Our Statement on Recent Threats to Our Communities
The events of the past week have left families and youth across Massachusetts and the United States reeling. This is by design. There have been real actions and blatant threats made on the federal level against immigrant and Black and Brown children, LGBTQIA+ children, disabled children, and low-income children. Many are scared for their immediate and long-term futures. Instilling fear in our communities hits home for each of us at MAC – this is an attempt to divide and to undo decades of advancement on racial equity, immigration, and disability justice in education and beyond.
Many of us at MAC have been personally targeted or are deeply connected with those personally targeted, yet we choose to move forward with hope. That is who we are. We wish there were more reassuring responses to the tactics being deployed, but we remain committed to changing what is possible, to speaking truth about the hard choices presented to our communities, and to remaining a source of accurate information about the law. And, as we have since our founding, we will continue to work each day toward education equity. We do this alongside and on behalf of the children most at risk. We do this in partnership with the resilient communities within our state. As long as MAC is here, no child in our state will face these threats alone.
This work has already begun at MAC. We are already harnessing our legal knowledge, our incredible partners, and advocating to prevent the dismantling of legal protections for students. A look at what we are doing:
The repeal of the Department of Homeland Security Sensitive Locations Policy has many immigrant parents fearful of immigration raids at schools. MAC is advocating with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to ensure that school districts have clear protocols in place to ensure that ICE agents are only ever allowed into schools when they have a signed, judicial warrant and that confidential student information is not shared illegally.
MAC is alert to, monitoring for, and ready to act on school district policies that explicitly or disproportionately exclude students or families on the basis of immigration status or other targeted groups, as we have been doing in partnership with Lawyers for Civil Rights in relation to Saugus’s exclusionary admissions policy.
MAC will continue to provide accurate information to families and those working to support families and students directly about their rights in education through our multilingual Helpline, trainings, and social media platforms.
With the halting of new investigations into discrimination by the U.S. Department of Justice, MAC will rely on our state systems of enforcement in our case advocacy.
We are not doing this work alone. MAC works in coalition with many talented and committed legal advocacy and community organizations throughout the state prepared for the fight ahead of us.
This is just the start. MAC will continue to be here to fight for the education that all children deserve. Together, we will find our way to a better, more equitable future that lies ahead.