Life changed on a cold December morning for nearly 200 Grand Island Public Schools students, and the days and months to come would add to the stress.
KEVIN ABOUREZK / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, October 6, 2007 7:00 pm
GRAND ISLAND — This is her favorite subject.
There are no surprises in math. No politics.
Just a series of numerals that Karla Banda adds, subtracts and multiplies to arrive at an answer.
But life for the Grand Island 11-year-old no longer makes as much sense as this day’s math lesson. At least not since Dec. 12, the day her world fell apart.
Early that morning, her father, Luis Ramirez, stood on the line at the Swift meatpacking plant, slicing and jerking bones from the necks of beef carcasses.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended on the plant on the outskirts of Grand Island about 7:30 a.m.
They stopped work in the plant and rounded up workers in the cafeteria. Then they separated them by nationality, Ramirez said through an interpreter last week.
Cubans and Mexicans over here. Guatemalans and Puerto Ricans over there.
They began asking for documents.
Ramirez, a 42-year-old father of four who has lived in the United States for the past 18 years, had none.
Agents handcuffed him and about 280 other workers and loaded them onto buses at about 1:30 p.m. to be taken to a military camp in Des Moines, Iowa.
Nearly a month later, he would walk out of a Georgia military camp.
Free. For the moment.
Studying the aftermath
Life changed that cold December morning for nearly 200 Grand Island Public Schools students, and the days and months to come would add to the stress.
A national Hispanic advocacy organization — the National Council of La Raza — plans to release a study later this month that examined the effects of federal immigration raids on Grand Island and two other communities in Colorado and Massachusetts.
The council commissioned the nonpartisan Urban Institute to complete the study.
Between May and August, the institute examined the effects of workplace raids on children, families and communities, said Rosa Maria Castaneda, research associate for the Urban Institute.
“It is the first report at the national level on the impacts of these raids, which are becoming more and more common,” she said.
Researchers interviewed state and local government officials, law enforcement, school administrators and teachers, community nonprofit agency directors and staff, clergy and other faith-based groups, as well as 30 undocumented caretakers of children whose parents were arrested, she said.
Neither Castaneda nor a National Council of La Raza spokeswoman would discuss specific findings from the study last week. They plan to release results Oct. 31 during a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
However, a Nebraska Health and Human Services employee shared preliminary findings from the study during a Sept. 26 Hispanic conference in Lincoln.
Yolanda Nuncio, central services area administrator for HHSS based in Grand Island, offered the information during a presentation at the annual Hispanic/Latino Summit, sponsored by the Nebraska Department of Education and the Nebraska Mexican-American Commission.
Among the findings she shared:
* The Grand Island raid affected children from all backgrounds, including Hispanic children whose parents were U.S. citizens and white children who saw their friends lose parents in the raids.
* Children were unable to communicate with their parents the day of the raid because those who were arrested were not allowed to use phones to set up alternate care for their children.
* Some children whose parents were arrested spent at least one night without a parent, often with other family members, a baby sitter, neighbors or family friends.
* Many Hispanic parents who weren’t arrested hid with their children in the hours and days after the raid, refusing to answer their doors or turn on the lights. Many lived in homes that appeared vacant.
* The raid caused economic insecurity for Hispanic families left behind, often without incomes and with responsibility for additional dependents.
* The raid left many children whose parents were taken with lingering mental health problems, issues their families often failed to address.
* Grand Island Public Schools acted swiftly to ensure all public school students affected by the raid had rides home and places to go.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Greg Palmore defended the enforcement action.
“Those who willfully violate U.S. immigration laws face the consequences of their actions,” he said. “We carry out enforcement actions at appropriate times and places.”
He also responded to findings from the study, saying ICE agents provided phones to those arrested at every place they were detained. He said he personally witnessed ICE agents lending their cell phones to detainees.
“Every individual in ICE custody was allowed to make contact with their family or spouse,” he said.
Palmore said the agency also worked with schools to make sure children had caretakers and places to go.
ICE agents interviewed each person they arrested to determine his or her lineage, immigration status and whether he or she had dependent children, Palmore said. Based on responses, Swift workers were either detained or allowed to waive their rights to go before an immigration judge, allowing for their immediate removal from the United States.
“Those arrested on criminal charges will be prosecuted through the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” he said.
A school responds
About 9 a.m. on Dec. 12, Robert Briseno was at Walnut Middle School when he began hearing students and teachers talking about a raid at the Swift plant.
Briseno, multicultural at-risk coordinator for Grand Island public middle schools, gathered students whose parents worked at Swift in the auditorium.
“I wanted them to hear it in their language so they would understand it,” the soft-spoken 73-year-old said. “Their world was like coming to an end.”
Students responded to his announcement with gasps and cries of anguish, he said.
With a student body made up of 60 percent minority students, mostly Hispanic, Walnut Middle School was hit hard by the Dec. 12 raid.
About 45 children at the school were affected directly or indirectly by the raid, Assistant Principal Rod Foley said.
Officials at Walnut played a key role in developing the school district’s response to the raid, Briseno said. That’s because the school’s principal, Vikki Deuel, had handled the aftermath of previous raids, he said.
After informing students of the raid, staff and administrators at the school began working the phones to ensure every child affected had somewhere to go and a way to get there.
School district officials did the same that morning.
Superintendent Steve Joel learned of the raid when Grand Island Police Chief Steve Lamken called him on his cell while Joel was driving to work shortly after 7:30 that morning.
“It was a real courtesy call, and I appreciated that immensely,” he said.
Joel began brainstorming. He decided to call a meeting with district administrators and staff who could best help find out which students were affected and get that information to schools.
At the meeting, school leaders decided to set aside three district buildings that would serve as places where students whose parents were arrested could stay until someone could pick them up.
The district identified more than 1,000 students who could have been affected by the raid, Joel said.
The next step was to inform the community that its public schools were safe places for students, havens ICE agents would not be allowed to enter and where students should remain so as not to interrupt their routines, he said.
Joel also wanted to let people know the schools were not taking a political stand on the raid.
“It got political pretty quickly, so we focused on the kids,” he said.
He said the district struggled to get Hispanic parents, especially those who had lost relatives in the raid, to trust school staff and administrators.
“There was a lot of distrust,” he said. “There was a lot of emotion.”
Tough to trustRobert Briseno knows about distrust.
The day after the raid, he visited the homes of students missing from school to try to persuade them to return to school.
Even though he saw curtains pushed aside by invisible hands as he neared several homes, rarely did anyone answer their doors, he said. But when Briseno, a respected man in Grand Island’s Hispanic community, spoke, people often felt safe enough to answer the door.
“I assured them they were better off in school,” he said. “It was hard to convince them.”
Later, when they returned to school, Briseno said many of the ornery, mischievous children he had come to know had turned sullen and withdrawn.
“All of a sudden they were just like little zombies,” he said.
Within three days of the raid, all of Walnut school’s students had returned, Assistant Principal Foley said.
On the district level, Joel said, staff and administrators at all of Grand Island’s public schools managed to account for the well-being of every child by 8:30 p.m. Dec. 12.
“I went to bed that night feeling pretty good about our work,” he said.
Speaking at the summit in Lincoln on Sept. 26, Nuncio congratulated the system on its response to the raid.
“I was very proud of the Grand Island schools that day,” she said.
Joel has become a popular speaker, speaking at about a dozen conferences and workshops, including an American Society of Newspaper Editors conference on covering Hispanic issues in late April and early May. He plans to speak at a newspaper education writers conference Oct. 14 in San Francisco.
And he was the subject of a June 18 Wall Street Journal story about his district’s reponse to the raid.
Mostly, he said, he tells others exactly how Grand Island Public Schools responded to the raid and about the need for an emergency response plan for schools that could face similar crises.
“It isn’t until you’re in a crisis that you really wish you had more time to prepare for it,” he said.
A community in crisisThe Dec. 12 raid demonstrated the distrust so many Hispanic community members feel toward school and government officials, Yolanda Nuncio of HHSS said.
She said HHSS staff spoke to a Guatemalan woman who didn’t tell ICE agents she had children at home who needed supervision because she feared they would be taken, too.
The raid also highlighted Grand Island’s deficiencies in dealing with such a crisis, she said.
The community lacked enough bilingual counselors to speak to children and their families.
She said several children were left with only their older siblings to care for them. One family of three children, the oldest of whom was 12 and whose parents had been arrested, stayed alone in their home for at least one night after the raid.
“We’re not saying we support illegal immigration, but we’re saying there’s got to be a better way to handle these things,” Nuncio said.
Families hid in their homes after the raids, fearing they might be taken. They kept their children out of school when they heard ICE agents stayed behind to continue rounding up undocumented immigrants, she said.
“Are you going to send your children to school if you think that’s going to happen to you?” she asked.
Later, after things settled down and children returned to school, many began exhibiting symptoms of such problems as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and separation anxiety.
Few Hispanic parents sought psychiatric help for their children, believing they could deal with the problems at home.
“We don’t take advantage of those services often enough,” Nuncio told the audience of mostly Hispanic educators and students at the Hispanic/Latino Summit last month.
Some families were afraid HHSS staff would take their children and not bring them back.
“We were supposed to work to keep those children with their families,” Nuncio said.
She said it’s important that Hispanic families develop plans for what to do should something like this happen to them.
“The important part of that is knowing where your kids are, knowing that they are safe,” she said.
Castaneda of the Urban Institute said those who conducted the study focused their research on how the raid affected children. They wanted to learn about the psychological impact the raid had on children and how it affected families.
“Largely what we wanted to do was bring a human dimension to it and what it means for families and children,” she said.
One family’s storyKarla Banda unfolds the Wall Street Journal on the table before her. On the front page is a sketch of Steve Joel.
Inside, she scans the page for her name. There it is, she says, pointing.
“What does ‘seized’ mean?” she asks Robert Briseno, who is looking over her shoulder at the story about the Grand Island raid.
The word is used in a sentence describing what happened to her father.
“Oh, taken away?” she says, answering her own question.
“Yes,” Briseno says.
It’s been a long 10 months for Karla. The Dec. 12 raid that left her without a father couldn’t have come at a worse time, she said.
It was the Virgin of Guadalupe Day at her family’s church, a special day in the Hispanic practice of Catholicism. It was exactly one week before her older sister’s birthday and nearly two weeks before Christmas.
Karla’s family — three siblings, her mom and nephew — did little celebrating last December.
Mostly, Karla said, they cried and held each other in the hours and days after the raid.
She had known her father was undocumented but never really thought he’d be taken away.
“He’s a nice dad,” she said. “He always tries to protect us.”
The kind of dad who holds her hand in public, even though it embarrasses her.
After he was taken away, she said, her family first heard from him by phone on Dec. 19, she said.
“He said that he loved me,” she said. “I couldn’t tell him anything. I was just crying.”
Later, Karla’s fifth-grade teacher asked her students to write about a personal experience. Karla wrote about Christmas Day 2006.
About missing her dad.
About opening presents and feeling miserable the whole time, then going straight to bed.
“It was sad,” she said. “I wanted to be happy, but I couldn’t.”
The experience has chastened the once stubborn 11-year-old. Rather than worrying about what clothes to wear or what friends to hang out with, she frets about money and whether someone will take her dad away again.
Her older sisters are considering dropping out of school and getting jobs to help support their family. She wishes she could help.
And she wants to offer some advice to children on how to treat their parents.
“Don’t ever scream at them because you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,” she said.
Luis Ramirez said he has a hearing in July that could determine whether he will be allowed to remain in the United States.
In the meantime, he has joined many detainees who have returned to Grand Island since the raid, according to Briseno.
When immigration officials released Ramirez on Jan. 11, he said, he jumped on a plane in Atlanta and flew to Lincoln, where his brother-in-law picked him up from the airport.
His wife and four children did not meet him at the airport, because his wife was working and his children were in school.
He refused to let them get out of school early, he said, because their education is the most important thing to him.
He then drove home to Grand Island, where he waited outside his daughter’s school.
Father and daughter said little to each other as they met.
“All he could do was hold me,” Karla said. “I don’t fight with him anymore and argue.”
Reach Kevin Abourezk at 473-7225 or kabourezk@journalstar.com.