Schoolkids in the Crosshairs

For six months, Chalkbeat New York has been embedded at ELLIS Preparatory Academy, a Bronx school that specializes in working with older immigrant students trying to find their footing in the US. One of those students is “Bridget,” the pseudonym for a newly arrived Ecuadorean teenager who allowed reporter Michael Elsen-Rooney to follow her and her mother’s anxiety-ridden journey through the maze of America’s education and immigration systems. (His story runs in two parts, here and here.)

Elsen-Rooney’s eye for detail is impressive, as he sees Bridget awarded A and B grades while she proves a quick study in English and math. Meanwhile, her mother collects cans on the street to scrape together twenty dollars a day as they squeeze into a relative’s apartment. And they do all of this amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown, including the ICE arrest of one of Bridget’s ELLIS classmates. “Normally, in the final month of school, students were worried about moving to the next grade or graduating,” Elsen-Rooney writes. This year, a counselor told Chalkbeat, they wondered, “Is a masked person going to grab me off the street?”