Fearing ICE, S.F. immigrant kids are staying home from summer camp 

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The day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested four people at a San Francisco immigration courthouse last month, one-fourth of the students enrolled at one Mission District summer camp stayed home. 

Parents told the camp director they feared ICE would take their kids. They didn’t want to bring their children to camp, the director said. They didn’t even want them to leave the house.

The summer camp serves almost 100 kids. Most of its students live in shelters, and are undocumented or have undocumented parents. It was one of three camps in Bayview and the Mission whose administrators spoke with Mission Local about declines in attendance after ICE raids. 

Since early June, ICE has been documented arresting several dozen people in San Francisco, including children, but some attorneys believe that is a vast undercount. Parents are scared. Camp administrators are, too. All asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution.  

“There’s a fear that if we draw attention to ourselves, we’re going to get swept up and become scapegoated,” said the executive director of one Mission-based program. She’s proud of her work. Normally, the kids spend their summers practicing English, exercising, and taking educational field trips. “But we have to prioritize safety.”

City officials at the Department of Children, Youth, and their Families said that attendance at publicly-funded camps always fluctuates. Representatives for the Recreation and Parks department, which runs more than 100 public summer camps, wrote, “We haven’t seen any decline or spike in registrations or attendance.”

But that wasn’t the case at camps in the Bayview and Mission District. 

In an internal email, the administrator of one summer camp network reported that five families had withdrawn, expressing “fear related to ICE activity” and “concerns about safety.” 

“These families claim immigration enforcement as the primary reason for their decision,” she wrote. 

The director who received that email said that his network of summer camps serves nearly 250 students when at capacity. A large number of their campers are designated “newcomers,” or immigrants, by the California Department of Education and are primarily taught in Spanish. Most are at or below the poverty line, he said.

Educators, too, have been caught up in the anxiety. Mariela, a camp counselor in the Mission District, showed Mission Local texts from parents asking her whether she could become the legal guardian of their kids, in case they get deported. 

“I’m a 27-year-old,” she exclaimed. “If I have to take over five families that have two kids, what does that mean for me?”  

A month ago, a parent called Mariela while her kids were in school. The woman had a scheduled asylum hearing that day, and was afraid to go. Her fears are not unfounded. Using a new legal strategy, ICE has been arresting asylum seekers after routine hearings and check-ins.

“She basically told me her final goodbyes on the phone,” Mariela said. The mother was able to reschedule the hearing, but Mariela wondered all day what she would do with the children if their mother didn’t return. 

How sturdy are the school’s walls?

For many immigrant students, summer programming is key to success during the academic year. Research has found that summer learning programs can improve outcomes among low-income students — not just grades, but also behavior, and attendance at school during the rest of the the year. 

But on his first day in office, President Donald Trump slashed a Biden-era mandate that protected areas like schools, courts and hospitals from ICE raids.

According to Cathy Sakimura, executive director of the Bay Area-based nonprofit Legal Services for Children, enrollment rates of newcomer students have declined sharply over the past six months in the San Francisco Unified School District.

There have been no confirmed ICE raids at San Francisco school campuses, said Sakimura. But the protections these campuses do have are flimsy. Teachers and security guards aren’t legally required to let ICE into school buildings, but there’s nothing stopping federal agents from entering publicly accessible spaces through unlocked doors. 

Another camp administrator based in the Mission, whose services support approximately 200 students, said her camp is adapting: Visitors are now screened before entering their building and field trips are rescheduled if high-profile protests that might draw ICE agents are planned in the Mission.

The camp shares emergency action plans with parents. Another administrator plans to create Zoom programming (adapted from the pandemic) for students. 

Attendance at that administrator’s camp has returned to normal levels since the ICE raids of early June, but she knows the situation can change quickly.

At times, she said, “we’re just kind of anticipating that some folks are not going to feel safe to go out.” To help, her camp counselors are now offering translation services and accompanying some people to asylum hearings.

Educators asked to become the parents of last resort

“We’re their last resource,” said Mariela, the counselor who was asked by five families at her camp to take on emergency legal guardianship. 

On a recent Thursday, Mariela sat next to a fellow camp counselor Susana, who wore a Hello Kitty cross-body bag and had Winnie the Pooh stickers plastered all over her phone. The two are under 30, yet express feelings of personal responsibility for the parents who rely on them. 

One of these parents, Ana (who asked to be referred to by an alias) described how important Mariela and Susana are to her 7- and 9-year-old daughters. “They have time and care for our kids,” Ana said in Spanish. “I don’t have anyone here.” 

Ana and her husband left Venezuela eight years ago after her husband narrowly avoided being arrested by Venezuelan police. They spent four years in Mexico, but proximity to drug traffickers worried Ana. Her family came to the United States in 2021 and began their asylum proceedings the following year. 

Now in San Francisco, they live in an apartment. Ana’s husband works full-time, Ana works part-time, and the daughters attend school and summer camp. 

For three years, the camp’s been a lifeline when school isn’t in session. “I can be wherever — working, or grocery shopping, wherever,” Ana said. “And I know that the girls are being taken care of.”

Ana has been doing “everything right,” in her asylum case, she said. But she still worries that she’ll get caught up in an immigration courthouse raid. She has requested that her asylum hearing be moved to Zoom to avoid possible detention, and worries what she’ll do if the motion isn’t granted.

“Every day that my hearing gets closer, I feel more terrified,” she said. 

Since January, she and her husband won’t appear together in public. “We can’t go anywhere together, because if they grab both of us, just imagine,” she said. “I’d die if they took me and left my girls.”