Each week, “Pop Quiz” features an interview with a member of Greater Houston’s education community. To suggest someone we should interview with an interesting story to tell, email us at education@houstonlanding.org.
Meet the interviewees
As children, Lorena Tule-Romain and Viridiana Carrizales migrated with their family through the Arizona desert to find a better life in the United States. Their nine-hour trek would bring the two sisters and their family to Dallas where they would build a life and enroll in public school.
The two sisters faced challenges as students living in the country illegally and eventually combined their experiences with education and immigration through Teach for America, when they began supporting teachers with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status.
Then, in response to President Donald Trump’s first term, Tule-Romain and Carrizales founded ImmSchools, a non-profit organization focused on providing educators and families support when navigating immigration issues at the K-12 level.
“From looking around, it was very much evident that there wasn’t an organization doing particularly the K-12 space work,” she said. “Yet ICE raids were happening, and it was impacting the ability for our kiddos to show up to school to academically succeed, and that was the foundation of ImmSchools – there’s nobody coming to save us.”
Founded in 2018, ImmSchools teaches educators to create preventative immigration initiatives in schools and teaches them about the rights students and their families have if they are living in the country illegally. The organization employs about 15 people who work with schools in Texas, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The Houston Landing spoke with Tule-Romain about the work ImmSchools does, how school districts can benefit and what parents should know when discussing immigration.
The following interview has been condensed for brevity and lightly edited for clarity.
Can you tell me about the program?
Since we’ve been around for a few years, we have been developing our curriculum of what our program offers. So for the educators and supporting staff we have developed different units, if you think about it that way, of professional developments.
The big bulk of our focus is the foundation – what does someone who has no idea or is not in proximity to this issue needs to know and understand from policy at the federal, state and local level to your point about the localized piece of their district.
So really breaking them down to the terminology and what it means to have a lived experience of being of mixed status families if we’re doing the work in Texas. So our professional development is really to fill in that gap. What do you need to know as an educator for the purpose of this topic at the federal level, at the state, and at the local level in terms of policy?
Even though, of course, policy is something that they probably are not hearing or having the conversation but just covering the essence of what are the rights of undocumented students from Plyler v. Doe to the protections that FERPA has to the McKinney–Vento law.
So just making sure they have a foundational understanding from a policy but also from a lived experience of what are the terminologies that they should know in the classroom to just making sure that they have some best research-based practices on supporting the students from having some visuals in their classrooms to curriculum tools that they can use to integrate some of this topic into their classroom regardless of the topic they are teaching.
So again just a big chunk of the professional development on that offering is just making sure they have best practices that they can implement right after our session – after breaking down the complexity of policy terminology just demographics and content. A big bulk of it is just making sure they have best practices and we have scenario basing that they can work through just to infuse some of that learning components of the topic.
And, of course, the biggest one is our foundation but we have developed a little bit more of our curriculum over the years to offer more information on post-secondary and entrepreneur opportunities for students just to make sure that as educators or counselors they understand how students can also navigate the post high school experience.
So there’s mental health topics that we cover as well, just knowing that our kiddos don’t get to leave their immigration status of their parents at home. They come with really focusing on how the strategies that the educator can implement to create that safe and welcoming space that I didn’t have growing up.
Infusing some of that, bringing some research on best practices and then doing some facilitation around that. So there’s different topics like I said for the educators from higher ed to immigration and race is another topic that we have developed and as an offering of having a conversation about race through the lens of immigration which is often something that folks don’t have a conversation around.
Why is this work important, especially right now?
f I’m talking generally, 5.5 million undocumented students in our K-12 system alone have at least one parent that is undocumented.
That is a huge number of directly impacted children, we live in a community, so they might know somebody who’s directly impacted if it’s not themselves. So the number of folks and that number, if you break it down in Texas, it’s one out of nine of our students in our K-12 that has at least one undocumented parent. So this issue it’s about the children that are being served in our education system and how this immigration also impacts them, right, because as I mentioned earlier they don’t get to leave their immigration status of their parents at home when they enter the schools they might be worrying about whether or not they’re going to come home and find their parents, and their ability to learn is not going to be there if they’re worrying about the safety of their family or the potential separation that might happen.
So, this coupled with just the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the different policies, executive orders that have removed the guidance on not coming into schools, the sensitive location memo being repealed, and just the anti-immigrant rhetoric that is happening impacts the ability for any student to actually show up to school. So really thinking about it from an education perspective that this impacts our children and that educators should be prepared to support these students, right? Parents and students should know their rights when it comes to this topic, but also have a plan in case something happens. I would argue that it’s an education system. It’s an education issue that impacts our students.
How are y’all advising educators and families now that the “safe space” locations guidance changed?
It was such an unfortunate but expected, honestly on our side, to happen within the first 100 days. So from the admin, school, educator lens in our conversation, we’re encouraging school districts to have a protocol. “What is your protocol if immigration custom enforcement steps into the school?” “What is that?” “Where do you put the officers?” to “what number do you need to call for your school district attorney and legal representation?” to make sure that they are the ones looking through whether or not they have the correct paperwork. “Is it a judicial warrant or an administrative warrant?” So from policy advice, we’re making sure that “Hey, here’s some templates of what other school districts’ policy districts look like,” right? So some charter schools each school has some districts having their own district policy just ensuring that there is that protocol for managing such situation from the educator and administrative to just making sure.
The other big piece is the expedited removal. So, another administrative recommendation to schools is to do what they’re called enrollment letters, and it’s just a letter from the school district saying this student with parent X has been enrolled in the school since X date to prove that they have more than two years in the country. So, they don’t fall into this expedited removal if they get caught in the immigration system.
So there’s administrative policy but also proactive actions that they can take. A big one has been making sure the emergency contact of the students are updated because if both parents or the parent gets detained, who are they going to call to make sure this child or this student is OK, so just having updated their system and multiple folks can do some of that to just providing direct resources from the red cards to family preparedness to hosting know your rights at the schools. So that’s just more of the recommendations we do for the educators, admin and supporting staff for the parents and the students is very similar, making sure we are recommending to them you need to have multiple people in your emergency contact that should be done, really encouraging parents to proactively think about this because it’s real, right?
Versus waiting for the worst case scenario where it might be a lot harder to get their children their emergency package whether they have to get their passports or process or just who’s in emergency contact in the school of my children. So walking the same process from the educators to the parents and saying, “Do you know what your school’s going to do if ICE comes into the school?” “How might your kids be protected?” Right? just to make sure that there’s that understanding across the board, not only the educators, but the parents also understand what the school’s going to do.
If someone wants to know more about ImmSchools, how can they reach out?
We have in our website, immschools.org, an inquiry sheet and again right because it’s topic sensitive we usually vet it once we get that and so we’re like “OK, where are they sending email from?” “Is it a school related email?” just to make sure we can filter through but there is a contact inquiry that folks can fill out on our website and that’s usually how they reach out to us.
Angelica Perez is a general assignment reporter for the Landing’s education team. Find her @byangelicaperez on Instagram and X, or reach her directly at angelica@houstonlanding.org.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
