Local civil rights groups accused Boston Public Schools is of sharing students' personal information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in what they called a "school to deportation pipeline," in a statement released Monday.
“Everyone should feel safe when they go to school,” Janelle Dempsey, an attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights, said in an interview Monday. “Families should feel comfortable sending their children to school to get an education without having the fear that it could lead to being deported.”
Dempsey said that since 2014 more than 100 incident reports were shared with ICE by the Boston Police, including one that led to the deportation of a student in 2016.
Dempsey said the student was involved in a nonviolent incident at East Boston High School and a report of that incident was sent to ICE via the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, or BRIC, a data-gathering unit of the Boston Police Department. As a result, the student was placed in ICE detention for over a year before authorities deported him to El Salvador.
“The Boston [School Department] initially denied that this practice was ever in place, and then said that the particular incident was an isolated event, and that they don’t share information with students,” Dempsey said.
In a statement emailed to WGBH on Monday, BPS denied sharing student information with ICE but acknowledged that school police incident reports are shared via BRIC.
“BPS does share school police incident reports with our local law enforcement in connection with their criminal investigations or if the incident reports contain information that, if shared with the BPD, is useful to ensure the safety of the school, public, and the City’s neighborhoods,” the statement said.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Lawyers for Civil Rights sued the City of Boston and BPS for the information that was released Monday in June 2018.
“[The information] shows that the practice is far more widespread than what we initially thought,” Dempsey said.
According to the report, between 2014 and 2017, at least 135 incident reports — that included disciplinary offenses such as "graffiti" and "disturbing school assembly" — were shared with ICE via BRIC.
During a press conference Monday, Mayor Marty Walsh backed BPS.
“There’s no sharing information between the Boston Public School and the federal government,” Walsh told reporters.
The mayor continued to say the incident reports that go through BRIC to law enforcement are “just information on any particular concerns, threats that that the school might have. … And that information gets shared to BRIC and then whatever BRIC does with the information after that, we'll do some type of investigation to see if this if it warrants any further any further progress.”
Dempsey says her organization is asking BPS to be clear about who is receiving the information from student reports and for what purpose.
“Lawyers for Civil Rights believes that they are sharing information with ICE via BRIC because the student who we know was deported as a result of BPS sharing information with BRIC,” she said. “This is an ongoing litigation and we are continuing to fight in court to get BPS to be transparent with the community about how it is interacting with ICE.”
