ICE Descends on Columbus, Ohio, Hits K-12 Schools and Immigrant Neighborhoods

ICE Descends on Columbus, Ohio, Hits K-12 Schools and Immigrant Neighborhoods I received a disturbing text message from my sister yesterday afternoon: “ICE has been at the girls’ old school today.” The girls, my nieces, used to attend World Language Immersion School in Columbus, Ohio, where they both studied French and developed rich relationships with the teachers and students. The school is situated in a quiet, residential neighborhood where kids often walk after school to the nearby shops in Clintonville to get ice cream or play board games. ICE broke the peace yesterday. Local parents and community members say that ICE showed up at the school’s release time, likely targeting the large Latino/Hispanic population the school attracts. Neighbors and concerned parents-including my sister-showed up to make sure that students, most of whom are 11 to 14 years old, were able to get picked up and board their buses without being harassed. ICE’s arrival in my hometown of Columbus follows a geographic pattern of concentrated enforcement in cities for a few days or weeks, and then moving on to the next town like roving bandits, more intent on instilling fear and sowing confusion rather than establishing law and order. Los Angeles. Chicago. Charlotte. Columbus. Your city could be next. I spent most of 2013 to 2019 learning about the grassroots immigrant rights movement in the state and eventually playing a small role in creating the infrastructure and local policies that were intended to support the often ignored new American population in the city. ICE raids took place then, but they were rarer and more focused on organized crime, not nabbing people off the street outside middle schools and Home Depots. My nieces’ former middle school wasn’t the only school ICE reportedly targeted. ICE was at or near Horizon Primary School, Dublin City Schools, and Scioto High School, as well as several other locations such as the immigrant neighborhoods and grocery stores across the city. As I wrote last week, Columbus is also home to a large Somali-American community that Trump cruelly disparaged . These sightings all need to be verified through ground-truthing, but the precise locations are of secondary importance to the primary issue: the disruption caused for people living in the city who are legitimately worried about what ICE is doing, whether they are following the law, and who is being affected. A loud, online, and radicalized minority of the country is undoubtedly gleeful over ICE’s arrest-bombing of various cities. But a growing number of Americans are having a hard time squaring the Trump administration’s claims online that they are going after the “worst of the worst” with the reality that ICE is circling schools and shopping centers to look for people who’s only observable immigration infraction is that they aren’t white. City officials spoke out about immigration enforcement. Shannon Harding, president of Columbus City Council, wrote on Facebook that the city is not participating in, or helping with, ICE’s enforcement activity-but also said they can’t stop them, either. Harding...

Preview: ~500 words