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On a recent summer night, a 9-year-old girl in Northwest Washington, D.C. was having trouble sleeping. She heard on the news that speaking Spanish could draw the attention of federal agents, and she worried aloud to her Hispanic father that immigration officers might come for her classmates’ parents. “She kept asking, ‘Can they come to people’s homes? Can they come to our home?’” her father said. “She was terrified.”
Their family, longtime residents of the city and American citizens, are not at risk of deportation. But the girl’s anxiety reflects a broader unease rippling through D.C. families as the city’s public schools prepare to start a new school year on Monday, Aug. 25, under the shadow of President Donald Trump’s takeover of the city’s police force and a ramp up in federal immigration enforcement.
Across the nation’s capital, parents are setting up group chats on WhatsApp and Signal to coordinate carpools and walking groups. Some are pressing the city to relax attendance requirements, out of concern that some families might feel they have to keep their kids at home. “We’ve got people volunteering to carpool other people’s kids to school because the parents are afraid to try to get their kid to school on their own,” says Catherine Morgan, a D.C. resident whose child starts third grade on Monday.
Since announcing in August that he would place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control and deploy National Guard troops to patrol the streets, Trump has insisted his measures are necessary to curb what he has described as “roving mobs of wild youth” and “bloodthirsty criminals,” despite statistics showing violent crime in the city had hit a 30-year low earlier this year. His administration has also rolled back protections that once limited immigration enforcement around schools, allowing agents to conduct raids in neighborhoods and workplaces.
The result, according to parents, educators and community leaders,…
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