“This Is a Modern-Day Indian Removal”
An Interview with Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona
Zainab Abdullah: Thank you, with so much going on, for taking this time to be interviewed for the CLES newsletter. We know that your insights will be important for all of us. Let’s start with what has been happening in Los Angeles in terms of attacks on children and their families.
Lupe Carrasco Cardona: Since the election in November of 2024, students have been really scared. As educators, we have had a lot of students coming to us in mental health crisis, expressing anxiety, worry and fear. There were periodic ICE raids here in LA even before Trump’s re-election, but the current escalation began on a weekend toward the end of February. I first learned about it when one of the students at my school, a 15-year-old with special needs, had the door to his family’s apartment broken down early in the morning; it was still dark. The student has a bunk bed right in front of the door. The officers handcuffed him. He didn’t know what was going on; he was completely confused. There other children in beds in room that were freaked out, too. ICE busted down the door to the main bedroom and took the dad away. So that was our first experience with somebody close to home.
The ICE raids picked up, but it wasn’t until the weekend of June 6 that it's been all-out war on the city of Los Angeles and our families. We're seeing multiple ice raids at one time. Ice raids all day long. It started with officers knocking on doors and seeing if anyone would talk, and then if they thought they were undocumented, they would take them. But it has evolved since then. Now we're seeing snatch and grabs of anyone off the street. We’re seeing officers who are masked and in unmarked cars. These are mercenaries. We’ve even heard of people who just want to cause harm, who are taking advantage of the fact that you can have an unmarked vehicle, you wear a mask—you could be anyone.
Last week ICE raided a factory in Vernon, California, in East Los Angeles. They kidnapped a bunch of women, and one of them is the mother of one of my students at the high school where I teach, and she is also the mother of a middle school kid. Those two kids are staying with family right now, without their mom, and they’re trying to find out if she’s going to be detained indefinitely. Is she going to be deported? We don't know what's going to happen. And that's a huge issue right now.
ZA: This is going to be an enormous topic for the upcoming school year. What are your hopes and fears?
LCC: Well, the hope is that ICE will be abolished and out of our communities across the country. Our fears are that they are going to be entering into areas where there are vulnerable populations, like schools. I know my campus will not let ICE in. We will lock down our school. The fear is for parents and students on their way to and from school. And for schools that can’t lock down. Some of the universities are giving the option to switch their classes to virtual, especially because universities are by and large are open. I know that a lot of gatherings that are organized by the district have already been canceled or moved to virtual.
ZA: How has the school district responded?
LCC: I've heard mixed messages. Our LA Unified School District (LAUSD) superintendent and also our board members are supportive of informing parents and having conversations about what’s happening, what it means, and how to stay safe and protected. But I have heard about some school sites where administrators are reprimanding teachers who are talking about what's going on. That’s worrisome. Because we need our communities, our parents, our students, to be informed on their rights, and also be informed on how to defend them.
So a lot of the education has been happening outside of the school sites. I am the chair of the Association of Rasa Educators (ARE) . We have been doing webinars and community teach-ins, popular community education. For example, we recently held a webinar with an attorney who talked to parents about what to do if they are separated from their children to ensure that they are in good hands, so that we can work towards reunification and so the children do not end up in the foster care system or incarcerated themselves. As educators, we are trying to do the best we can, considering the circumstances. It feels right now it's like we’re in a combat zone.
ZA: What role is the LA teachers union playing?
LCC: This is an interesting question because I wear two hats—as a community member and organizer, and as a teacher. I do grassroots organizing through ARE and through my work with Union del Barrio on our community self-defense. We’re part of a community self-defense coalition that’s trying to protect people minute to minute, because right now due process is totally out the window. When community members see these agents and mercenaries—these paid kidnappers—getting set up, they inform us and we're able to put the call out for people to go capture it on video to alert the community. So everybody knows that these raids are happening and they can stay in the safety of their homes. That’s one level. Our union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) works on a different level. When our families are separated, when somebody in the family is kidnapped, UTLA, in collaboration with the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights-LA (CHIRLA) is able to get them legal representation. They're able to get the inside scoop on where are they being held. Are they being charged with something? What’s going on? It makes me feel good that there are these two approaches, because neither the union nor the grassroots coalition has the capacity to do both.
ZA: There are so many different communities and populations who are being impacted. In addition to all the immigrants being attacked, we’ve also seen an escalation in attacks on trans youth. Can you talk about the intersection of those issues?
LCC: On the news, it seems like ICE is mostly going after Mexican and Central American folks. But we definitely are seeing that Haitian communities are being impacted; so are African diasporic communities, South American, and all the Asian communities. One of my friends just told me that her uncle self-deported to the Philippines because of his fear that he would be captured. He's near retirement, and he is afraid he would end up in Trump’s “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida.
Trans youth without documents are especially concerned. If they’re captured, will they be in detention centers they identify with in terms of gender or not? They’re especially vulnerable to mistreatment from guards. So we're seeing increased mental health issues among our
trans youth who are undocumented. And among our trans youth and trans educators in general, because we’re living in a super dehumanizing environment. Their legal protections are being stripped.
I’m trying so hard to stay in a spirit of optimism.
ZA: You mentioned the importance of educating people about what's going on. There has been a lot of opposition to teaching how power has been misused in the United States. We see that in the attacks on DEI, on Critical Race Theory, on teaching Black history and Ethnic Studies. How do you see the connection between what’s happening and Ethnic Studies?
LCC: What we are seeing here in Los Angeles and in the United States right now is a settler
colonial government that is doing a modern-day Indian removal. The core population of LA is from what is now Mexico, Central and South America. These are peoples who have been on these lands, who have been migrating across these lands, for thousands of years. The archaeological, anthropological, historical record proves that there have been thousands of years of migration here. These are peoples who have been following these routes on Turtle Island for millennia, and now they’re being criminalized, dehumanized, and removed. Ethnic Studies gives you a lens to see that, to understand that.
That’s why we see an attack on Ethnic Studies, because by understanding that history you are going to understand what is happening now, and you will be more apt to be against this Indian removal that is occurring right now in our very lifetimes—in the US and in Palestine.
The attack on Ethnic Studies is really an attack on the truth of what’s going on in the world. As I look at it, there are a couple of camps: You've got the people who totally understand what’s happening here and internationally, and they’re happy because it benefits them. They’re doing everything they can to keep that going forward, like with this big, ugly bill that just passed. And then there's a large population of folks who don't understand, maybe because they didn't take Ethnic Studies in school. So it's very easy for them to fall into the trap of “people are stealing jobs” or “they don't belong here, they’re foreigners”—the ideology that whole peoples are inherently criminal, inherently primitive, inherently lazy. But once those people are exposed to truth and understanding, and have language to express it, then there’s hope. With no Ethnic Studies K-12, you get have to get a college degree to understand these things. They are very deliberately trying to keep this knowledge from people. And that’s ridiculous.
All over the country, there are attacks on knowledge and on education, on the freedom to think, freedom to teach, freedom to read and write. It’s scary that anyone would try to prevent knowledge and truth from being imparted to our youth, because I do believe that most people are good people. I think most people with real understanding of what's going on would be taking different positions..
Our kids need Ethnic Studies because we need a society of informed, educated people who
can disagree on things, absolutely, but who can disagree on things in a more humane way where we can engage in discourse, where we can struggle things out in a way that is productive and not harmful. This is the world that CLES is fighting for. So I’m appreciative of CLES and all of you who are doing the work that's necessary to keep CLES together.
ZA: Thank you. Looking toward the fall, how are you going to help your students make sense of everything that's going on? What will that mean in terms of curriculum and making sure that they're in a safe and sacred space? That they feel protected?
LCC: Even for me as an educator and an organizer. sometimes it's overwhelming. I have to really talk to myself and try to stay as optimistic as possible. But I know that one of the most powerful things that we have is one another, our communities and our solidarity. And that is absolutely something that I'm going to be helping my students to see. We all may come from different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, whatever. That is part of our intersectional identities. But we have one another and our solidarity is our power. And it's our power to resist. It's our power to transform. It's our power to survive. It's our power to thrive. That power is rooted in self-love, in radical love and healing.
As an Ethnic Studies educator/activist over the past like 15 or so years, I have gotten to know more people who are part of different racialized ethnicities than my own than ever before in my life, and it has changed me. I have grown as a human, as an educator, as a mom, as a student of life. The love that I have inside of me is because of that solidarity. And that's absolutely something that I'm going to teach. We need to stop the proliferation of scapegoating, the proliferation of anti-Black, anti-Asian, anti-Indigeneity, anti-trans propaganda. All of us have our beauty and the things that we bring into the world, and all I want is for each of our students to see the love in themselves and the love in one another, and feel happy and fulfilled. I'm talking about a happiness that is healthy for yourself and also for everyone else in the world. At the end of the day, that's what I want.