Opinion | A Suitcase, 10 Countries, One School: A Migrant Family’s Search for Home

Mary Lauri and Roberto Rodríguez, asylum seekers from Venezuela, heard about Public School 46, in Fort Greene in Brooklyn, from a mother at Hall Street, the emergency shelter where their family had been placed. It was five blocks away and had a Spanish dual-language program.

When Ms. Rodríguez went to register her two younger children the second week in January, the school’s parent coordinator, Amanda Ocasio, a 30-year-old Puerto Rican woman with platinum hair, big brown eyes and funky red glasses, was standing inside the entrance with the security guards to welcome them. There was breakfast, and there were piles of warm clothes, school supplies and toiletries in the teachers’ lounge for parents and children to choose from.

Allison Blechman, the English as a new language teacher, took the family on a tour of the school: a beautiful library with books in English and Spanish and comfortable chairs, a science lab with 3-D printers, an auditorium with a stage and curtains like a real theater, whiteboards in every classroom.

Andrés, Ms. Rodríguez’s 7-year-old son, gaped at the bounty, revealing teeth growing in every which way. Kenny, her 12-year-old, sporting a bowl cut and serious expression, solemnly told Ms. Ocasio, “This is the best school I’ve ever seen in my life.” He was too old to attend. “There’s a middle school upstairs for you,” she said.

The next day, Ms. Rodríguez watched as Ms. Ocasio escorted Andrés and his 9-year-old sister, Keymar, down the hall through a set of doors toward their classrooms. Once she’d gotten outside, Ms. Rodríguez burst into tears. “We had crossed 10 countries and to go through so much and receive a warm welcome,” she told me through a Spanish interpreter.

Like many Venezuelans, the Rodríguezes tried living elsewhere in Latin America after fleeing the economic collapse in their home country in 2019. The first stop was Colombia, but between Covid and discrimination against Venezuelans, they couldn’t enroll their children in public school. After a year and a half of the children at home, they left for Peru, where they’d heard the schools were good. But Peru seemed to be going the way of the rest of the region: economic instability, state violence, a (failed) presidential coup.

Keymar kept having to be hospitalized for asthma. With Mr. Rodríguez away on the fishing boat where he’d found work, Ms. Rodríguez had no one to watch the boys. In September 2023, they made the difficult decision to head to the United States, where Ms. Rodríguez has two brothers living in Brooklyn, to apply for asylum.

The trip took nearly three harrowing months. The Mexican police strip-searched the whole family looking for hidden money; Ms. Rodríguez had braided their few pesos into Keymar’s long black hair. At every security checkpoint, police shook them down. In the Darien Gap, a masked man put a gun to Kenny’s head and forced the family into a column of migrants heading up a mountain where, word traveled down the line, gun-toting gang members were demanding phones, cash and sometimes women’s bodies. They escaped only when Mr. Rodríguez, who worked in the military in Venezuela, spotted a trail leading another way and told his family to run.

When they finally got to Texas, Ms. Rodríguez’s family sent them plane tickets to New York City to spare them from the bus ride promised by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. They were joining the 198,000 migrants who have arrived in New York City over the past two years. Although they no longer had to fear for their lives, they were still on the move. Owing to New York City’s 60 day-limit on shelter stays for families, they would be evicted from Hall Street in no time. (By the end of April, the city had evicted almost 10,000 families, affecting nearly 18,000 children, according to an investigation by the New York City comptroller’s office.)

The couple was eager to get out of the shelter, but they couldn’t afford a place to stay until they started working. And they couldn’t work until they got permits, which they couldn’t apply for until 150 days after an appointment with the immigration office about their asylum claim. And they couldn’t book that appointment because all the slots were full.

P.S. 46 was the closest thing the Rodríguezes had found to actual sanctuary in the sanctuary city of New York since their arrival. Unlike the bureaucratic rigmarole required for housing, asylum, work eligibility, medical care or transportation, education is relatively straightforward. Following a 1982 Supreme Court ruling in a case out of Texas called Plyler v. Doe, no child can be turned away from any public school in the United States because of their immigration status. In sanctuary cities like Chicago and Denver, enrollment of asylum seekers has also surged since 2022. That was when Governor Abbott started sending migrants north as part of an attempt to turn the influx of undocumented migrants crossing the border into Texas into a national issue — and a political liability for Democrats.

Some Republicans would take away the safe harbor of schools from asylum-seeking families. Governor Abbott has suggested that if Roe can be overturned, why not Doe? Last year a Texas state senator introduced a bill that would get that process started if the federal government didn’t fund the additional students. Separately, the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a second Trump term, has laid out a strategy to send the Doe decision back to the Supreme Court. Repealing the decision would not only change decades of understanding of what it means to be a “public school,” it could turn educators into Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who must police their students’ immigration status.

While former President Donald Trump has been publicly maligning migrants since he began campaigning for the 2016 election, New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, has joined the chorus, bemoaning as recently as late May being “stuck with housing over 198,000 migrants and asylum seekers, over 38,000 children, all on taxpayers’ dime.”

New York City spent $22 million, — less than 1 percent of its $31 billion education budget — on the approximately 20,000 migrant students who enrolled in its public schools last year. The funding allocated to migrant students was even less this year, although they now make up nearly 4 percent of the public school population. Already those learning English in the city’s public schools don’t receive their required language instruction, according to a district coordinator of multilingual services. And similar stories are playing out in cities around the country: in some cases, bilingual programs in Chicago public schools, for example, lack bilingual teachers in core academic subjects, according to a recent investigation by Block Club Chicago and Chalkbeat Chicago.

Schools are an essential lifeline for migrant children: They clothe them, feed them twice a day and keep them safe, in addition to educating them. They’re also a way of grounding the children and their families in the community when everything else — the language, the city, the culture, the people — is brand-new.

That’s a tremendous amount of pressure to put on schools and neither the City Department of Education, Mayor Adams, the shelter system nor the federal government is making it easier. Schools are living up to the ideal of the sanctuary city, even as the city fails to do so. Educator after educator told me the same thing: These are our kids now and we’ll care for them like we care for all our children.

No Idea They Were Coming

It was the first week of January when the students started arriving at P.S. 46 from the shelter. The principal, Alex Braverman, had no idea they were coming. By the second week, over a dozen more had arrived, including Andrés and Keymar Rodríguez. Mr. Braverman organized a welcome breakfast and picked up two dozen bagels. So many families showed up, they had to move it from his office to the teachers’ lounge.

Yes, the arrivals were overwhelming at first, but they were also good news. At P.S. 46, each grade has a general education class and a Spanish dual-language class. For the past few years, however, there haven’t been enough native Spanish speakers to maintain the dual- language classes, and Mr. Braverman had to combine grades: second with third and fourth with fifth. Between January and March, 70 new students enrolled, and some dual-language class sizes doubled.

Over the past two years, an estimated 38,000 migrant students have enrolled in New York City public schools, reversing years of steep declines in their population. Many schools receiving these students are already serving some of the city’s most vulnerable children. P.S. 46 tells the story: 92 percent of its students are Black and brown, 87 percent are low-income, and 15 percent are homeless.

As Fort Greene gentrified, some of the Spanish-speaking families who had been sending their children to school in the area were displaced or moved away, and the new residents in the school’s zone were choosing other public or private schools. Over the last decade, grades K-5 at P.S. 46 lost half their enrollment; only about 180 students remained at the start of the 2023-24 school year — until the migrant families arrived. By one measure used by school officials, P.S. 46 was among the top 10 recipients of new arrivals in the entire New York City school system.

But the city sets school budgets according to enrollment numbers in the fall. Still, the district secured Mr. Braverman some laptops for the new students and hand-held translation devices for non-Spanish-speaking teachers and staff to communicate with the new parents. The school also received some money designated for homeless students, most of which Mr. Braverman put toward after-school programs to give the newcomers extra academic and English language support. He also received funding to add one paraprofessional. But though his student population increased by nearly a third, the school had to manage with its existing number of teachers and the help of its parents and caregivers.

The families needed everything. Ms. Ocasio organized food and clothing distributions, helped families sign up for health insurance and city identification cards, and printed out maps because they were walking everywhere and didn’t have phones with data to use for directions. Helping others is in her blood. From a family who arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in the 1950s, she grew up watching her grandmother explain government benefits and translate documents for the Ecuadoreans and Mexicans who streamed into their Bushwick neighborhood in the late 1990s.

Two of Ms. Ocasio’s daughters attended P.S. 46 this year: Junie, in first grade, and Olive, in kindergarten. The new students were their classmates, which Junie pointed out on their walk home one day when she recognized a girl with a family holding a sign asking for money for food. The shelter meals were terrible and were making some of the children sick. Ms. Ocasio bought the family a bucket of chicken. Afterward, Junie said, “But Mommy, you can’t buy all my friends buckets of chicken.” Ms. Ocasio had been homeless herself and lived in a shelter when her daughters were little. After nine years on a waiting list, she secured an apartment in Whitman Houses, the public housing complex zoned for P.S. 46. No, she couldn’t buy everyone dinner, but she could help the asylum seekers access the benefits they were entitled to.

Not everyone was so welcoming. Last month, after a series of dust-ups in the neighborhood over complaints of panhandling, loitering and trash, more than 200 angry residents packed a town hall about the Hall Street shelter complex where the Rodríguezes were placed. With nearly 1,000 family members and 3,000 single people, it is currently the largest concentration of migrants seeking asylum in New York City. Most of the speakers’ ire was directed toward elected officials about the number of migrants being housed, but some neighbors shared ways to support the new arrivals. The overwhelming message, though, was that the migrants were burdening the neighborhood, and residents wanted them gone.

But that has not been the sentiment of the families whose children were already at P.S. 46, although they are part of the community that’s most directly affected by the newcomers. As stabilizing as schools can be for the new arrivals, the influx — especially in the middle of the year — of so many students with complex needs, often considerable trauma and little prior schooling can also be very destabilizing for the school communities they join.

The Rodríguezes were aware of the pressure that the asylum seekers were putting on the school, and the city, and were surprised by how supportive the parents continued to be. Mr. Rodríguez was eager to help. He volunteered at food distributions. He learned to navigate the city’s online scheduling system and began securing appointments, which are required, for other migrants to get city identification cards known as NYC ID. When new families arrived at the shelter, he acted as a liaison with a local mutual aid group to secure coats and shoes in the sizes they needed. If the Rodríguezes stayed at the school, Ms. Ocasio knew she wanted to recruit Mr. Rodríguez for the P.T.A. In many ways, meeting the asylum seekers’ material needs was the easy part.

‘I Wish I Could Focus on Educating the Children’

On a Tuesday in mid-February, some of the new second graders knelt on a rug decorated with the seven continents and tried to sound out words. Rag. Lag. Bag. Their English-speaking counterparts sat at tables quietly reading chapter books, one of them absorbed in a thick novel. Later, during a math lesson on “grouping,” the Rodriguezes’ youngest child, Andrés, went to the whiteboard. He’d learned the addition-strategy at his school in Peru. His classmates applauded and, imitating the other kids, he did a victory dance in the universal language of the Fortnite computer game.

After lunch, Mr. Braverman came by with invitations to a celebration for students who had been at school 90 percent of the time during the previous month. Not only does consistent attendance affect all children’s ability to learn, but it’s also a key metric used by school districts and prospective parents to judge a school’s quality. P.S. 46’s attendance had been taking a hit because the new arrivals were often sick or had appointments. Germs passed quickly in the shelter.

A few minutes later, Andrés’s teacher led the little boy into the hall. He was sobbing. Some native-English classmates sitting on the hall floor decoding a story asked gently, “Qué paso, Andrés?” But he waved them away. The Spanish-speaking school guidance counselor later coaxed the reason from him: It was the attendance party. Andrés believed that he hadn’t been invited because he missed two days of school when his family went to get their NYC IDs. The first time the clerk rejected their application because Kenny’s birth certificate had gotten wet in the jungle and torn slightly.

For teachers, attending to their charges’ emotional well-being, especially as the effects of trauma began to surface for the migrant kids, was challenging enough. But the juggling required to teach 30-some students whose skills ranged from not knowing how to write their names to reading novels, from learning basic numbers to doing division — all in two different languages — was incredibly daunting.

For one dual-language teacher in Brooklyn, filling out her class with the new arrivals started out well. Her class size doubled, to 28 pupils from 14. After a couple of weeks, the new students began to talk in morning circle about how beautiful the beaches were in Peru and all the stars they could see at night. Native English speakers learned new vocabulary words and about different countries and how people made difficult journeys to get here. The details slipped out at unexpected times. On a visit to a museum, one child saw a jaguar and said, “That’s the type of animal I saw in the jungle.” By the beginning of March, after six weeks together, the dual-language teacher said she was beginning to get a handle on the needs of different students.

Then the shelter evictions began.

A student would disappear one day and reappear three weeks later. More students arrived. At pickup time, the teacher struggled to keep track of which child belonged to whom. She started losing sleep. “I’m feeling like I can’t take it anymore,” the teacher told me. “I wish I could focus on educating the children, but I can’t.” There was talk of getting her help in the classroom, but she didn’t see that happening.

The Eviction Treadmill

On March 2, when the Rodríguezes were evicted, it was pouring rain. They dragged their suitcases along Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill, a beautiful leafy street lined with 19th- century mansions. Mr. Rodríguez took his wife’s hand. He still has the erect posture and watchfulness of his military days, while she has a softness that belies their life experience. They reminisced about walking through a torrential rainstorm in Mexico.

On the train, Keymar clutched a key chain, a gift from a friend at the shelter to remember her by, as she and Andrés knelt on the seats and watched the stations pass. “Are we still in Brooklyn?” Keymar asked. “No, Manhattan,” the interpreter said. “No,” the kids cried. Andrés’s eyes swelled with tears. “They think they’re leaving the school,” Ms. Rodríguez said. They had promised the kids they could remain there, but it depended on where they were placed next.

The family stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, the city’s central processing site for migrants, for a week and a half while they waited for another shelter assignment. Homeless students are entitled to busing or free MetroCards to get to school. Busing can be hard to set up and the office for student transportation was experiencing MetroCard shortages. The family couldn’t afford $29 in fares to and from P.S. 46 for each child, each week, and couldn’t risk getting caught if they tried to ride without paying, so the kids didn’t go to school. On the plus side, Mr. Rodríguez consulted with an immigration lawyer while at the Roosevelt.

One of the case managers at the Roosevelt went through the family’s paperwork and told Ms. Rodríguez to return with her husband and she could place them in a shelter run by the Department of Homeless Services, which was not subject to the 60-day eviction rule. But Mr. Rodríguez had taken the subway back to Hall Street, to see if their NYC IDs had arrived in the mail. His wife kept calling to hurry him back, but there was another rainstorm; the subways were delayed. By the time he returned, the shift had changed, and the new case manager wouldn’t accept a notarized copy of their civil union document as proof of their marriage. Another family got the permanent shelter spot.

The Rodríguezes’ new placement, at a hotel-style shelter in East New York, Brooklyn, was about an hour’s commute to P.S. 46. The kids started going again, all using the MetroCard Kenny’s school had managed to secure for him. When I asked them about returning to school, they lit up. Keymar and Andrés were learning some English, going on field trips and making friends. Kenny borrowed my computer to log onto his middle school’s online grading system to show me his math grade: 100. Ms. Rodríguez’s brothers lived near their new shelter, and the families ate dinner at their house, so the Rodríguezes got a break from shelter meals. The food there came frozen and there were only two microwaves, one of which didn’t really work, for 100 people. They would be evicted again on May 9, just a little over two months since they had to leave Hall Street.

It Can’t Go On Like This

Some P.S. 46 parents whose children had been in the dual-language program since the beginning of the year were growing concerned about the effect of increased class sizes and constant comings-and-goings on the teachers’ ability to teach. Granted, if the school could hold onto the newcomers, there would be more funding next year for an assistant principal or another teacher. But would the teachers make it to next year? Heather Brodie, who had sons in 3K and first grade, had heard a few of them commenting, “It can’t go on like this.”

At a P.T.A. meeting on Zoom in March, parents pressed Mr. Braverman in the chat to do something. “It was the first time at P.S. 46 that a P.T.A. meeting has ever been anything other than, like, ‘OK, let’s do a movie night,’” said Ms. Brodie. She was more concerned about the teachers than about the effect the situation was having on her older son’s class. He was reading above grade level, his Spanish had improved considerably, and he loved the new kids. But that wasn’t the case for everyone.

Ms. Ocasio’s daughter Junie was struggling to learn to read. Her Strategic Reading Group, a cornerstone of the city’s new literacy curriculum, had 14 students, instead of the recommended five or six. Ms. Ocasio’s third daughter is autistic and requires an enormous amount of attention at home so she didn’t have time to help Junie herself. She’d recently taken a new job as a program director for El Puente, a human rights and youth leadership organization, which gave her more freedom to speak her mind. “It’s not that I want the kids separate,” Ms. Ocasio told me. “I want the school to support the teachers for what they need.”

Through some creative scheduling of existing staff and a substitute teacher, Mr. Braverman managed by early April to open another classroom for second- and third-grade Spanish-speaking students who needed more support. That took the pressure off some classes that had gotten many more students. But it was a temporary solution. The school will need to hire a new bilingual teacher for next year, and there has been a shortage of bilingual and English as a new language teachers across the nation.

If P.S. 46 does hire new staff and doesn’t hold onto enough newcomers — and given how transitory migrant families are forced to be, who knows what will happen — the school could be put into the position of having to pay back to the City Department of Education hundreds of thousands of dollars, which could mean reducing staff.

Already P.S. 46 has lost students from its early-childhood program. Historically, those classrooms were the one area where local white and more affluent families were willing to give PS 46 a chance. They might even keep their kids enrolled through fifth grade — though that is less likely. Nearby, a new Montessori public school just opened. Cynthia McKnight, the president of the district’s community education council (New York City’s version of a school board), ventured that the negative feelings in the neighborhood about the influx of migrants discouraged parents who might have previously considered P.S. 46.

P.S. 46’s attendance rates and state test scores on school review sites like Niche or Inside Schools, where parents of prospective students seek out information, include no asterisks to explain the special circumstances: all the missed school because of evictions, transportation issues and illnesses from congregate living and poor-quality food; how some students sat for state math tests in May even though they did not join P.S. 46 until January; or the impact on the other students in the class while their teacher tended to children who had been through months or maybe years of trauma.

The compassion, resilience and grit that everyone in the P.S. 46 community displayed this year won’t be found in those statistics.

A Wedding and Another Eviction

A week before their second eviction, the Rodríguezes got married, again. They knew it would be helpful for their asylum case and perhaps for their shelter placement, but they also married for themselves, their children and their families, to celebrate the next chapter of their lives.

The morning ceremony took place at Brooklyn Borough Hall with some of Ms. Rodríguez’s family members present and more relatives in Texas and Venezuela watching on Zoom. The evening reception was held at her brother’s apartment, a small, newly renovated three- bedroom in East New York. In the afternoon, Ms. Rodríguez, who ran a breakfast spot in Venezuela, cooked dozens of empanadas and trays of lasagna, and her sister-in-law made individual servings of tres leches cake for the dessert display.

Everyone was dressed to the nines with pressed hair, freshly polished nails and strappy high heels that would come off before the night was over. The family danced to salsa, drank rum and Cokes and toasted to the couple’s future with champagne. Mary Lauri’s siblings’ lives offered a vision of what hers might hold. Her two brothers had been in New York City for three years and worked as welders for a small steel fabricator in Brooklyn. Ms. Rodríguez’s sisters-in-law cleaned rooms for a hotel in Manhattan. They had created stability for themselves and their families. She promised the party would last all weekend. Indeed, dinner wasn’t served until midnight. There was the sense that the Rodríguezes should grab every bit of happiness they could, because it was going to have to last them for a while.

A few days later, the family lugged their suitcases on the subway back to the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan only to be sent to the Hall Street shelter where they’d started months ago. The Roosevelt had no room. Unbeknown to the Rodríguez family, the placement guide used by case managers specifically omits the permanent shelter housing run by the Department of Homeless Services as an option for families with children in kindergarten through sixth grade, perhaps to deter those who have been evicted before from continuing to reapply in hopes of getting something better.

When Mr. Rodríguez and I caught up on the phone in early June, his voice sounded weak and scratchy. He had a sore throat and cough, but he hadn’t been able to see a doctor. The shelter felt more crowded now. There were long lines for the bathroom. The children were often late to school and they were crying more. The family’s third eviction was scheduled for mid-August.

They were considering moving to Philadelphia because it was more affordable. They’d finally had their asylum appointment, which had gone well, and they could return to New York City for future appointments if they had to.

Mr. Rodríguez told me he might have felt more hopeful about staying in New York if they’d received placement in one of the permanent shelters. I pointed out that the shelter evictions are serving their purpose if he leaves town, but he is quick to defend New York City as a sanctuary city. It had helped the family gain a foothold in the country to start planning their next steps. P.S. 46 had made Keymar and Andrés, and the rest of the family feel genuinely welcomed.

It was now the end of the school year. Keymar would miss her teacher. Andrés would miss his classmates, who treated him so kindly, except for the boy who called him poor. The kids had gone bowling for the first time. Keymar was chosen among all the girls to sing the Spanish part of the song “This is Me” from “The Greatest Showman” for the Broadway Showcase.

“I’m not scared to be seen. I make no apologies, this is me”

At first, she was very nervous. Her friend Allison, standing next to her, glanced over. Keymar took Allison’s hand. Her fear went away. Everyone said she sang beautifully.

Bliss Broyard is the author of “One Drop” and is working on a book about gentrification and integration in Brooklyn.

Mariana Martínez Barba contributed reporting and interpretation.