How a Crackdown on MS-13 Caught Up Innocent High School Students

The Trump administration went after gang members — and instead destroyed the American dreams of immigrant teenagers around the country.

hen Alex walked into school on June 14, 2017, it felt as if summer had already started. He didn’t have regular classes, just a standardized math test in the late morning. The other immigrant students in the bilingual program at Huntington High were crowded in a hallway comparing their plans for the break — most already had jobs lined up — and promising to stay in touch.

Classmates came up to greet him. At 19, Alex was older than many of the other sophomores. He enrolled as a freshman when he arrived in Suffolk County on Long Island from Honduras a year and a half before. He felt good in the school from the start. A shy teenager who preferred video games and watching soccer on TV to playing it on the field, he had always been an outsider, slow to make friends. But all the immigrants in the bilingual program were outsiders, so he fit in, and he was popular for the first time in his life. In Honduras, it had felt as if teachers were preparing students to work in the fields, like everyone else. Here, in Huntington, they were always telling him that with a good education, he could do anything he wanted.

While the other students laughed and shouted in the hall, Alex (his middle name) went to his desk.

Alex sometimes lingered in the halls, but today he wanted to leave as soon as possible. A month before, he got in trouble in school for the first time, for doodling in math class. He was shocked and confused when the principal accused him of drawing gang signs and suspended him for three days. … He tried to defend himself; the devil was the school mascot, after all, and 504 was the Honduras country code.

“For the police, it’s a gang thing, but for us, it’s about being proud of your country,” he later told me.

Although he was in the United States legally, seeking asylum from gang persecution, his status was tenuous. The government can revoke the provisional freedom it gives to minors seeking asylum if they do something to indicate they are a danger to the community. So he had been careful to stay away from anyone who might be connected with gangs.

A few weeks earlier, a classmate was arrested by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement and never came back to school. He seemed like a rule-follower, but the rumor was that he had been accused of being in the street gang MS-13. Soon after, another student was detained on his way to church. Alex figured there must be something he didn’t know about them — maybe they really had done bad things. He had heard about gang killings in some other Suffolk County towns, but it all felt very far away.

He unlatched the gate to the building where his family lived and left his bike unlocked on the lawn as he always did. Then he changed into a pair of gym shorts and … sprawled out in his room and texted a girl he had a crush on.

Then he heard a soft knock. He emerged from his bedroom and, through a window in the door, saw a group of men wearing bulletproof vests.

He told himself there was no reason to be afraid — his immigration case was moving forward, and he hadn’t committed any crime. So he put on flip-flops and went outside. One of the men asked his name and told him they had a warrant for his arrest. He was too stunned to protest as they cuffed his hands behind his back, loaded him into an S.U.V. and drove off, with a second car in front and a third behind. A neighbor watched between the curtains as the convoy disappeared. She called his parents. They rushed home and found his keys, wallet and cellphone laid out neatly on the kitchen table.

Across the country, ICE increasingly depends on information from resource officers to identify suspected gang members. But that intelligence is often unreliable. In March 2018 in Baltimore, ICE detained a 17-year-old after the school resource officer reported that the student was part of a group that threatened a classmate. The detention lasted six months. A federal immigration judge reviewed the decision for “clear error” and found that one had been made. In January 2018 in Houston, ICE detained a high schooler with a 3.4 G.P.A. after a school resource officer wrote him up for fighting with another student. The student went to the officer after the fight to explain that his classmate had been harassing him, but he was arrested and transferred to ICE custody; after a student walkout at the school, supported by some teachers, he was released in April.

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