ICE Raided My Son’s Daycare to Abduct a Teacher. This Kind of Trauma Lasts.

Children at my son’s Spanish immersion preschool in Chicago bore witness to a teacher being violently assaulted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who entered their school, armed with weapons, earlier this month.

One of the school’s infant teachers, Diana Santillana Galeano — known to the students as “Miss Diana” — was abducted by ICE on the morning of November 5 as she prepared to start her shift for the day. While my 3-year-old son did not see the teacher’s abduction, we arrived at the school — Rayito de Sol, located in the Roscoe Village neighborhood — shortly thereafter, and he was emotionally shaken by the traumatic aftermath unfolding at his beloved daycare.

Seeing his classmates, teachers, and other parents weeping and huddling together caused my son to break down. He eventually became withdrawn and quiet, appearing to become numb in the midst of the chaos around him. My husband was thankfully able to leave work to come to the school and care for him at home. He did his best to offer what comfort he could, telling our son that mommy had to stay behind at the school because I was a “helper” and that I needed to help Miss Diana come back. The next seven days were a whirlwind of community care and rapid organizing, as we tried to help our kids process this trauma.

How Can We Comfort Our Children When the Trauma Is Ongoing?

After a child witnesses a traumatic event, parents are generally advised to reassure the child that they are safe, to promise that the grownups in their life will protect them from harm, and to confirm that the threat has passed. But parents living in cities being terrorized by Donald Trump’s secret police can’t actually offer these recommended words of comfort to our kids — to do so would be a bald-faced lie.

Because the truth is that while this regime still reigns — with a bloated Department of Homeland Security budget, helmed by untrained, violent agents hell-bent on ignoring laws while abducting our neighbors, and with little to no meaningful resistance by an opposition party — our children are not safe.

Children in Illinois have suffered months of systematic physical and emotional abuse by ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents during Operation Midway Blitz, with kids of color enduring the worst of it. For example:

A baby was recently pepper sprayed in Cicero.

A baby was recently pepper sprayed in Cicero.

Kids in South Shore were zip-tied — restrained with plastic flex-cuffs on their wrists — after their home was raided in the dead of night, so that agents could cosplay Call of Duty characters and rappel from a military-grade helicopter.

A child suffering from stage four cancer lost her primary caregiver to a raid in a Home Depot parking lot in Niles, Illinois, a village near Chicago’s northwest border.

Children playing outside at an elementary school in Logan Square were surrounded by tear gas as agents tossed canisters through their car windows.

A 15-year-old boy on the Southeast side was slammed to the ground and then disappeared into a garage for several hours.

Numerous schools across the city have been forced into soft lockdowns after ICE has abducted family members, nannies, or workers outside of schools. Teachers have reported their kids crying, expressing feelings of fear and confusion.

Once separated from their parents, this regime has also pressured children to renounce asylum claims, threatening them with criminal liability if they do not self-deport.

ICE claims in their video propaganda that raids like the South Shore attack removed criminals from our streets. Not only was this later determined to be false, but untold levels of terror were inflicted on innocent children that day.

How We Mobilized to Defend Miss Diana

I was already working as a part-time immigration attorney and anti-ICE organizer before the abduction of the infant teacher at my son’s daycare, so I was fortunately in a position to begin leading efforts for Miss Diana’s release. The values that the school cultivates — empathy, diversity, and altruism — lend themselves well to a robust parent community that instantly sprang into action. Together we rapidly mobilized for Miss Diana.

Phone calls from parents and community members to elected officials and legal counsel led to a same-day press conference and a vital habeas corpus petition filed on Miss Diana’s behalf in federal court by 2 p.m. that day, just a few hours after ICE stormed the daycare. Such petitions have been crucial for disappeared Chicagoans; DHS enjoys shipping our abducted neighbors to states like Kentucky, Michigan, or Louisiana within 24 to 48 hours after routinely denying them access to legal counsel at Broadview, the immigration jail just west of Chicago, known for its “unnecessarily cruel” and inhumane conditions, where members of our community have been protesting ever since ICE began its occupation of our city. Here, because of our swift action, the Northern District of Illinois retained jurisdiction in Miss Diana’s case.

A community rally that night drew upwards of 500 people and also aided in our fundraising efforts, eventually growing her legal defense fund to over $150,000. Parents at the school banded together physically as well: Because the school was closed for several days as a result, some formed communal home daycares among themselves.

We spent the next week circulating a petition calling for Miss Diana’s immediate release, creating t-shirts and yard signs, and making thoughtful media appearances. We wrote cold direct messages to Instagram influencers and celebrities. We joined Zoom conferences in collaboration with local unions and the ACLU for Know Your Rights seminars and participated in “Migra Watch” trainings led by one of the city’s leading resistance organizations, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, that shared knowledge on how to safely document and record ICE. We collaborated with local Alderman Matt Martin for a Purple Day of Action in solidarity with Miss Diana and all care workers. We tied purple ribbons — symbolizing Miss Diana’s favorite color and the color of the union working with child care staff — to local schools in the neighborhood and held rallies demanding that ICE leave Chicago and return Miss Diana to her community. We protested at Broadview and praised the suburban moms who were arrested in solidarity with our fight.

We also created a care plan for the rest of our teachers in line with the dozens of other mutual aid networks that have been vital in Chicago to support our immigrant communities. Many of our teachers suffer from food insecurity as a result of their fear over leaving the house because of ICE, so we began coordinating meal donations and deliveries. We offered to escort them to their cars or homes and signed up for patrol shifts outside of the school, whistles at the ready should ICE return. We began working with the school’s administration to assist them with long term immigration support. We did all of this while attempting to ignore a vile smear campaign orchestrated by DHS’s social media operators and explaining to folks that a “.gov” website is not in any way a reliable source to cite for information.

These Fears Take a Toll on All Our Children

Like all moms juggling numerous tasks at once, we tackled this work while also trying to prioritize the increasing emotional needs of our kids. We crafted thoughtful responses as best we could to their heartbreaking questions, like “If I speak Spanish outside of our house, are they going to take me too?” For families of immigrants especially, when they asked these questions, we wanted to reassure them, but struggled not to mislead. The Trump administration makes baseless claims that agents are only going after “the worst of the worst,” but Chicagoans recognize this as a blatant lie. They’ve stolen U.S. citizens simply for being Brown. They’ve snatched our tamale workers, our teachers, and our gardeners. Being undocumented is not a criminal offense no matter how many times Kristi Noem tries to convince you otherwise, and, regardless, nothing would justify the indiscriminate violence that “shocks the conscience,” according to one federal judge, that we’ve seeing from these federal agents. I’ve lived in Chicago for 15 years and have only felt unsafe when these masked agents started invading our communities.

This new danger has taken a toll on our children. Many parents have described their kids working through their trauma through role playing, relaying nightmares, struggling with sleep, and emotional outbursts. A new study links Trump’s immigration raids to rising fear and mental health risks among kids in immigrant families. Researchers identified harm to emotional development and academic performance. Chicago public schools reported that attendance is down significantly since Trump began terrorizing our beloved city.

Fascism relies on division. Leaning hard into your community is a powerful tool in opposition.

What do you say to a child in this moment? I often struggle with how to explain this level of anti-immigrant racism to my two kids. I try instead to highlight our resistance: I bring them with me to anti-ICE rallies, they help me make HANDS OFF CHICAGO posters, and we read books like “Dreamers” by Yuyu Morales and “Prisons Must Fall” by Mariame Kaba and Jane Ball. We work on our Spanish and visit Latine neighborhoods for “Dia de Los Muertos” celebrations. My husband shows them videos of me whistling at ICE near our home and collecting tear gas canisters. When they see my gas mask on the table and ask me why I need that, I teach them about state violence while explaining the tools I have to defend myself and our neighbors.

Last week our community received the incredible news that Miss Diana was released by DHS after a federal judge determined her detention was illegal. We were overjoyed to celebrate this win with our children and eager to spotlight how the collective can prevail. When our community came together with a singular goal, we defeated an enemy much larger and more powerful than us. Anchored by Miss Diana’s strength and grace, we hope that this lesson can be a balm to some of our children’s fears. At the same time, we want them to know that this fight isn’t over. These resources should be available to all of our abducted neighbors, not just beloved daycare teachers with the backing of an army of parents. And we intend to continue organizing to achieve this.

Fascism relies on division. Leaning hard into your community is a powerful tool in opposition. As I look to my comrades in Charlotte and New Orleans, I am hopeful that they will build on Chicago’s resistance to keep their children, and all of their neighbors, safe.