Susan Mayes-Smith

Why a Principal Supports the Path to Citizenship - Susan Mayes-Smith

I am Susan Mayes-Smith, Principal of Truckee Meadows Community College High School.  I have been an educator in theWashoe County School District for the past 22 years, with many years spent at the elementary or middle school levels. I have been personally motivated to assist a number of undocumented mothers with U.S. citizen children find a way to gain legal status, with or without the hope of ever becoming a US citizen.  

In some cases I was successful as I sought out immigration lawyers and found legal loopholes.  At best, mothers were awarded a legal work permit that had to be renewed on a regular basis.   Even so, the work permit is merely a short term band-aid for our U.S. citizen children. 

Research by Family Unity, Family Health Coalition, shows that many of the 4.5 million children in the US with one or both parents undocumented, suffer from anxiety and fear of losing a parent to deportation or have already experienced separation from one or both parents who have been deported. 

The study addresses the impact of fear, anxiety and grief on families, health care systems and schools across the nation.  In 2012, there were nearly 100,000 removals from families with US citizen children, with devastating impact on those children affected by those removals.

I shudder to imagine children living through the horror of seeing immigration authorities storm a child’s home and take away his mommy or daddy or both, and then to be left with an aunt, a cousin or and adult sibling to care for them.   It happens over and over. 

It breaks my heart that some parents, threatened by the broken immigration system, decide to self-deport hoping for a future chance to re-enter the country legally. They pack up their US citizen children to move in with strangers in a strange country and enroll in a strange school without any of the educational opportunities a US citizen has right to.

A Pathway to Citizenship for parents of Washoe County School Children, and all our nation’s children, will contribute to healthy, happy families.  And children will have a better educational experience if their parents could become more engaged in their children’s education if they didn’t feel as though they had to be looking over their shoulder at every turn for the authorities who can separate them from their loved ones.

I firmly support a Path to Citizenship.