Schools boss rips secrecy

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said the federal government has been silent about undocumented immigrants disappearing from city schools because they’ve been detained by authorities.

City records show 466 child immigrants who arrived in New York as unaccompanied minors after crossing the border have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement between October and March.

It’s a gigantic increase over fiscal year 2016, when just 24 such minors were detained by ICE.

City officials said they first noticed the phenomenon when the teens started disappearing from schools.

But Carranza said school administrators were never notified.

“A lot of this is very quietly, I would say, unfortunately, surreptitiously done. And there’s been no communication with us in the public school system about any, any of this issue,” Carranza said.

Hundreds of children who entered the country as unaccompanied minors – who are held in the custody of Office of Refugee Resettlement in foster-care like settings – have been detained by ICE, some because they were rearrested, but many simply because they turned 18 in the refugee agency’s custody.

Bitta Mostofi, the city’s commissioner of immigrant affairs, told the Daily News she first became aware of the problem when some 18-yearold students stopped showing up to school because they were shuttled to ICE jails.

Carranza said Thursday he wasn’t aware of public school students being detained. “I don’t know of any,” he said. “And my staff is actually doing inquiries now to try to find out what is really happening.”

At the same time, more and more migrants are arriving in New York City after being separated from their parents at the border and classified as unaccompanied minors.

“The mayor yesterday mentioned he was going to what is a detention facility in East Harlem,” Carranza said “We didn’t even know that.” An ICE official said the families of arrested immigrant students are responsible for notifying schools when students are detained.