Just as students see that no single actor was responsible for the deportations of the 1930s, they can recognize that President Trump alone does not have the power to terrorize immigrants and their families. For that it takes the collaboration of the corporate media, ICE agents, for-profit detention centers, wall-builders and contractors, and an electorate primed by racism and capitalism to misplace blame for their own low wages or precarious social position.

If that is true, then it matters how every single one of us responds.

I want my students to take what they have learned about deportations of the 1930s and be like Jordon Dyrdahl-Roberts, the Montana Department of Labor worker who quit his job, explaining, “There were going to be ICE subpoenas for information that would end up being used to hunt down and deport undocumented workers. I refuse to aid in the breaking up of families. I refuse to just ‘follow orders.’”

I want my students to be like the more than 100 public defenders who walked off the job in New York City to protest ICE arrests in courthouses or like members of the Sanctuary Movement who are devising novel and brave ways to put themselves between ICE agents and their targets.

And I want my students to be like the 4th/5th graders in California who demanded they be taught about the deportations of the 1930s, who insisted that history matters, and that it might be the history that is not in the textbooks that matters the most.

I used the Deportations on Trial lesson with my Virginia history class.

The students were shocked to learn that hundreds of thousands of native-born Mexican Americans were deported during the Great Depression. — Deana Forbes,

high school social studies teacher, Woodbridge, Virginia