Joe Garofoli: Travel order leaves Oakland middle school students confused.

Middle school is confusing enough to navigate when your family life is stable, but for the kids at one Oakland school, it’s been even more difficult since the election. They’ve been asking their teachers and counselors a lot of heavy questions, like, “Will my parents be home when I get home from school?”

And “Are they going to split up my family?”

And “Is my friend going to be deported?”

We know how confusing it’s been for lawyers and policymakers to untangle President Trump’s executive order “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” Although his order affecting travel from six Muslim-majority nations, which was set to take effect Thursday before it was put on hold Wednesday by a federal judge, may be more high profile, the effect of his earlier order may be more pervasive. It touches families in every neighborhood, yet many of them are too fearful to speak up against it.

Trump insists that the top priority of the order is to re-

move criminal, undocumented residents from the United States. But the section that prioritizes removing, in the president’s words, “bad dudes” also demands the deportation of “aliens” who “in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.”

That means it could apply to anybody for any reason at any time.

Trying to figure out what that means to their undocumented family members and friends “is freaking out” a lot of kids in her school, one Oakland counselor told me. Kids hear about the order through the media but also by overhearing their parents talk about it in anxious, hushed tones.

Recently, one student was worried about her aunt and grandmother, who usually visit from Mexico for a few weeks at a time. They may not this year, the student told her counselor, because they don’t know if they’ll be able to get here. Or get back.

“They’ve got a lot of questions,” the counselor told me. “A lot. They’re scared.”

So is the school. Officials there are also so worried they asked that neither the school, nor the counselors, administrators or teachers with whom I spoke be identified. With an immigration order written so broadly — one that gives wide discretion to deport any people in the country illegally who look as if they “pose a risk to public safety” — the school fears anything that puts its families at risk.

The school district has done a lot to try to make its families feel safe. Similar to many cities, Oakland has declared itself a “sanctuary district.” The school I visited offers a packet of material — in multiple languages — from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center that explains families’ rights “under a Trump administration.” They can learn how to make a “family preparedness plan” “to reduce the stress of the unexpected,” and read the latest news on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the federal program for certain people who entered the country as undocumented children.

The uncertainty and fear about what could happen to their families is hitting middle schoolers hard, said Katharine Gin, the co-founder of Educators for Fair Consideration, a San Francisco nonprofit that helps undocumented youths with legal and educational issues.

“I’m hearing that a lot now — that middle school students feel the most vulnerable,” Gin said. Younger students can’t grasp the complexity of how immigration politics made in Washington can affect their families. And older high school students are already starting to develop a sense of independence as they’re preparing to leave the home.

But younger teenagers depend on their parents more: for rides, for emotional support, for guidance.

On top of their natural growing pains, Gin said, students are “feeling their parents’ anxieties about leaving the house or even driving them to school” more. “They’re feeling very protective of them.”

Parents, meanwhile, are often reacting by “reeling the family in tighter,” restricting their children more from staying late at school. Gin said it always has been a challenge to “educate the immigrant community on the value of afterschool activities. Now, being out after dark is even more of a concern to a lot of people.”

Estefania Hermosillo knows what that insecurity feels like. She grew up in the Central Valley town of Ceres, raised by a mom who was undocumented. So is she — but, for now at least, she is protected by DACA.

“Growing up, I didn’t think so much about deportation,” Hermosillo told me. “I would worry that my mom would get pulled over by a cop, and you’d get a big ticket and our car would be taken away. That would be bad, because we wouldn’t have a car, but it’s not like now.”

In middle school, she felt optimism as former President Barack Obama was running on a slogan of “hope.” He didn’t demonize immigrants in his campaign as Trump has over the past two years, but talked about creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

But that didn’t happen. And Obama wound up deporting more immigrants than any other president. The difference is, Hermosillo said, that Obama’s rhetoric didn’t sound as harsh.

“All we see and hear about now is deportation, deportation, deportation — and we see stories of how the parents have to leave (the country) so quickly,” Hermosillo said.

That just feeds the fear Hermosillo hears when she talks to middleschool students all over the Bay Area as a community education coordinator for Educators for Fair Consideration. She sees how that fear can unnerve some young people.

“It’s really real for people, that fear,” Hermosillo said. “And if you are fearful that a person, your parent, might be gone some day, it might affect the decisions you make. Are you going to sign up for that afterschool class? Are you going to try to get into that advanced class? Are you going to go away for school when you get older?”

That fear will remain as long as the order does.