Before the school bell rang on the morning of 19 November, dozens of parents – mostly dads – huddled outside schools all around Durham, North Carolina. Bleary-eyed from late-night meetings and dinging group chats, they passed out whistles and gloves before dispersing to stand along school perimeters.
The parents had formed ad hoc welcoming committees for students being dropped off for school – and to serve as a united group of watchdogs against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A week before Thanksgiving, federal immigration agents had descended upon the city as part of a massive statewide campaign that included Charlotte and smaller communities. For almost a month, masked agents, often in tactical vests or fatigues and some carrying rifles, patrolled quiet neighborhoods and vibrant shopping centers around North Carolina. ICE doubled its North Carolina arrests in 2025 from the previous year, totaling 3,400 arrests from 20 January through 15 October.
Here, in this central North Carolina city known for its organizing history and politically blue bent, 35% of Durham public schools’ students are Latino.
Norma Portillo, the PTA president at Club Boulevard elementary and an immigrant mother from Honduras, immediately leapt into action, organizing rideshares for families afraid to leave their homes to take their children to school. With the help of local networks, she ramped up the weekly food pantry – run by mostly mothers and grandparents. PTAs all across the district did the same, using the rideshare network to make food deliveries to families.
“I am so touched by how the community is willing to help people,” Portillo said. “I feel so blessed that we have this kind of connection with citizen families. We not only respect each other, but we care for each other.”
In this city, schools have always been the nexus of trusted community organizing for immigrant families. November’s community response to federal enforcement was swift due an astute parent-teacher network ready to face any threat with infrastructure like rideshares, and finely tuned political activism on the local level – even as it’s unclear whether immigration enforcement is ongoing.
In early December, minivans rolled up to a school at 7.30am. Several kids from various families spilled out each sliding door. Dean Fitzgerald, father of an elementary schooler, stood guard and shouted “Good morning!” to each kid. His group includes many neighborhood volunteers who are not parents. After running out of whistles, one of them 3D-printed more.
“Mostly, we need parents to feel safe to bring their kids back to school,” Fitzgerald said. “So they know who’s going to be here, who’s watching, who’s going to get picked up by whom. Is something [like agents entering campus] going to happen that we need to get in front of? We don’t want to have to [intervene]. But that’s why I’m here.”
There’s ample reason for the parents like Fitzgerald to be there – and well-founded reason for fear. One school patrol volunteer, who goes by Jeana, noticed unmarked SUVs with masked people inside them a few blocks away on 19 November. Despite not having children, Jeana was compelled to get directly involved and showed up to patrol the next day.
“I had this visceral reaction that there are people in my neighborhood that are essentially terrorizing my neighbors, making them feel unsafe to go about their lives and fearful of doing things they shouldn’t be afraid to do,” she said.
Natalie Kitaif, a PTA member and mother of two, said she hears this fear from her kindergartner, who discusses friends’ concerns that they may come home from school and find their parents missing. “They seem to know that adults are being targeted,” Kitaif said. “It deeply concerns me to know how afraid they are for their parents.”
The community here is finding inspiration and practical support in past organizing. Teachers have been at the frontline, along with students and parents.
“This is not just a tactic,” said Holly Hardin, a middle school teacher at Lakewood Montessori. “Durham and the south have always been home to so much courage and noncompliance and resiliency in the face of historic oppressions. It’s not building a model of charity. It’s building a model of intentional care for each other, larger than any one group.”
In January 2016, ICE officers in plainclothes arrested Durham high schooler Wildin Acosta outside his family’s apartment as he was headed to school. Hardin was among a group of teachers who rallied for his release, with the help of a growing student base determined to find justice for their peer. The teen was detained at Stewart detention center in Georgia for months awaiting deportation. Student journalists at his high school, Riverside, reported on Acosta’s case weekly. Their journalism teacher took them on a field trip to Washington DC, where they marched the halls of Congress and met their representatives to advocate for their friend’s release. They eventually succeeded; Acosta graduated high school in 2017 and continues to live in Durham.
Hardin was a major player in organizing for Acosta’s release. She recalls a middle school student whose parents were detained a couple years earlier. No one could locate them, and teachers and other school parents became his main support before he was placed in a foster home. He would ask Hardin every day to help find his parents.
“Ultimately, I didn’t have the networks to help him,” she said. “But during Wildin’s detainment, we strengthened those networks and navigated those systems. Each fight made fulfilling this [current] need so possible so quickly. Some of the students who fought to bring Wildin home are now teachers or parents.”
Durham’s progressive culture breeds organizing from within city hall, too.
The city council declared Durham a “fourth amendment workplace” in September after four ICE agents showed up in plainclothes at the county courthouse earlier that summer, looking for an undocumented individual. The fourth amendment protects against arbitrary searches and arrests and establishes the need for a judicial warrant before entering private spaces.
The resolution was introduced by council member Javiera Caballero, an immigrant from Chile and the first Latina elected to the city council. She is also the former PTA president at Club Boulevard elementary and helped spearhead many community-based programs in the school system, along with Alexandra Valladares, who later became the first Latina and formerly undocumented person elected to Durham’s board of education.
“It is deeply frustrating to me that, with a community with so many different needs, we must focus on something completely manufactured to destroy public safety,” said Caballero. “We’ll always do what we need to do as a city to stand with immigrants.”
Durham Public School Strong (DPSS), a grassroots group of parents advocating for immigrant families, formed in November. But the organizing began in January, as the Durham community began grappling with what a second Trump term means to immigrants. Within 36 hours of the news that ICE and CBP were heading to Durham, more than 2,600 people signed up to connect with the care and protection teams, according to Magan Gonzales-Smith, a DPSS founder.
“We have to find ways to be more bold, assertive and creative, and believe that when we do so, we are stronger together than what we’re up against,” she said.
That includes pushing the school board and school district to make clearer directives in case ICE or CBP enters a campus. Current policy requires a judicial warrant for entry and that all federal agents be directed to a superintendent at the district level. DPSS and teachers don’t think it’s enough.
“Having a plan reduces anxiety,” says Megan McCurley, a Latina parent and director of Leap, a bilingual preschool serving majority Latino families. “The district never released anything.”
Hardin echoes this concern, saying: “The first question from one student after the bell rang [on 19 November ] was: ‘Will you let ICE come into our schools?’” She told him she would not let ICE into the school, but she couldn’t guarantee that wouldn’t happen. Donald Trump has moved to end a more-than-30-year “sensitive location” protection that keeps schools, churches and hospitals safe from immigration enforcement.
Teachers like Hardin have been working all year for more pointed directives from the school district. She spoke about it during a public comment session in September. Last week, she ceded her time to a ninth-grader named Yair, who delivered his comments at a podium with his mother and younger sister by his side. Reading from a piece of paper, he asked the school board: “Are you telling us that this is a normal time in our democracy? We need a policy that will protect us from those who see us as less than human.”
