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PDFFrom Colorlines:
What happens when the police officer who works at your high school also happens to moonlight as an immigration agent conducting raids in the neighborhood where you live? Latino middle and high school students in the small Colorado town of Carbondale started reporting exactly this over a year ago, along with the fear that their school resource officer was using information he learned at school to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement pick up parents in the town.
Now, the school board for Carbondale’s Roaring Fork School District is considering a policy that would bar police officers from serving such dual roles.
“When it comes to immigration, mixing it with law enforcement is very problematic,” said Alan Kaplan, a spokesperson for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. Kaplan’s group has been collecting stories from students and parents in the neighborhood for over a year and proposed the new policy. “We think trust is paramount, and in a 52 percent Latino district, a lot of families are mixed status families, so even if someone is a citizen, their family often has someone who is not.”
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