shifting curriculum from one in which “the acquisition of a common language and a new ‘American’ identity has been part of the implicit agreement and considered critical to the success of that project” (Salomone, 2010, p. 5)? What policies need to be created and put in place to rapidly communicate when immigration raids may be circling and to literally shelter children and youth from that threat knocking on the school door? Perhaps more elusively, what ruptures in the myth that this nation was formed by “deserving” immigrants must take place for teachers to see migrant children not as charity but as people who have been made vulnerable by a transnational system of capitalist policies?

Finally, as in every aspect of schooling and society, racism looms large. Migrants, now largely from the Global South, are taught in schools where the overwhelming majority of teachers are White and female. Although the atrocities against humanity unfold at the nation’s borders, we must also be careful of not collapsing these young children into mere victims. Applying the term victims—that is, damaged people—is yet another articulation of being savage or at least less than civilized. Decades ago, Sylvia Wynter (2016) used the phrase “narratively impossible” to describe the ways that Black peoples were described to evoke criminality, savagery, and most fundamentally, disposability. Wynter argued that this language clearly collapsed humanness but did so through a narrative that, by contrast, elevated non-Black peoples as possible, recognized as humans. Put another way, casting populations as mere victims constricts the narrative possibility for humanity itself.

Although I find it necessary and heartening that officials in leadership positions, such as municipal leaders in Philadelphia and San Francisco and the governor of California, proclaim cities and states to be sanctuary spaces, true sanctuary requires much more furtive, strategic, and selfless behavior on the part of those who already enjoy the protection of walking freely in society. Luckily, and unsurprisingly, the long-standing youth-led Dreamer movement holds many examples and lessons, including political education tool kits, resources for learning about the pressures on migrant populations, and speaking points to politicians (see https://unitedwedream.org). Their tool kit and resources take into account that sanctuary cannot be accomplished in one fell swoop but rather requires proclamations, practices, and, more fundamentally, shifts in mind-sets about the politics of inclusion in a nation that claims to be a meritocracy. The materials assume that people will have varying experiences, and therefore unlearning and learning to do, to work for sanctuary.

If schools are to be sanctuaries for immigrant populations, then they must dispense with the idea that these populations are less than their U.S.-born counterparts. They must be respected and treated with respect for their own full humanness, not as prospective citizens on a path of assimilation. Teachers and administrators who want to create and provide sanctuary must do so not out of the goodwill of their hearts but out of the core commitment to well-being for all as well as a historical understanding that schooling has too often been a place of colonizing minds and bodies (Battiste, 2017). This is no small request for the culture of education that tends toward wanting to save children rather than seeing them as willful, sovereign entities (Shalaby, 2017). If schools are to approach becoming a sanctuary—in other words, sacred space—they must eschew the ranking of some people as more human than others and become places where all can be well, not out of pity or as gift, but out of a core ethic for all. This is the anchor that can guide the practices, knowledge, and shifts in curriculum, pedagogy, and policy that schools might take to truly become sanctuary spaces.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental_Material_802417 – Supplemental material for Immigrant Populations and Sanctuary Schools

Supplemental material, Supplemental_Material_802417 for Immigrant Populations and Sanctuary Schools by Leigh Patel in Journal of Literacy Research