ICE Raids Are Affecting Children—And What Youth Programs Can Do?

Source: Ian Kapsalis/The Express

We queried Google AI to learn more about how youth programs can protect youth while the threat of ICE raids is possible. Below are the responses:

How Youth Programs Can Protect Students

• Enact "Safe Haven" Policies: Establish clear protocols that prohibit staff from sharing student information or allowing ICE agents into non-public areas without a judicial warrant.
• Implement Trauma-Informed Care: Train all staff to recognize trauma responses and prioritize emotional safety. Shift from punitive discipline to supportive interventions that address the root causes of behavioral changes.
• Support Family Preparedness: Help families create emergency plans, such as Caregiver’s Authorization Affidavits, which designate temporary guardians if parents are detained.
• Provide Mental Health Resources: Partner with community organizations to offer culturally responsive counseling and support groups that help youth process community-wide trauma.
• Facilitate Safe Travel: Organize community carpools or "walking buses" to ensure students can travel to and from programs without fear of encountering enforcement. 

Below is a checklist for staff training on how to respond if immigration officials arrive at your facility, provided by Google AI. Please note that your school, district or program provider agency may already have a protocol should ICE agents conduct a raid. It is important that you consult for prior checklists and ensure that you disregard any of the checklists below if you think this list is contrary to existing policy or if you think any of these actions would be unsafe for your staff.

Training staff for potential visits from immigration officials (such as ICE) focuses on maintaining calm, verifying legal authority, and following a pre-set communication chain. 

1. Preparation (Before a Visit)

• Designate a Point Person: Assign a primary and alternate representative (e.g., HR Director or Manager) as the only staff authorized to interact with officials.
• Create a "Cheat Sheet": Provide reception and front-line staff with a step-by-step response guide, including emergency contact numbers for legal counsel. 
• Distribute "Know Your Rights" Notices: As of February 1, 2026, certain jurisdictions (like California under SB 294) require employers to provide written notices to all employees regarding their rights during immigration inspections.
• Emergency Contacts: By March 30, 2026, ensure employees have the opportunity to designate an emergency contact specifically for workplace arrests or detentions. 

2. Front-Line Staff Protocol (Upon Arrival) 

• Stay Calm: Instruct staff to remain professional and avoid sudden movements or running, which officials may interpret as "articulable suspicion".
• Verify Identity: Politely ask for the official’s business card and government-issued photo ID.
• Identify Public vs. Private Areas: Train staff that officials may enter public areas (lobbies) but need a judicial warrant (signed by a judge, not just an agency official) to enter private workspaces.
• Direct to Management: Staff should state: "I do not have authority to grant access. Please wait while I contact my employer".  

3. Management & Legal Protocol

• Review the Warrant: Check that any presented warrant is signed by a judge/magistrate and correctly identifies your facility's address.
• Do Not Consent: If no judicial warrant is present, managers should politely but clearly state that they do not consent to a search of non-public areas.
• Avoid Obstruction: Staff must not hide employees, destroy documents, or provide false information, as these actions can lead to criminal charges.
• Document the Visit: Assign a staff member to record agent badge numbers, names, and all actions taken. If permitted by local law, video or photo documentation is recommended. 

4. Post-Visit Actions

• Request Receipts: Obtain an itemized receipt for any property or records removed from the facility.
• Notify Contacts: If an employee is detained, immediately notify their designated emergency contact and legal counsel.
• Debrief: Record a factual account of the encounter while details are fresh to assist legal counsel. (If it is safe, we recommend that somebody video the encounter.)   

Source: www.pexels.com

Because the threat of deportation has existed for a few years, we have written other resources to assist afterschool programs with this. Below is a listing of some of the resources we have developed:

Learning in Afterschool & Summer Blogs:

• ICE Raids at Schools
• Deportation: Things Immigrant Families Can Do Now to Protect Loved Ones
• Collateral Damage: New Immigration Policies and Education in California
• Practitioners Speak Out: Serving the Needs of Immigrant Youth
• Supporting Immigrant Families
• How California Schools Can Support Students, Families Fearing ICE Raids
• Immigration and Afterschool

Briefing Papers:

• Countering the Threat of Deportation

Reed Larson’s Research on Youth Development

Source: Reed Larson, The Youth Development Experience

Kate Walker

By Guest Blogger Kate Walker, Extension Specialist, Youth Development, University of Minnesota Extension. This blog was originally published by the University of Minnesota Extension.

I recently attended the annual meeting for the Society for Research on Adolescence where my mentor Reed Larson was invited to reflect on his influential research career in youth development. Reed first got interested in adolescence because he saw it as a critical period of awakening. Yet he noticed that most research focused on problems more than development, and he discovered that youth programs were powerful spaces for this awakening and development to occur. These insights propelled an impressive body of research that has tremendous implications for our work with and on behalf of young people. 

Young people’s daily experiences and emotions

With his mentor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Reed began by studying adolescents’ daily experiences and emotions, pioneering the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) where young people were prompted (with beepers back then!) to report on their feelings and the dynamics of their experiences in different domains in their daily lives. He explored their media use, time alone, experience with friends, and school experience.  

Reed Larson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

He discovered that during their typical experiences in school, young people were challenged (deep attention) but not engaged (intrinsically motivated). Conversely during unstructured leisure time, they were engaged but not challenged. The one unique context where young people reported experiencing the rare combination of high levels of challenge and engagement was in organized youth programs (arts, STEM, leadership, sports). He was intrigued.

Youth programs as developmental contexts

This led Reed to develop a series of studies focused on young people’s developmental experiences in youth programs and how staff facilitate these experiences. His research teams identified the types of key experiences that young people have in high-quality youth programs that facilitate their development of skills for teamwork, solving problems, managing emotions, and sustaining motivation in challenging work. He found that project-based youth programs are settings in which Csikszentmihalyi’s "flow" experience serves as a powerful catalyst for developing vital adult skills.

These findings are widely used to design programs and train program staff. They were the basis for a researcher-practitioner collaboration that resulted in a field guide of key youth experiences and staff practices that build valuable social and emotional skills. His groundbreaking research on the lives of young people and the developmental role of youth programs helped to both launch and legitimize the field of positive youth development. 

I most appreciate how respectfully rooted Reed’s research is in the direct experiences and accounts of young people. Throughout he has always emphasized that youth are agents or producers of their own development. Are there aspects of his research that speak to or influence you and your work? 

MORE ABOUT...

Kate Walker, (she/her), is the Extension Specialist, Youth Development at University of Minnesota Extension. Kate provides leadership to the understanding and development of youth work practice. She studies the role that adult program leaders, staff and volunteers play in supporting youth development in programs. She also leads professional development efforts aimed at supporting and improving youth work practice. This includes trainings on social and emotional learning and on the dilemmas that practitioners face in their everyday work with young people. 

The University of Minnesota Extension has a long history of youth development leadership. They are best known for running Minnesota 4-H for more than 100 years. The 4-H program also serves as their laboratory of learning, in which they are constantly improving. Their mission is to improve the lives of all Minnesota young people - no matter where they live or which youth program they choose to join.

An Interview with Youth Development Researcher, Reed Larson

By Sam Piha

According to the Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring, "Reed Larson’s seminal research on the lives of teenagers helped to launch the field of positive youth development, and his insights and findings continue to enrich the work of mentoring researchers. His work explores the contexts of daily life and how developmental processes unfold in extra-curricular activities."

Researcher, Deborah Vandell (UC Irvine), stated, "Reed Larson did some really  important work looking at the development of initiative and engagement. What he found is that when children are in school what they often are doing is putting forth a lot of effort, but they're not really motivated. What happens in afterschool activities, when they're really working, when they're active, they're choosing those activities and they are also focused on them. It's the best combination for learning."

Reed Larson will share his work at a Speaker's Forum entitled, "How Demanding Program Roles Can Facilitate Youth’s Positive Development" on April 19, 2019 in Oakland, CA. You can register here. We recently interviewed Reed and some of his responses are below.

Reed Larson

Q: You have been a pioneer in the field of youth development. What drew you to this work? 
A: I have done research and teaching on the age period of adolescence all my life. We know it is a time of enormous potentials for growth. Yet our society does not get that. Teens are disrespected, misunderstood, and terribly underestimated. As a result, they are not given the opportunities to develop their potentials. I discovered that after school and out of school programs were the main exception. They are a part of teens’ lives where they have opportunities to develop their full potentials.

Q: The work of promoting youth development is not easy. In your research, what did you find to be the greatest challenges facing youth workers? 
A: There are a lot of challenges: being present and attuned to youth, being both a friend and a mentor, teacher, or sometimes parent; seeing societal injustice and hurt in teens; having too few resources; taking care of yourself at the same time you are engaged in caring relationships with others. 

Q: What settings and practices are most successful in engaging youth? 
A: I don’t claim to have all the answers. But in our research, youth have described becoming highly motivated in youth program settings where they feel safe, feel they belong, experience positive relationships, and experience a culture that supports these positive ways of being. Further, in settings where they are engaged in activities: that have meaningful goals, are challenging while allowing them to experience competence, and involve high-functioning collaborative relationships. I’ve also observed that high quality programs provide an environment that helps youth disengage from distractions and anxieties in their lives at the beginning of the program session, and reflect on what they have learned at the end.  

Q: What is the most important lesson that you learned in your research? 
A: I have seen again and again that young people have enormous resources. They can be extremely resilient. They are eager, active learners who learn from experiences. They are ready to have deep insights about complex social and emotional truths. We just need to provide the right conditions for them to feel save, loved, and to see a way forward. 

Q: What most surprised you? 
A: It is maybe not a surprise, but I have been impressed by meeting many, many wonderful, smart, and caring people who have devoted themselves to working with young people. It has been increasingly clear to me that to improve programs the field needs to seek out, understand, and draw on the expertise of experienced youth development practitioners. Communication between researchers and practitioners need to involve two-way conversations. 

Q: What are you working on currently? 
A: We just finished a research paper on how “substantive demanding roles” can provide powerful opportunities for youth’s development of new competencies, including responsibility to others. (This will be the main topic of my Speaker's Forum presentation). Although my research has been mainly focused on processes of positive development, I am currently interested in times when youth in programs experience “psychological meltdowns” from a setback or being overwhelmed, and how staff are effective in helping youth respond with resiliency. 

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Reed Larson’s seminal research on the lives of teenagers helped to launch the field of positive youth development, and his insights and findings continue to enrich this field. His work has involved over a thousand interviews with youth and front line staff in diverse youth development programs. It has focused on understanding how developmental experiences unfold in programs (including extracurricular activities) and how program staff are effective in supporting these learning processes. His team’s research was the basis for the Weikart Foundation’s research-practitioner collaboration that identified effective staff practices for supporting social emotional learning in programs. Reed is a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was recently the President of the Society for Research on Adolescence. He also served as Editor-in-Chief of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development (with Lene Jensen).

Character Day is September 22nd and Lights On Afterschool! is October 20th



There are two important events coming up that are important for the afterschool community. We urge all afterschool leaders to consider their participation, see below. 



CHARACTER DAY - SEPTEMBER 22, 2016 (#CharacterDay2016)


Two weeks to Character Day! Afterschool and summer youth programs are perfectly positioned to promote their development of important character traits. In fact, many programs do this intentionally as part of their stated mission. We encourage afterschool and summer programs to join over 50,000 events happening around the globe. The hunger for this conversation is incredible! If you are still looking for ideas for your event (whether you have 15 mins, an hour, or a whole day devoted to Character Day), check out Let It Ripple's website, where you can find suggestions for activities, discussion kits, other free materials, and videos for all ages. 




LIGHTS ON AFTERSCHOOL! OCTOBER 20, 2016 

Get Involved! We encourage all afterschool programs to participate in the 17th annual Lights On Afterschool! celebration. This is an important day, sponsored by the Afterschool Alliance, in which thousands of programs make the case for the continued support of afterschool programs for youth. You can find events, gather ideas, and register for Lights On Afterschool and help showcase the benefits of afterschool programs and their need for support. 

Last year, more than 1 million Americans celebrated Lights On Afterschool at more than 8,000 events. Thousands of news outlets shared stories of diverse programs around the country. We know partners like you made this happen.


We can’t wait to see what programs across the country have in store for Lights On Afterschool 2016!




Save the Date for How Kids Learn II: A One-Day Conference in the Bay Area on January 9, 2013

By Sam Piha

Temescal Associates and the Learning in Afterschool & Summer Project is proud to join with others in sponsoring How Kids Learn II on January 9, 2013 in San Francisco. The purpose of this TED-like, one-day conference is to inform and energize youth program leaders, educators and afterschool stakeholders regarding our current knowledge on how kids learn and to share innovative approaches to promote learning outside of the classroom. In addition to hearing from cutting edge thinkers on how kids learn, participants will have the opportunity to meet innovative practitioners and California colleagues. To date, confirmed speakers include Pedro Noguera, Jane Quinn, Robert Granger, Renate Caine, Nicole Yohalem, and other national leaders. We will also hear from innovative leaders from exemplar programs that operate in California. They include those from Techbridge, Pogo Park, Mindful Impact, and The Los Angeles Service Academy (LASA).

WHY FOCUS ON THE “HOWs” OF LEARNING

Much is discussed and written on what children need to learn.  Less attention is paid to how they learn.  What have we learned in recent brain research that contributes to this question? How can we apply this knowledge to improve our work with young people to increase their motivation and interest in learning? What are effective learning approaches that are currently being used successfully by practitioners, especially those working in out-of-school programs and in informal learning settings, and what makes them successful?

For more details and how to register, visit the conference website: www.howkidslearn.org. Registration will begin on August 20, 2012. Last year was a sold out event so early registration is suggested.