Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children
Massachusetts DSS workers helped obtain the release of 20 parents and other caregivers without bond within a few days after the raid. DSS staff were also present at service provider meetings and community events. New Bedford also had access to substantial nonprofit legal resources, mostly provided out of Boston offices. Legal aid was offered by both Greater Boston Legal Services and a lawyer from Catholic Charities who specializes in immigration issues. Grand Island, Nebraska. The response effort in Grand Island was less centralized than in New Bedford, but was coordinated informally and funded primarily by the employer (at that time, Swift & Company), the union (United Food and Commercial Workers), and other private sources. Community leaders in Grand Island were ready to respond when the raid happened because of experience with a previous raid at the same plant in the late 1990s. But Grand Island could not draw on the same level of resources from nearby cities, as was the case in New Bedford and Greeley, because the community is relatively isolated, located about 100 miles west of Omaha. Several community leaders and institutions came together under the umbrella of the Grand Island Multicultural Coalition, a preexisting independent nonprofit membership organization dedicated to networking and coalition-building to better serve the needs of the area’s Latino and other minority ethnic populations. The coalition, which already had participation from broad sectors of the community (including Swift, Nebraska DHS, public schools, nonprofit service providers, and local churches), facilitated connections among responding organizations and sponsored and provided the space for numerous meetings. Out of concern for the school children, the Grand Island school district played a lead role in coordinating and providing assistance to families, starting on the day of the raid. The district had developed plans in the event of a raid at the Swift plant, based on the experience with the previous raid there. The superintendent held several press conferences throughout the day reassuring immigrant families that their children were safe at school. English as a second language program staff took the lead in convening meetings of community leaders, delivering assistance directly to families’ homes, and referring immigrant parents to available services. The public schools became safe havens for children and an information pipeline for the community in the days and weeks after the raid. The district had developed a database of parents’ employers, and used this database to contact all children whose parents might have been arrested at Swift. The Swift plant had a history of strong, positive relations with the Latino community –
NCLR ◆ Page 85