Many of Maryland’s immigrants are on edge.
Concern has taken hold in school faculty rooms. School officials have advised employees how to react should Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other enforcement agents come calling. And immigrants who are parents, both documented and undocumented, say they’ve grown fearful that such a visit, were it to happen, could turn their lives upside down in an instant.
Though there have been no confirmed reports of visits to Baltimore-area schools by law enforcement agents as part of the Trump administration’s stiff new immigration policies, that hasn’t prevented fear over the possibility from gripping local immigrant communities.
One immigrant mother who is also a citizen said that while she has heard of no such searches happening, some of the Trump administration changes are so aggressive they’ve left educators, students and parents frightened in ways they haven’t been in years, and she finds it painful to process what it all means.
“It’s hard to sleep knowing that children can actually be taken,” said Rosemary, a native of Kenya who spoke with The Baltimore Sun on condition that she be identified only by her first name due to concerns over her family’s security.
Rosemary is a school nurse who emigrated to the United States as a student and later became a citizen. She now has 10- and 13-year-old daughters enrolled in a Catholic school in Baltimore County.
“We’re not criminals, maybe 1% [of immigrants] are criminals,” she said. “Most of us are here to make ends meet and provide for our children. We work hard and contribute to the economy. It brings tears to my heart. It’s unfair.”
Immigrants pay taxes, buoy economy
Estimates vary on how many are in living in the U.S. today, but most agree it’s more than 11 million. The Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors low immigration levels, cited 14 million as of March.
Though immigration hard-liners argue that such numbers depress American wages, studies suggest that the immigrant population overall has a positive impact on the economy.
Immigrant households paid $579.1 billion in taxes to federal, state and local governments in 2022 alone, for example, according to the American Immigration Council. About 6.1% of that, roughly $35.1 billion, came from undocumented households.
Still, Trump has signed more than 20 executive orders aimed at hastening the intended “mass deportation” of immigrants in the country illegally.
Rosemary made her comments days after administration officials announced a reversal of a longstanding federal policy that prevented immigration officials from carrying out raids or arrests in “protected spaces” such as churches, hospitals and schools.
The policy has been observed since 2011, when a memo issued by then-ICE director John Morton ordered that federal law enforcement not carry out searches, interviews or arrests in “sensitive locations.”
Now those locations are fair game, should ICE or other agencies deem them important to national security, and sources say immigrant parents and many of their teachers have been living in fear since the day Trump won reelection in November.
In East Baltimore, the usually noisy streets and storefronts of Highlandtown — home to one of the area’s most populous immigrant communities — were all but deserted this week.
Restaurants with menus in Spanish stood mostly empty. Customers drifted quietly in and out of laundromats and corner grocery stories. One patron after another declined to talk to a reporter, most of them saying they spoke no English.
ICE raids are a constant worry
In one place that was doing a busy trade, Castillo & Villegas Boutique & Day Spa, proprietor Reyna Villegas paused from styling the hair of 21-year-old Carmen as four other women sat around them in chairs, sharing the latest news with each other in Spanish.
Villegas said she emigrated from Mexico to the U.S. with her mother decades ago and has long been a citizen. A former longtime board member of Casa de Maryland, she’s a fixture in the mostly Spanish-speaking community who keeps tabs on her many friends and connections in part via an online chat group.
Her phone buzzes time and again with updates, most of them about immigration or deportation news.
She said new Trump administration policies have the immigrant community concerned.
“People are going to work, but they’re not doing anything they don’t absolutely have to be doing,” Villegas said, which she said explained the unusual quiet in the neighborhood.
Her youngest son, a graduate of Patterson Park Charter School, is in college, so she has no children in the public schools. But she says everyone she knows is keenly aware of the policy change toward protected places, and the many parents who frequent her salon are wary and frightened and have yet to figure out what to do.
One message that came across her phone Tuesday was an alert from a community member that an ICE agent had materialized at a high school attended in Dundalk. Many of the parents in the chat group panicked and headed to the school, ready to remove their children, only to find out the visitor was an EMT making a medical call.
The report may have squared with what Ana, a mother of four children in two public schools in Dundalk, told The Baltimore Sun through a translator after a press conference by the immigrant advocacy group Casa de Maryland in Annapolis Thursday.
Ana, who asked that her last name not be used, said she saw ICE driving around the schools during student dismissal.
“It was heartbreaking to see the fear in people’s eyes, especially when all they’re trying to do is to pick up their children from school,” she said.
Villegas echoed the idea.
“As far as I know there have been no visits by ICE, but rumors keep popping up that something has happened. Everybody is on edge all the time,” she said, referring to everyone from documented residents of the U.S. who say they’re mistrustful of the government’s intentions to Venezuelan natives who are in the country under the temporary protected status created during the Biden administration in 2023 (and extended three days before Trump took office this month).
Villegas’ customer Carmen, a dental assistant who also spoke on condition she be identified by her first name only, is the daughter of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants. The Baltimore native enjoys the birthright citizenship status Trump is seeking to eliminate by executive order.
She knows Trump officials have said they only intend to arrest undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes in the U.S., at least for now, but she was also aware that White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said during a press conference Tuesday that the Trump administration considers anyone who has entered the country without documentation a “criminal.”
That, she said, means that even if an ICE or other law enforcement agent shows up at a church, hospital or school in search of a hardened criminal, he or she can and, in her view, probably will arrest anyone on the scene they determine is undocumented.
It can mean deportation for that person and, potentially, the separation of community members from their school-age children.
Carmen’s 3-year-old daughter is too young to be in school, but she has cousins and nephews with children, they’re sharing similar thoughts with one another, and though she hasn’t heard of anyone keeping their kids home from school, she won’t blame them if and when they decide to.
“Children are going to be traumatized,” she said, when they learn their families are vulnerable to removal by the government. “President Trump has been so aggressive in his policies in this second term, now that he knows he’s not up for reelection. I hope he thinks about this. One way or another, it’s going to become a mental health issue.”
Charles Herndon, a spokesman for the Baltimore County Public Schools, said he is unaware of any visits by ICE or other law enforcement to schools in the county. Spokesman Christian Kendzierski of the Archdiocese of Baltimore said area Catholic schools have also had no such visits.
Mark Cheshire is a spokesman for Catholic Charities, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that provides humanitarian services to immigrants and refugees around the world including legal assistance, education and workforce development. Cheshire said the organization had nothing to report regarding school visits “at this point” but is following the situation closely.
Baltimore City Public Schools officials did not respond to requests for comment, but immigrants who know families with children in the system said no reliable reports of visits had emerged.
Questions about birthright amp up
The absence of visits has done little to comfort Mayra Loera, a mother of two who emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico as a teen, later became a citizen, and lives in Anne Arundel County.
Loera’s boys, 12 and 10, attend public school in the county system, and though they, too, are birthright citizens, she says what she has seen of the immigration system in the U.S. — together with the confusion around Trump’s barrage of executive orders — has her “extremely concerned” about her sons.
Loera is a program manager at the Esperanza Center, a Catholic Charities-affiliated nonprofit in Baltimore that helps immigrants adjust to life in the United States.
Loera said the center, too, had no information on ICE visits, and she stressed that she was speaking to The Sun as a mother and citizen, not as an employee.
She said she has observed in her own life that the criteria immigration officials use in deciding whom to speak to or even detain can be frighteningly subjective, and in the current climate she believes things will be little different no matter how the administration frames the debate.
“As a concerned mother of two boys who go to school, obviously I think, ‘What if ICE presents themselves at their schools?’” she said. “If they check schools, will they single out people who they think look Hispanic? As a foreign migrant woman, I’ve experienced certain situations. The fear is real in people. Parents are concerned.
“I haven’t heard anything other than talking to other parents. I’m scared. We don’t want ICE here,” Loera said, adding that she hadn’t yet thought about what to tell her boys.
“My head is going like a million miles an hour. My stomach is in knots. I can’t believe all this is happening,” she said.
As of Wednesday, Rosemary, too, had yet to find a way to tell her children that the Trump administration had removed the protected status of the school they attend every day.
Even though they’re Maryland-born citizens, she, too, wonders how government agents might act if they appear on the scene, and she said she’s fearful for her many friends, documented and undocumented, whose children attend area schools, including the one where she works.
It’s hard enough, Rosemary said, that she and her fellow staffers are having to have furtive conversations about how — or whether — to act as physical shields for the children they love should immigration agents appear on campus.
“I’m praying that God will make out a way,” she said.
Have a news tip? Contact Jonathan M. Pitts at jonpitts@baltsun.com.