With the threat by President Donald Trump’s administration to target Chicago for mass deportation, public school officials are telling parents without legal status that their children are safe from immigration agents inside their classrooms.

“Under no circumstance are we ever going to compromise our children — whether it is this issue around immigration or something else,” Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said. Students return to class Wednesday for the first time since Trump was inaugurated.

If federal officers show up at their school, principals have been told they should not let them engage with anyone, except on the rare occasion that they have a signed criminal arrest warrant, Martinez said. CPS does not allow immigration agents into schools without a warrant.

CPS also has three lawyers at the ready to review any warrants or other paperwork and to advise staff, Martinez said.

Whether federal agents are allowed in school is one of the big questions parents without legal status might have. Here are a few others:

Should I send my children to school?

There is no one way to answer this question, but officials stress that once they’re inside schools, students are safe.

Schools don’t ask for, and don’t know, the legal status of their students. As a result, there’s no possibility that they could or would provide a list of students to federal authorities.

“We'll never give them access to information,” Martinez said.

There is still a risk traveling to and from school. Community advocates stress that drivers should make sure law enforcement has no reason to stop them by keeping their cars in good repair and having all necessary stickers.

Teachers should be “very, very aware and be very empathetic of the fears that parents have,” Martinez said. They also should be understanding if parents do not feel comfortable sending their children to school, just as they should be understanding of other absent students, Martinez added. But he is not considering allowing them to switch to remote schooling, as many students fell behind during the pandemic’s virtual classes.

How should parents without legal status prepare for the possibility of deportation?

Parents should make sure their emergency contacts at their child’s school are up to date — and that the contacts are aware and that they will be available.

“Let’s say I get stopped and detained. Who will pick up my kids? Who can I trust with my kids? That is the biggest fear, what makes their stomach hurt,” said Any Huamani, who works for the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council and has been leading “Know Your Rights” sessions around the city.

In addition to that initial call, Huamani said parents really need to think through who is the right person to put in charge of their children in case they are detained for a period of time.

What should I tell my children about the deportation threat?

“You want to be able to tell them, ‘We’re going to do everything we can to keep you safe, but we want you to know, if we can’t be here, that so-and-so is going to take care of you, and they’re going to make sure that you and I can reunite at the soonest availability,’ ” said Rebecca Ford-Paz, clinical child psychologist and co-director of the Forensic Assessment for Immigration Relief Clinic at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

“So, we want to make sure that children already get that reassurance.”

That’s why the emergency plan should be in place before talking to children, she said.

Especially for older children, it is best for them to hear about it from parents first.

Ford-Paz also said it is important not to isolate.

“We want kids to continue to be able to go to school and play and see their friends and celebrate cultural tradition,” she said. “That is the kind of thing that promotes a sense of calm and peace and equilibrium, even in the face of chaos.”

While parents can do their part, schools also can help. Many schools have affinity groups for immigrants where children can go so they don’t feel so alone. Social workers can connect parents with other resources in the community.

Ford-Paz stressed that, like educators, health care providers don’t know and won’t divulge people’s legal status. While Trump may change this, for now, federal immigration agents cannot go into hospitals and clinics and arrest people without a criminal warrant.

Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ. Follow her on X @WBEZeducation and @sskedreporter.

The recent announced tariffs were computed using a formula that is almost universally viewed by economists as making no sense:

Now we discover that even if you think this formula does make sense, the specific calculations were based on the wrong elasticity estimate.  The following is from an AEI report by Kevin Corinth and Stan Veuger:

The idea is that as tariffs rise, the change in the trade deficit will depend on the responsiveness of import demand to tariffs, which depends on how import demand responds to import prices and how import prices respond to tariffs. The Trump Administration assumes an elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices of four, and an elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs of 0.25, the product of which is one and is the reason they cancel out in the Administration’s formula.

However, the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs should be about one (actually 0.945), not 0.25 as the Trump Administration states. Their mistake is that they base the elasticity on the response of retail prices to tariffs, as opposed to import prices as they should have done. The article they cite by Alberto Cavallo and his coauthors makes this distinction clear. The authors state that “tariffs [are] passed through almost fully to US import prices,” while finding “more mixed evidence regarding retail price increases.” It is inconsistent to multiply the elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices by the elasticity of retail prices with respect to tariffs.

Correcting the Trump Administration’s error would reduce the tariffs assumed to be applied by each country to the United States to about a fourth of their stated level, and as a result, cut the tariffs announced by President Trump on Wednesday by the same fraction, subject to the 10 percent tariff floor. As shown in Table 1, the tariff rate would not exceed 14 percent for any country. For all but a few countries, the tariff would be exactly 10 percent, the floor imposed by the Trump Administration.

The Cavallo study was gated, but a tweet by Cavallo seems to confirm their interpretation:

Unless I’m mistaken, the stock market briefly rose at the beginning of the tariff announcement, as it looked at first like there’d be a uniform 10% tariff on all countries (which would have been a relief to the markets).  Stocks then crashed when it became clear that our major trading partners would face far higher rates.  Thus it looks like $5.4 trillion in wealth was destroyed by a math error by a low-level government official.  (To be clear, there are many other problems with the formula, but this mistake is especially significant.)

Of course it is likely that the administration had already decided on high tariffs, and this equation was reverse engineered to provide cover.  Nonetheless, this equation was used to compute the specific rates for each country, and thus probably explains why the EU was hit with a 20% tariff, China with a 34% tariff, and Vietnam with a 46% tariff.  Mistakes do have consequences!

All this reminds me a bit of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when grown-up experts were banished to the countryside and important parts of the economy were turned over to students.  

You might argue that anyone can make a math error, and that’s true.  But in an administration that includes skilled economists, it is more likely that someone will catch the error, especially when the final results look “fishy”.  To be fair, even the previous administration fell short in this area.  Larry Summers warned the Biden people that excessive fiscal and monetary expansion could lead to high inflation.  The current administration seems even more anti-elite than the Biden administration, and is especially hostile to the views of economists.  Most talented people have either left the government or are laying low to avoid involvement in the current mess.

The administration now has three options:

1. They can admit that the wrong figure was used, and correct the tariffs.
2. They can admit that the wrong figure was used, and also admit that the formula was not the actual justification for the tariffs.  In other words, they can admit that they lied.
3. They can deny that the wrong figure was used in the formula.

In the old days, choice #3 would have been unthinkable.  But we are in a new world.  Just a few weeks ago, the administration responded to the Signal chat scandal by claiming that the highly specific battle plans leaked to a reporter at The Atlantic did not constitute “classified information.” Yes, and the sky is green.

My wife lived through the Cultural Revolution.  She hoped that she was leaving all that behind when she moved to America.

PS.  When I think of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I often recall this scene from the 1994 Chinese film To Live:

Months later, during Fengxia’s childbirth, her parents and husband accompany her to the county hospital. All doctors have been sent to do hard labor for being over educated, and the students are left as the only ones in charge. Wan Erxi manages to find a doctor to oversee the birth, removing him from confinement, but he is very weak from starvation. Fugui purchases seven steamed buns (mantou) for him and the family decides to name the son Mantou, after the buns. However, Fengxia begins to hemorrhage, and the nurses panic, admitting that they do not know what to do. The family and nurses seek the advice of the doctor, but find that he has overeaten and is semiconscious. The family is helpless, and Fengxia dies from postpartum hemorrhage (severe blood loss).