Border Patrol Officers Arrest Woman in Bay Village, Then Drives to Daughter’s School in Lorain to Arrest Her Too

The Chronicle-Telegram reports this morning that U.S. border patrol agents arrested a woman in Bay Village last week and then accompanied her to her daughter’s school in Lorain to collect her as well. The whereabouts of both are now “unclear,” but the immigrant community in Lorain, 30 miles west of Cleveland, is rightfully fearful that even on school grounds, where their children are legally in the district’s custody, they might not be safe from raiding agents.

At a meeting, the CT reports, local Latino leaders and school officials tried to calm down families by saying that the school district’s protocols were now being reviewed to ensure that in the future, no border patrol agents would enter school grounds, and certainly not in uniform. (The agents last week were dressed in plainclothes and driving an unmarked vehicle.)

Leaders also said that the school district is pursuing a policy change which would require an independent law enforcement officer to verify the border patrol agents’ credentials and paperwork, and would require a bilingual interpreter to be present for all interactions.

The Lorain Schools’ safety coordinator told parents that in their own interactions, it was “paramount to verify that any agents are who they claim to be, not human traffickers or drug cartel members posing as Border Patrol officers.”

But it’s not as if Border Patrol agents are any better. Indeed, it’s border patrol agents, not human traffickers or cartel members, who are storming communities and targeting Latinos in pursuit of vile mass deportation policies under Donald Trump.

In last week’s arrest, the mother was a passenger in a vehicle. A traffic stop nevertheless resulted in her and her daughter’s detainment.

“It was found that she violated an immigration order,” the CT reported, from a school district press release. That’s a grammatical construction — it was found — that removes the agents and their civil rights violations from the equation.   

But invading schools is a new terrifying incursion. After raids last summer, the local immigrant community and their allies rallied in downtown Cleveland to sound the alarm on ICE’s “reign of terror.” Speakers said that Latinos felt as if they were under “constant surveillance” and parents said they were afraid to even let their kids play outside.

Ohio, at the time, was home to the third-most immigration arrests in the county, behind only Michigan and Pennsylvania. Ninety percent of those arrests were of Latinos.

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This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2020.