A Shameful Stance of Union Leaders
On January 20, the Trump administration issued a series of executive orders, many targeting the so-called “border crisis.” Among these is Executive Order 14165. This order, combined with a change in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy, aims to expand DHS operations, bolster surveillance capabilities, leverage the bipartisan-backed Laken Riley Act (Democrats share responsibility here), and grant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweeping authority to enter schools, hospitals, and churches.
The prospect of ICE agents entering schools has ignited widespread outrage, sparking protests nationwide. School districts like Bridgeport Public Schools in Connecticut, criticized by right-wing media, are attempting to block ICE agents and other officials from entering campuses, buses, or events without explicit approval from the superintendent. Meanwhile, families and students increasingly rely on mobile apps offering real-time alerts about ICE activity.
For educators, a pressing question looms: What should we do if ICE threatens our students?
In response, some districts have rolled out training programs to inform staff of their rights. Teachers’ unions, however, have offered tepid guidance. The National Education Association (NEA) advocates lobbying school boards to establish “Safe Zones” alongside its usual weak-kneed advice that political and community action should be conducted “off the clock.” While the NEA provides legal guidance and resources, it avoids taking a direct stand against ICE operations and offers no real strategy for resistance. At best, it makes symbolic gestures while stopping short of encouraging meaningful defiance or social change.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) echoes this passivity, emphasizing lobbying, knowing your rights, and maintaining dialogue—essentially prescribing compliance with the status quo. Both the AFT and NEA, rather than mobilizing their members for collective resistance, instead work to keep teachers in line with the capitalist state and its laws, ensuring that any action taken remains within a framework that ultimately serves those in power.
Educators know these measures fall disastrously short. For years, Republicans have systematically targeted local governments—particularly school districts—by stoking divisions between parents and teachers, dismantling unions, and stacking school boards with loyalists.
The idea of simply “talking” with these people, especially in the South, is a well-worn path to nowhere. And it certainly doesn’t help when our own unions take positions that confirm our worst fears—expecting that teachers take a bullet for our students, yet advising us to step aside for ICE.
Once again, our unions fail to protect the interests of working people, demonstrating the co-optation of these institutions by agents of the bourgeoisie. Rather than tapping into popular indignation to protect our students, they call the one force capable of rallying to the side of students to stand down, thereby enforcing compliance with the so-called “rule of law.” Compliance is not neutrality. It is nothing less than an attempt to suppress meaningful action and contain the collective outrage that is brewing against the policies of the bourgeois governments.
But this is not a reason to abandon the unions—it is a call to fight for their democratization, to resist those who collaborate with both Republican and Democratic governments, and to transform the unions into fighting organizations. We cannot let Democrats shape the narrative around their so-called resistance to Trump’s policies when they remained passive during the Biden administration’s record deportations, the brutal repression of Haitian migrants at the border, and Kamala Harris’s pledges to toughen immigration enforcement.
We must demand unions that unflinchingly defend teachers, students, and families. Unions must fight for universal access to quality public education and unequivocally uphold the rights of migrant students and their families.