Teachers Scrambled After ICE Released Tear Gas Outside a Chicago Elementary School

Maria Heavener had opened the windows of her first-grade classroom to let in the unusually warm October breeze when the sound of helicopters, sirens, and a flood of notifications compelled her to slam them shut. During a raid on a nearby grocery store, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had hurled tear gas canisters into a parking lot across the street from Chicago’s Funston Elementary School, spreading a thick, choking smog toward the building while class was in session. 

Heavener had heard rumors that ICE was planning to detain unaccompanied minors and that schools could be a target, but this scenario had never crossed her mind. “We definitely didn’t expect what happened,” she said. “We didn’t expect them to throw tear gas right outside of our school building.”

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For the last month, the Trump administration has kept Chicago under siege. Customs and Border Protection agents arrested a 15-year-old U.S. citizen earlier this week after unleashing tear gas into a crowded residential neighborhood. Earlier in October, masked federal agents raided a five-story apartment building in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Chicago and zip-tied naked children as they dragged their parents away.

The Trump administration claims that Chicago is unsafe and needs order, despite the fact that the city experienced its lowest homicide rate in 60 years this summer. But instead of investing in underfunded schools or attempting to eradicate poverty, which have been shown to increase public safety, the administration is pouring millions into the militarization of American cities and fighting a court battle to federalize the National Guard in Chicago. 

The Trump administration’s war on immigrants has had a disastrous impact on the city’s children, Chicago teachers told The Intercept. 

“The smoke bombs that they dropped in front of school right at dismissal, the detainment of grown-ups after they drop off their children, or as they’re picking them up. All of that is violent. All of that is traumatic,” said Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “And for the first time, that is what many students in this city are experiencing.”

Heavener said she struggled to explain the events that occurred on October 3 to her class of 6 and 7-year-olds. “A lot of them were sad, worried, scared, nervous,” she said. “Some of them said they’re scared because they don’t want their own family members to be taken away.”

One of her students became so overwhelmed that he had a panic attack. “It’s very scary because this is their normal,” said Heavener. “You start forming your memories more solidly around 4 or 5 years old, so they have some happy kindergarten memories. But now all of sudden, this is going to take over their experiences and worldview, and it’s going to shape a lot for them, and it’s traumatic, and they’re all going to hold that in their bodies as they grow up.”

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The stakes feel even higher at schools with older kids, where Heavener and other staff fear students will become targets. The recent arrest of the 15-year-old, Heavener said, has had a particular chilling effect. His lawyers allege that the teenager was detained in a federal facility for five hours without anyone telling his family where he was being held. The Department of Homeland Security denied that CBP “kidnapped” the teen, noting that “a U.S. citizen teenager threw eggs and hit a CBP Officer in the head.”

“The media is sadly attempting to create a climate of fear and smear law enforcement. These smears are contributing to our ICE law enforcement officers facing 1,000% increase in assaults against them,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a statement. “ICE is not conducting enforcement operations at, or ‘raiding,’ schools. ICE is not going to schools to make arrests of children. Criminals are no longer be able to hide in America’s schools to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

“Attendance at a lot of [schools] is down,” Gates told The Intercept. “Senior nights have been cancelled. Fall sports and after-school activities have been sparsely attended … because of the unpredictability and the violence of Trump’s troops.”

“It makes me want to cry,” said Heavener. “Generally, the societal norm is that children are sacred, and we take care of our children. Now it seems like they’re being targeted.”

Amid the chaos, Gates said that teachers, parents, students, and community organizers had come together to help make students safer. At Funston Elementary, for example, community members lined the streets to form a safe walking corridor for students and their families after the tear-gas incident. Heavener said the community has remained vigilant for ICE activity — although Facebook shuttered local groups used to alert schools about ICE’s presence. 

Kathryn, an elementary school music teacher who wanted to use her first name to protect her school from being targeted by ICE, has tried to make her classroom a safe space for her students. 

“It’s even more important right now that we have stable, predictable classrooms and especially places where students can continue to be imaginative and experience joy and learn to work with other people,” she said, “and especially learn to work with people who are different from them.”

Still, she said normalcy and joy are difficult to achieve in the current environment. 

“I’m worried every day,” said Kathryn. “I’m worried that we’ll have kids here waiting to be picked up and nobody will ever come for them, because we’ve seen it happen.”

A middle school student was recently at home when ICE came to detain their parents. Through the process, Kathryn learned how to navigate the fact “that you can set up temporary guardianship for a minor if it’s less than a year,” she said. “I would like to live in a world where that’s not a thing I need to know, but I do.”

Despite claims from the Trump administration that Chicago is unsafe, Kathryn argues they’re the ones who’ve turned the streets into a war zone. “I was born and raised in Chicago,” said Kathryn. “I’ve never seen the city as unsafe as it is right now with them here.”

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What makes it worse is that the money the administration is spending to deploy federal agents to patrol outside of elementary schools could genuinely make a difference in Chicago Public Schools. An estimate from the National Priorities Project found that a National Guard deployment to Chicago, currently blocked in federal court, could cost roughly $1.59 million a day. The latest Republican spending bill added $29.9 billion to ICE’s enforcement budget — a boost that nearly triples the $10.25 billion operating budget for the entire Chicago public school system, which includes 630 schools.

“Our school budget was slashed by two-thirds here,” said Kathryn. She pointed out that ICE is offering “$50,000 signing bonuses for people who are willing to kidnap other people,” while she finds herself telling kids: “Sorry, you can’t join the band right now because I don’t have enough instruments.”