Right choice of words
The new United States attorney in Boston yesterday said his office expects to be “more aggressive” in enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, which is hardly a shocking revelation. Andrew Lelling was chosen for the job by President Trump.
Still, stepped-up enforcement is unlikely to include rounding up minor students enrolled in Boston Public Schools simply because their names are mentioned in school incident reports along with the word “gang.”
As the Herald reported this week, a group of advocates is concerned that Boston School Police are “overusing” the word when writing reports about incidents involving criminal activity on school property.
“The fear is that there is a chain,” said Matt Cregor of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, which is seeking public records to test its theory. “The school police officer writes a report and overuses the word ‘gang.’ That report finds its way to the fusion centers, and the word ‘gang’ is then used against that student by ICE.”
Rather a circuitous path from Point A to Point B, but we’ll give Cregor and his colleagues the benefit of the doubt in their concern; the president, after all, has made it clear he wants to crack down on gangs affiliated with immigrant populations.
But what would the critics have Boston school police officers do, then, if a crime takes place involving known gang members — or if the incident involves clear gang activity? Leave that key piece of information out? Write that the incident involved members of the same after-school “club”?
The school department doesn’t ask for or record a student’s immigration status, and its records aren’t shared with law enforcement. Incident reports filed by Boston School Police officers aren’t school records — they’re police records.
Either way, ICE has denied initiating enforcement actions because of a single word in a report, calling it “a baseless claim and totally without merit.”
Fear grips many immigrant families in the current climate, of that we have no doubt. Raising groundless concerns that school records might implicate innocent immigrant students only inflames those fears.