The Relentless School Nurse: When Childhood Becomes Conditional – Detention, Fear, and Empty Desks

 

The drawing looks simple on the surface, but look deeper, this was created by a five-year-old child held in an immigration detention center. 

Across the country, children are trying to make sense of instability with the only tools they have: paper, pencils, pictures, and words. In Dilley, Texas, children detained with their parents at the South Texas Family Residential Center have written letters describing what their days feel like. Through reporting by ProPublica, read their handwritten accounts of sadness, illness, and the uncertainty of not knowing when they will leave. They write about missing school and missing friends, about wanting their ordinary lives back.

https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-dilley-children-letters

What echoes through those letters is not political language. It is longing for routine. For predictability. For the safety of a classroom and the comfort of home.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has been unequivocal: detention exposes children to toxic stress — prolonged activation of the stress response system without adequate buffering support. Pediatricians have documented that chronic uncertainty is associated with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and disruptions in healthy brain development. In a February 2026 USA Today opinion piece, AAP leaders wrote plainly about what they are seeing in practice: immigration enforcement policies are harming children’s mental and physical health.

Detention is not simply a legal status. For children, it is an environmental condition with developmental consequences.

While children in Dilley write about wanting to return to school, children in Lindenwold, New Jersey, were leaving for school when federal immigration agents conducted an operation near their bus stop. According to the Department of Homeland Security, agents were attempting to apprehend a specific individual and left without making an arrest. But before explanations circulated, the video showed elementary students running.

One ten-year-old described the moment this way:

“Out of nowhere, people just start running, saying that ICE is over there, and everybody was running… I feel like they’re just going to come out of nowhere and take my parents.”
— Dylan, 10-year-old student, Lindenwold, NJ
https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/lindenwold-ice-school-new-jersey-students-woodland-village/

Children do not evaluate policy nuance. They register a threat. Their bodies respond first.

In schools, that response does not disappear once the vehicles leave. It shows up in stomachaches without fever, in students who hesitate at dismissal, and in attendance patterns that shift. I have written before about empty desks after gun violence. Those desks hold grief. What we are seeing now is different, but no less heavy.

I will never forget the day a family stood in our school hallway to say goodbye. They had decided to leave, to self-deport, because the fear of being separated felt worse than starting over. There were no cameras. Just hugs, tears, and classmates trying to understand why friends were leaving mid-year. The next morning, two desks were empty. They stayed empty. Absence has many causes. The classroom does not differentiate. It simply feels the space.

In Minneapolis, a community mobilized after a five-year-old child was detained with his father during what should have been a routine walk home from preschool. Schools, neighbors, and civic leaders organized peacefully and persistently. Editors at The Nation later nominated Minneapolis and its residents for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their sustained civic activism and solidarity with immigrant families. That nomination does not undo fear. But it demonstrates that a collective response can interrupt isolation.

Research is clear about what chronic fear does to a developing child. Attention narrows. Sleep is disrupted. The nervous system stays on alert. Learning becomes harder not because a child is unwilling, but because their body is busy scanning for threats. Trust, once unsettled, is slow to return. When immigration enforcement becomes visible in the spaces where children live and learn — near homes, at bus stops, in the routines that once felt predictable — it becomes part of the environment shaping their development. And children grow in response to the environments around them.

Schools see the aftereffects. Families withdraw from school. Health records become inactive. Goodbyes happen mid-semester. The pattern is not loud, but it is steady.

If we believe in child health, then collective action cannot be optional.

Silence does not buffer stress, and policies that impact children do not operate without developmental consequences. We know that children’s health is shaped by the environments around them, and our response must match the emergency of this moment. Pediatric professionals, educators, and community leaders have a responsibility to name what is measurable and visible in real time. School districts can strengthen data privacy protections and clarify communication protocols so families are not left in uncertainty.

If we are serious about protecting children, then we must be equally serious about the environments we create around them. Stability is not abstract. It is felt in whether tomorrow looks like today, whether classmates remain beside you, and whether a bus stop is simply a bus stop.

We can see the pattern. We know the science. The work now is collective, deliberate, coordinated action centered on children’s need for safety and belonging. 

 

Immigration Resources for Families:

AAP – HealthyChildren.org: Seeking Safe Haven: Supporting Immigrant Children & Families Facing Detention or Separation

The National Immigration Law Center (https://www.nilc.org).

The Immigration Advocates Network directory (https://www.immigrationadvocates.org/nonprofit/legaldirectory/).