Children who attend Denver’s Place Bridge Academy discovered federal immigration officers with military-style rifles banging at their doors one morning last month as armored vehicles blocked streets. They still went to school, fearful the agents would follow.
They didn’t follow, but the students’ fears did. The next day, two planes circled over Place Bridge as kids played outside during recess. Inside, staff fielded calls from worried parents who no longer felt safe sending their children to school.
Those scenes, as recounted by Place Bridge Principal Nadia Madan-Morrow in a court filing, took place Feb. 5 and 6 after high-profile immigration raids across Denver and Aurora.
The administrator’s account and others recently filed by Denver Public Schools highlight the fact that, while U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers haven’t shown at the city’s schools, the fear they will is present even among students after the Trump administration threw out a policy that mostly prohibited such activity.
“Those days were spent consoling children and trying to make them feel safe at school, even though, as adults and teachers, we knew there was no legal protection against ICE showing up on school property,” Madan-Morrow wrote.
The principal’s comments were submitted as evidence in DPS’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which the district filed a week after the raids and which seeks to block ICE from detaining people on school property.
DPS, the largest school system in the state, is believed to be the first district in the nation to sue the Trump administration over the end of the longstanding policy, which largely prohibited arrests at sensitive locations such as schools, hospitals and churches.
A hearing is scheduled in U.S. District Court in Denver on Friday to consider DPS’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, which would prevent ICE from conducting enforcement actions at schools across the country while the district’s lawsuit proceeds.
U.S. District Judge Daniel Domenico, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019, is overseeing the case.
A representative for DPS declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing litigation.
DPS attorneys have argued in court filings that the changes to federal immigration policies have created anxiety among parents, leading them to keep students home from school.
The drop in attendance “constitutes a clear threat to DPS’ stability” because school funding is determined by how many students are in a classroom, the lawyers wrote in the Feb. 12 lawsuit.
At Place Bridge, student attendance has dropped to as low as 68%, Madan-Morrow wrote in her statement.
Another Denver school, Ashley Elementary, saw attendance drop to as few as seven pupils in a classroom, according to a statement written by Principal Janet Estrada that also was filed as part of DPS’s lawsuit.
The Department of Homeland Security has argued in its response to the lawsuit that the sensitive-locations policy hasn’t changed much despite the agency rescinding previous guidance.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued its own guidance that again defined protected areas to include schools and required supervisory approval before enforcement action could be taken in those protected areas,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado wrote on behalf of Homeland Security.
But DPS educators, including Superintendent Alex Marrero, detailed in court filings how even though the Feb. 5 raids didn’t take place in schools, they still affected campuses across the city.
On the day of the raids, which took place at nearby complexes including the Cedar Run Apartments, at least four of Place Bridge’s students were detained, Marrero has previously told The Denver Post.
In a court filing, he described the scene at multiple schools he visited that day.
“I witnessed many people who were visibly upset and crying,” he wrote about a visit to a school. “It also appeared that, as an unfamiliar face in a suit, my presence was causing additional stress.”
Several buses were prevented from picking up students for school the morning of the raids, according to district officials.
Marrero told an ICE agent at one of the raid locations that a bus stop was being blocked and asked if students were allowed to leave on DPS school buses, Marrero wrote in his statement.
The ICE agent “flippantly responded that ‘anyone can go and come,’ ” Marrero wrote, adding, “As it pertains to the school buses, that was not true.”
Not only were children themselves detained in the raids, but multiple students had one or both of their parents arrested. A pair of siblings had to be placed in the care of the Department of Human Services because both of their parents were arrested, Marrero wrote.
DPS also sent staff to apartment complexes affected by the raids so that an adult was there in case students returned home to find their parents or guardians had been taken into custody by federal agents, Estrada, the principal at Ashley, wrote.
“Numerous parents have told me that they do not want to send their children to school in fear ICE officers would approach them,” Madan-Morrow, the principal at Place Bridge, wrote. “I can no longer assuage these fears by pointing to the protected area policy.”
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