It Is Harming the Fabric of Our School Communities.
Left Voice spoke with Gabe Paez, a socialist teacher in Chicago, about how teachers, students, and communities are organizing to defend immigrant students from ICE and the role of educators in fighting against Trump’s attacks.
Since early September, Chicago has been the latest target of the Trump administration’s brutal Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raids. Trump has declared war on the city and threatened to send in the National Guard, — as he has done in Los Angeles and Washington, DC — with the intent of undermining what few protections exist for immigrants living in these cities and expanding federal repression against working-class and oppressed communities as a whole.
Over the past two months, ICE has terrorized communities daily, including military-style raids in apartment buildings and even entering a daycare and abducting a teacher in front of her students. At the same time, there has been a significant response from workers and activists in Chicago against these attacks, and the recent mobilization of over 100,000 people in the city pushed Brandon Johnson to utter the words “general strike.”
In the context of this important struggle, Left Voice spoke with Gabe Paez, a bilingual middle school teacher for the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and a member of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The interview below is an adapted version of a video interview recently conducted with Gabe.
Could you introduce yourself?
My name is Gabe Paez. I’m a bilingual middle school teacher. I teach Spanish language arts, ESL and social studies to kids in seventh and eighth grade who are in their first couple of years in the country. And I teach at one of the largest public elementary schools in the city of Chicago, with over a thousand students.
Last year, when Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida were busing migrant children from their states and dropping them off under viaducts in the middle of the night, my school was one of the places that received many of those kids. We now have over a hundred students who were likely sleeping in the police precinct across Pulaski Avenue, which is the major street near our school. Like many schools in CPS, we’ve become a welcoming site for newly arrived migrant students.
I’ve spent the past 11 years in CPS teaching migrant children from first through eighth grade. I also served as a bilingual education coordinator for seven years, and this year I’m back in the classroom teaching full-time.
Chicago has been the target of ICE raids and a potential National Guard deployment by the Trump administration. What’s the situation right now in Chicago? How have teachers and communities been fighting back and organizing to defend immigrant communities?
What’s happening right now is literally a campaign of state terror against the city of Chicago. This isn’t just the run-of-the-mill Biden-Obama deportation machine. What we’re seeing is a particularly abhorrent piece of political propaganda. Even before Trump was reelected, he was openly promising a war against major American cities.
He doesn’t like us because we have a labor history, a history of working-class resistance, because we welcome immigrants into our communities. That runs directly against the one-dimensional country he and his posse envision. They believe in using state power to control the demographic shift happening in this country — very explicitly and very openly — to maintain a white majority in the United States. People like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller see ICE, HSI, and CBP as forces to ethnically cleanse the country, as Dolores Huerta recently said on Democracy Now.
In Chicago, we’re seeing daily raids across the city — south side, west side, north side. It began when they paraded militarized Proud Boys through downtown, grabbing anyone who was brown. You might have seen that viral video of a man on an electric bike escaping them. That’s where it started, and now it’s happening every single day.
I live in Albany Park, on the northwest side. I wake up around 5:30 in the morning, and soon after, I hear federal helicopters hovering over our neighborhood — right above our school buildings. They’re flying so close that last Friday, our pre-K students had to cancel recess because the helicopter was shaking the building.
Imagine a child who already arrives with trauma, with their guard up, ready to learn and engage — and all they hear is the sound of helicopters. It’s not only damaging to teachers, to our morale and our ability to do our jobs effectively — it’s also shaping how these children experience school for the first time in their lives. They’re learning to associate school with fear, with the sound of surveillance. Even the little ones know what’s going on.
It’s affecting everyone. Just last week, we heard neighborhood volunteers blowing their whistles from inside my classroom. At Funston Elementary, they had to call a lockdown because ICE dropped tear gas canisters right outside the school. Example after example of how schooling is being interrupted.
We still have our challenges, but compared to where we’ve been, we have 80 percent of kids who are graduating. Chicago Public Schools, not that long ago, was graduating 50 percent of kids. We are making growth. And now what we’re seeing is a federal government who is impeding us moving in the right direction. They’re suing CPS for our Black Student Success Plan. They’ve already pulled $8 million, which in CPS terms isn’t that much, but that’s just the beginning. They’re dismantling the Department of Education that pays $20 billion to Title I schools like mine. And we know they want to also slash Title III funds, which are for immigrant English language learners (ELLs).
This is a program of austerity — one that has long been part of the Democrats’ agenda — but now it’s mixed in with an ethnonationalist fascism that wants to use every state organ and every state institution to instill an extreme right-wing agenda through every mechanism that it can.
What that doesn’t capture are the human consequences. The kids showing up to school after having their parents abducted. The ones going home to find their houses empty. The growing number of absences. Parents who are too afraid to enroll their children in after-school or before-school programs. Families who are too afraid to show up for report card pickup. It’s tearing at the fabric of our school communities in ways that are impossible to fully convey in this conversation.
They have now even gone onto school campuses. Two weeks ago, federal agents went on to Decatur Classical Elementary School, which is very close to where I teach, and they grabbed someone who was doing yard work, an employee who was hired to be at the school, and they grabbed him from campus. If you can imagine them stepping to a green space at a school with children inside of the building, we know that the next step is going to be for them to try to come into the buildings.
We’ve had to harden our schools in ways we should never have to. Our jobs are already hard enough — we shouldn’t have to worry about whether secret police are going to show up to take our students or their parents. We were already teaching in a carceral state, in overpoliced neighborhoods where mass incarceration has been devastating communities for decades. Now, on top of that, we’re facing a secret police force tasked with snatching brown people off the streets — without informing their families, without their A-numbers appearing in the ICE database.
I know people who have simply been grabbed and disappeared — now rotting away in secret torture prisons in Libya, El Salvador, Louisiana — places with no oversight, no due process, no access to legal representation. This is the secret prison state the United States has always maintained — but now it’s on steroids.
What organizing has been happening at schools, including your own school, to respond to these attacks?
CPS and CTU to have come to an agreement that every school needs a sanctuary team. I’m on my school’s team but I believe that the sanctuary team needs to be active in preparing schools, not just for if ICE comes knocking. What if they take a parent while the kids are at school? What if they show up at a field trip or a school event or during recess around the school building?
Education workers are the ones actually seeing kids day in and day out. So it started just on a building-to-building level, but we quickly realized that it needed to become a formalized process. We’re now talking beyond just a know-your-rights workshop, which we should be doing in every building. We’re talking about creating procedures that we’ve never had to consider: what happens if a kid doesn’t get picked up? What happens if a brother or sister gets taken?
It took the union pushing for CPS to agree to allow us to formally have these teams.
And we had to push for a very long time to get them to agree to it.
The walking school bus is one thing we’ve been doing. For folks who don’t know that it is, it’s a group of adults who will help parents who can’t or don’t want to leave the house for safety issues to walk their kids safely to and from school.
We’re also having massive donations of groceries and food out to parents who cannot or are too afraid to go out to the grocery store. That’s happening all the time in my school building.
Another thing is lines of communication. We do have a signal chat going on with our sanctuary team. And we’re also very connected to the 33rd Ward, our alderperson is Rossana Rodriguez. She’s a democratic socialist who is our city council rep, essentially, our alderperson. They’ve been very proactive with putting together these neighborhood watches, these volunteers, who I see as early as 6:30 in the morning, standing on every street corner around the school buildings in the neighborhood with their whistles, with their phones in hand, keeping an eye out.
There are lines of communication that have been vetted between those folks and then people in the school buildings. That way, if we see something, we let them know. If they see something, they let us know. If there’s been raids during the school all day while we’re in the building — and there have been many, many — we will often see them lining the sidewalks as we’re dismissing kids out. It really is something you can feel. It’s something that you can perceive. Something is really different. The community has been proactive in getting organized.
The Trump administration has been systematically attacking public education — dissolving the Department of Education, defunding schools, attacking DEI, trans students, academic freedom, on top of the broader attacks on living conditions that impact people’s ability to live and learn in safety. What do you think is the broader role that educators and workers at schools can play in fighting back against Trump’s attacks on education?
I think we need to recognize why they’re coming after public education. Public education has always been a thorn in the side of the right-wing of this country. And now they have an opportune moment and the political machinery to finally dismantle the last universal system that is for everybody in this country. They can’t stand the idea that every single child — any child who happens to be in the United States — has the right to an education. They can’t stand being taxed for it. And what particularly triggers them is that undocumented children get to have a free education — although there are serious barriers to higher education for undocumented students in the U.S. But at least for K-12, this is the final frontier around a universal, freely accessible program in the United States. And that’s why they want to privatize it to the end, and they want to cut it up — death by a thousand cuts.
That’s why Linda McMahon is the perfect Education Secretary for them. This is someone who doesn’t even have a substitute’s license and couldn’t do what we do for a single day. Yet now she is charged with basically destroying the Department of Education by design.
Our role as teachers is deeply intertwined with our role as members of the working class — as organized labor. Historically, that’s the role we’ve always played in relation to right-wing politics. We’ve been the first and strongest line of defense against fascism and totalitarianism, because we have both the numbers and the productive power that the billionaire class simply doesn’t.
So if educators decided that there was going to be a general strike from coast to coast, that means that parents would also have to stay home. And if parents also have to stay home, that means that the employers and the corporations that depend on their labor would grind to a halt. The crux of creating the general strike today is through public education. We have to come to a halt to stop their machinery from kidnapping our children, from kidnapping our parents, from terrorizing our communities.
That’s why during the No King’s March, it went viral that the mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson called for a general strike. And I think that’s the language we have to start getting more comfortable with, even though it’s fallen out of favor for a very long time in the U.S. There’s a history of mass strike actions in this country that we just don’t learn about. In fact, they’ve been purposely removed from popular education to make us believe that the labor movement has always been as weak and as disempowered as it currently is.
But I do see a turn coming — through people who are already in unions, people who are going to be in unions, and people who are not in unions. We’re workers, right? We’re hurting more than we have in for a very long time.
I think that at the crux of it is the general strike, and that there is a rising tide of class consciousness that the Left has to jump on and push to its furthest degree. We have to bring those contradictions to light in a way that is not just theoretical. We’re talking about seeing it in our neighborhood, seeing how the mechanism of the state is very openly crushing the working class, and the working class is disproportionately Brown and Black in this country, immigrants, and undocumented. They’ve always hated the poor, they’ve always hated the working class, and we’ve always fought back. This is how we got the eight-hour workday. This is how we got the right to unionize. This is how we got children out of mines, right? So let’s talk about how the few protections we do have were won because of the labor movement.
That’s why it’s time for a new labor movement. It’s time for a new wave of labor actions and labor power.
An inspiring international example has been workers taking up the power of the strike to fight against the genocide in Palestine, to defend the Global Sumud Flotilla. Could speak to the connections between these issues and to the power of workers and taking up these struggles?
That’s great that you brought that question up. So in 2018, I spent two weeks in Palestine in Hebron with an organization called Youth Against Settlements. We were documenting road closures and all the daily harassment that Palestinians in Hebron have to live under. There’s literally a street in the old town of Hebron where there’s fencing above your head because Israeli settlers have taken over the second floor. They throw piss, and they throw bleach, and they throw rocks, and it’s just really violent. It is apartheid. There’s no doubting it.
But I bring that up because I got tear-gassed in the West Bank, and then I got tear-gassed on my street, on the corner that I live in, in Chicago, in the third largest city in the U.S. And the manufacturer of that tear gas is the same company.
All those weapons that were manufactured, all that know-how in oppression, all that surveillance — federal agents now have drones and helicopters in Chicago. All that machinery of war was fine-tuned and tested in Palestine. And now in Venezuela, the U.S. is about to start another war. In Libya, when the Obama administration destabilized that country, it left a place where people are still being sold into modern-day slavery and facing atrocities every day.
We know the list of U.S. interventions around the world, but that was never going to stay outside of the borders of the United States. That came home. It’s been home. And now it’s finetuned to a degree that we can’t doubt the connections between an internal oppressive apparatus of the state and imperialism in other countries.
So the connections between imperialism abroad and the oppression domestically is not just the actual weapons, but also the know-how and the ideology of using state power to crush the people at the bottom. And that’s what’s happening right now.
But what’s also happening — because of this gut-wrenching genocide that everyone has now seen on their phones, on every single screen — is that it’s pushed the American population in a way we can’t come back from. There is no going back. There’s no consensus on Israel anymore. It’s broken. And thank god it’s broken.
What else would you tell rank-and-file educators about how to organize to defend their immigrant students and fight for our rights?
I’d say, don’t fall for the trap of, “You have to bargain for your wages or you have to bargain for the well-being of your students.” We can have both. We work our asses off. We work unpaid hours before school, after school, weekends. So when we’re talking about salary and benefits, and when we’re talking about the rights of our students to dignity, to come to school without fear of deportation, to not have to worry about someone snatching their parents away — both of those are what we have to bargain for.
I would say that we have to stay united in our unions, but if at some point, leadership is drawing this this false dichotomy of wages or bargaining for the common good — that needs to go. You simply cannot teach and then close your door and ignore the society and context in which you teach. So many of us are burning out because we’ve been taught to just close the door and teach your lesson. And then your kids are having a hard time academically or behaviorally, and you feel unsatisfied at work. And your test scores are showing that you’re not teaching. And then suddenly teaching is undoable and we’re out the door. Half of us leave by year five. And then let’s talk about teachers in West Virginia or in Florida who are basically in poverty teaching full-time, ununionized, and who are getting bullied out of their classrooms for putting a rainbow up.
This is where we’re at with public education in the U.S. So organize your unions along your values. If your values are liberation and working-class organization, then that’s how your contracts need to look. Teachers, especially now, are more receptive than we’ve been in a long time. We feel like we’re part of a civil rights movement because we are part of a civil rights movement. We’re fighting for the civil right of every child to receive an education. Whether that child sleeps under a viaduct, or whether that child crossed the Darién Gap, or whether that child has a parent or doesn’t, or anything, they need to have a safe and educational place that’s paid for by the taxpayer, and that is a public good for everybody. And that’s why we do what we do.
I’m a bilingual teacher because within this context of an underfunded, understaffed, underinvested in public education sphere, it’s even more dire for our immigrant kids who are learning English, who are new to the country. They are dealing with acute physical and mental trauma. These are wonderful kids who have walked across war zones and across continents to make it into your classroom. They need teachers who can understand them, who understand their culture, and who can help connect them to the resources.
If there’s young folks who are coming into their professional career or career changers out there, if you are bilingual, especially if you are a Spanish speaker, we sorely need you in Chicago public schools and in any large school
