This town has a plan to protect children from ICE
MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa — After Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers descended on the Midwest Precast Concrete facility on the outskirts of this small, quiet town in eastern Iowa, news of the dramatic May 9 raid quickly spread to the community's schools. Some students in the high school left class without a word, hurrying to track down their family members. Some teachers quietly cried to themselves, knowing a handful of their students would be without their fathers that night. Some parents picked their kids up from school early, fearing immigration enforcement might next come for the students.
But Gabriella, a thin 12-year-old with dark brown hair and black-rimmed glasses who until recently only worried about her next clarinet performance, found out about the raid in a text from her mom on the bus ride home: "Immigration took dad away."
When government vans carrying the 32 men left town to detention centers spread across the region, it showed how unprepared the community of Mount Pleasant was for a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As the Trump administration picks up the pace of workplace raids nationwide, other communities will have the same experience that Mount Pleasant did. No one knows, however, which workplace will be hit next, which schools might have to prepare their teachers and students, which families will soon have to explain a parent's disappearance to fearful children and scramble to pay their bills after its breadwinner is taken away. Our country is vast, and immigrant communities dot every state.
A raid could happen anytime, Gabriella's parents, who came to the U.S. illegally from Guatemala, had told her. But as the school bus passed rows of cottage-style, white homes and expansive lawns that Wednesday afternoon, Gabriella thought it might have been a joke.
It wasn't until she opened the door to an empty home that reality sank in: She would have to care for her three younger siblings until her mom returned from meeting immigration attorneys in Des Moines. There would be no celebration for her youngest brother's fourth birthday that evening.
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Officially, the town of Mount Pleasant never had a response plan. But in the past year, Hegar and the school district designated the church as a safe space for families to reunite with their children after a raid. The church has held this role for decades in the case of a natural disaster.
On the morning of May 9, the school district immediately called the First Presbyterian Church. Soon, the church was ready to receive families with snacks and bilingual volunteers. It was "providential," Hegar said, that the church would be ready for the raid, but the lack of communication from federal and local law enforcement upset the gray-bearded, energetic pastor.
"I got pissed," Hegar said, leaning back in his office chair, surrounded by walls with hundreds of books and an honorable-discharge certificate from his four years in the Marine Corps. "The next day, it really hit. ICE came in, raided our community, yanked families apart. These are not the worst of the worst. These are families that play soccer and lift up Iowa family values. These are good, good fun-loving people."
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