AURORA, Colo. – When Alisson Ramirez started seventh grade at her first American school and took classes taught entirely in English, Alisson Ramirez prepared herself for rejection and months of feeling lost.
“I was nervous that people would ask me things and I wouldn’t know what to answer,” the Venezuelan teen said. “And I would be embarrassed if I answered in Spanish.”
But it wasn’t quite what she expected. On her first day at Colorado’s Aurora Public Schools in August, many of her teachers translated their classes’ relevant vocabulary into Spanish and handed out written instructions in Spanish. One promised to study more Spanish to better support Alisson.
“That made me feel better,” says Alisson, 13.
Outside the classrooms it’s a different story. While that school system aims to accommodate more than 3,000 new students, mostly from Venezuela and Colombia, the city government has taken the opposite approach. The city council has tried to deter Venezuelan immigrants from moving to Aurora by promising not to spend money helping newcomers. Officials plan to investigate the nonprofits that helped migrants settle in the Denver suburb.
When Aurora’s mayor spread baseless claims that Venezuelan gangs were taking over an apartment complex there, former president and current Republican candidate Donald Trump increased the claims at his campaign rallies, calling Aurora a “war zone.” Immigrants are “poisoning” schools in Aurora and elsewhere with disease, he said.
Trump has promised that Aurora, population 400,000, will be one of the first places he launches his program to deport migrants if elected.
This is life as a newcomer in the United States in 2024, home to the “American dream” and conflicting ideas about who can achieve it. Migrants arriving in this polarized country are stunned by the divisions.
One thing seemed clear to Alisson’s mother, Maria Angel Torres, 43, as she passes through Aurora and nearby Denver looking for work or running errands: While some organizations and churches are eager to help, some people are deeply afraid of her and her family. ,
The fear first became apparent during a routine trip to the supermarket. Torres was standing in line when she got a little too close to the young woman in front of her. The woman — a teenager who spoke Spanish with an American accent — told Torres to keep her distance.
“It was humiliating,” Torres said.
And when Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman — and then Trump — started talking about Venezuelan gangs taking over Aurora, Torres didn’t believe it. But keeping dangerous people out is important to her. The whole reason her family left Venezuela was to escape lawlessness and violence. They didn’t want it to follow them here.
In addition to Alisson, Torres has an older daughter – Gabriela Ramirez, 27 – whose partner owned a food truck in Venezuela. Government employees there extorted bribes from him. He paid them the equivalent of $500, about half a week’s wages, to continue working.
When Ramirez’s partner later refused to pay, the government employees stabbed him in the bicep and threatened to kill Ramirez and her young son. He sold the company and the family all fled to Colombia.
Just over two years later, they headed north through the Darién Gap on foot. In Mexico, they crossed the border in Juarez and turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol. They will all have deportation hearings in 2025, where they will have the opportunity to argue their asylum case.
Torres and her daughter tried to get their children into school shortly after arriving in Aurora in February, but they were confused by vaccination requirements. Alisson and Dylan stayed home for months. Dylan played math or first-person shooter games. Alisson watched craft videos on TikTok.
Aurora is used to educating immigrant children. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, more than a third of residents speak a language other than English at home.
But the arrival of so many students from Venezuela and Colombia who did not speak English caught some Aurora schools by surprise. Teachers at some schools have as many as ten newcomers, or a third of their class roster.
When Marcella Garcia, principal of Aurora Hills Middle School, visited classrooms where only English was spoken, she noticed that the newcomers were not talking. The district’s central office recommended a strategy called “translanguaging.” That means using Spanish occasionally to help students make meaning of the English lessons and the conversations happening around them.
Before the school adopted this new approach, teachers may have stopped student conversation in Spanish. Now they say students are encouraged to help each other in whatever language they can.
As teachers try out new Spanish vocabulary, English-speaking students show varying responses. Some seem bored or irritated. Bilingual students seem proud when they can help teachers use more Spanish in the classroom.
Still, some English-speaking and bilingual students have harassed Alisson. A few weeks after school started, a group of boys tried to keep her from sitting in her seat in class. They called her ugly and told her to go back to her country.
In mid-September, Alisson’s mother received messages from Aurora Public Schools that there had been rumors of bomb threats at their schools. It is not clear whether the threats were related to Trump’s rhetoric about the takeover of Aurora by Venezuelan gangs. Similar issues arose after his false comments about pet-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
Neither Alisson nor her mother understand how American schools and children could become targets based on rumors.
“This doesn’t happen in my country,” Torres said.
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