ICE’s Surprise detention center is near my school. Does my congressman care?

As told to Morgan Fischer. Click this link to sign Cali Overs’ online petition asking Congress to pass a 3-mile safety buffer zone between ICE facilities and schools.

On a Thursday afternoon, a few classmates and I were on our way to a statewide student council conference when our student body president, Dayna, grabbed our attention. Holding up her phone, she read out loud a news story that sucked the air right out of the bus.

The Department of Homeland Security had secretly purchased a 418,000-square-foot warehouse with plans to turn it into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center holding up to 1,500 people. It sits less than a mile from our school, Dysart High School, where I serve as student body vice president. My classmates walk, bike and drive past it every morning to get to school. Dysart Middle School and El Mirage Elementary are also within a mile. And our elected representatives — the people whose one job is to represent us — have responded with silence, deflection or worse: telling us to get used to it.

I’m 17 years old. I don’t have a vote…yet. But I do have a voice, and I intend to use it.

Let me be clear about what’s actually at stake. This isn’t a debate about immigration policy. Reasonable people disagree on that, and that’s not my fight here. This is about whether students should have to navigate around a massive federal ICE detention facility just to get to first period.

This is a dangerous and reckless mix. Student drop-off/pick-up is already chaotic. Around 7-8:30 am and 2-3:30 p.m. every day, the roads leading to our schools are completely gridlocked. We have our normal school rush with parents stopping and going, kids crossing the streets and inexperienced teenage drivers trying to get through the intersections. Now we’re going to have to navigate prison buses, protestors, media and unwanted attention from people with bad intentions. Someone already tried to set the building on fire, and it’s not even open yet. These are not abstract concerns that can be shrugged off. If something goes wrong and a student gets hurt or their education is affected, who answers for that? Whose fault will it be?

Sixty percent of our student body is Hispanic. The U.S. Supreme Court gave federal immigration agents permission to use race, ethnicity and accents as factors when deciding whether to stop and question people. This has created intense fear among our students, who worry about being stopped, harassed and interrogated on their way to and from school.

Many students have told me they are switching to online school rather than take that risk. These are American citizens changing the course of their education because the federal government moved a detention facility next to their school, and nobody with power thought to ask whether that was appropriate. Nobody held a community meeting. Nobody notified the school district. Nobody asked the people who actually live here whether we want to have what is essentially a federal prison in our neighborhood.

Our school district can’t even afford to fix its school buses. That’s why students are walking past this warehouse in the first place, because a bond measure to fund bus repairs failed and the district simply doesn’t have the money. Every student in the Dysart School District who lives within two miles of school is not allowed to ride the bus. If our school district couldn’t fund transportation, what makes anyone think they’ll be able to fund the additional security this situation demands?

I’ve spent months trying to be heard through every proper channel available to me. I’ve spoken at three Surprise City Council meetings. I requested a meeting with Mayor Kevin Sartor, who is also the safety coordinator for the Dysart Unified School District, after he personally told me to email him at a youth city council event. He has not responded once. I’ve contacted my school’s principals about their plans to protect students and received nothing beyond a brief email citing existing safety policy. I’ve reached out to every member of the Dysart Unified District Governing Board. Nothing from any of them, either. I plan to show up in person if that’s what it takes, because apparently a written request from a student isn’t worth a reply.

I’ve also gone to Congress with a concrete proposal: a three-mile safety buffer zone between ICE detention facilities and K-12 schools. It’s a simple, commonsense idea. It would keep students from having to navigate the extra traffic, protests, media presence and unpredictable activity that a facility like this inevitably attracts. Democratic Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly have been supportive and said they back the proposal, but they need Republican co-sponsorship to move it forward. When I met with a staffer for GOP Rep. Paul Gosar, a congressman who has himself written to the Department of Homeland Security expressing concerns about this facility, I hoped for a real conversation. Instead, I was told that my safety concerns were “hypothetical” and that my classmates and I should “accept the fact that this detention center is here” and that we “need to accommodate our lives around it because it’s not going away.” Three miles, I was informed, was asking for too much.

Too much. That is what they said about asking that children not be placed directly in the path of a massive federal detention center.

By the time this facility opens, I will have graduated from Dysart High School and moved on to college. This fight is not about protecting myself. It’s about the students who will be traveling down that road after I’m long gone, the kids in middle school right now, the ones in elementary school, who had absolutely no say in any of this and whose parents, like mine, moved to Surprise because they believed they were choosing a safe and quiet community. My mom and I came here six years ago to get away from the density and complications of Phoenix. We thought we were building a life in a family-friendly neighborhood. An ICE detention center capable of holding 1,500 people was not part of that picture.

Those kids deserve to be protected. And our representatives owe us a real answer, not silence. I am prepared to keep fighting for the safety of my classmates and every student across the United States. Student safety is not a political issue. Every student has a right to a safe path to school. That is why I am asking Congress to support and pass a federal bill that keeps ICE detention centers three miles away from K-12 schools.

To Rep. Gosar, to Mayor Sartor, to the Dysart school board and to every official who has let my concerns go unanswered: Your constituents are not asking you to solve the immigration debate. They are asking you to protect children who walk to school. They are asking you to show up. That should not be a hard call, and it should not require a teenager to spend months begging for a response before anyone takes it seriously.

To the parents, neighbors and community members who voted these officials into office: I’d encourage you to ask them the same questions I have been asking. Ask them what their plan is. Ask them why students’ safety concerns are being dismissed as hypothetical. Ask them why three miles is too much to ask.

Because so far, they’re not answering me. Maybe they’ll answer you.

Phoenix New Times reached out about Overs’ concerns to the Dysart Unified School District, as well as to the offices of Surprise Mayor Kevin Sartor, Rep. Paul Gosar and Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly. The school district declined to comment but reiterated its commitment “to providing a high-quality education in a safe and supportive environment for all students.” Sartor did not respond. Spokespersons for Gallego and Kelly acknowledged meeting with Overs and provided statements supportive of her efforts. Gosar spokesperson Anthony Foti said Gosar was “impressed by the initiative she showed and is grateful that Cali took the time to meet and share her perspective.”