The Relentless School Nurse: The Weight Schools Were Never Meant to Carry

Author’s Note: This piece is written from a child health and public health perspective. It is not an argument about immigration policy. It is an examination of what happens to children and communities when immigration enforcement actions intersect with schools—and why that harm must be named.

Earlier this week in Minneapolis, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation turned into a citywide crisis that spilled into a public school community. On January 7, an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good during a federal enforcement action in south Minneapolis, a killing that sparked widespread protests and outrage. As enforcement activity intensified later that day, federal agents were present near Roosevelt High School during student dismissal.  Eyewitnesses and educators reported that pepper spray and other chemical irritants were deployed in the surrounding area as ICE agents engaged protesters, creating fear and disruption for students and staff. In the wake of these events and ongoing safety concerns, Minneapolis Public Schools canceled classes for the remainder of the week.

I keep thinking about what it must have felt like for the students who arrived that morning expecting an ordinary day and instead found themselves surrounded by fear and force. Schools are meant to be predictable places, and that predictability is not incidental. It is part of how children feel safe enough to learn. When armed agents and chemical irritants breach school grounds, that sense of safety does not erode gradually. It collapses.

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement becomes part of a school’s environment, even indirectly, the issue is no longer immigration policy. It is child safety. It is what happens to developing nervous systems when institutions meant to protect instead become sources of threat. It is what happens when an entire community is destabilized in the middle of a school day.

As a school nurse, I have seen how immigration enforcement activity ripples through a city long after the agents leave. In the days that follow, attendance drops. Families pull back from school contact. Anxiety shows up in ways that are hard to name but easy to feel. Children complain of headaches or stomachaches without a clear cause. These changes reach far beyond the households directly affected. They settle into the life of a school, undermining health, learning, and trust across the community.

Decades of research show that exposure to violence, threat, or perceived danger activates the body’s stress response, flooding systems with cortisol and adrenaline. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has documented how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)—including community violence and fear of harm—can interfere with learning and increase long-term risk for physical and mental health problems. For students who are immigrants, who live in immigrant families, or who already experience racialized policing, events like these rarely stand alone. They layer onto existing fear and instability. Public health has a name for this: toxic stress.

None of this is speculative. None of it is controversial.
What is striking is how easily this harm is dismissed when it happens to certain children.

Predictably, the defenses follow. Some argue this is simply law enforcement doing its job. But enforcing the law does not require destabilizing a school or shutting it down for days. Enforcement methods are choices. We do not apply maximum force in every context, and choosing to do so around children reflects priorities, not necessity.

Others argue that “families should have followed the rules,” as though children are responsible for immigration policy—or as though it is ethical to punish children psychologically or physically for adult legal status. Pediatric ethics reject collective punishment outright, particularly when it causes foreseeable harm.

Then comes the claim that this is about safety. But nothing that predictably produces panic, medical emergencies, school closures, and community-wide fear can credibly be called a safety strategy. Research on school policing consistently shows that increased enforcement presence does not improve safety outcomes and disproportionately harms students of color.

Finally, there is the insistence that this is not racism, only legality at work. But if legality were the sole factor, the harm would be evenly distributed. It is not. The same communities bear the brunt of enforcement, fear, disruption, and loss again and again. That pattern is structural.

Schools are not borders. They are not courthouses. They are not crowd-control zones. They are places where children are legally entitled to care, stability, and protection. When that protection fails, the damage does not end when the agents leave. It lingers in closed schools, fractured trust, and in children who no longer feel safe where they are supposed to learn.

As a school nurse, my responsibility is not to political convenience. It is to the child, the family, and the school community—trying to recover from fear imposed where safety should have been guaranteed. I cannot call this neutral. I cannot call it order. I cannot excuse it as inevitable.

Silence does not make us objective. It makes us complicit.

If schools are not sanctuaries, then nothing else we say about caring for children holds meaning.