In late January, tutors volunteering at Canopy Scholars, a popular service learning organization among Lakeside students that aims to provide “tutoring and STEM programs to a diverse population of Shoreline Elementary School students, prioritizing students participating in the National Student Lunch Program,” received an alarming email from Executive Director Lynn Newcombe. The email — which was also sent to all Canopy parents — stated that a Canopy mom had been stopped by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as she was pulling into her apartment building. The email also included instructions on what to do if approached by ICE.

Because the mother who was stopped that day didn’t speak English well and chose to stay anonymous due to safety concerns, Tatler was unable to interview the mother directly. However, Tatler received a recounted version of the story from Newcombe, who was given permission by the mother to share her story. 

According to Newcombe, on January 26 at noon, while the mother of a Canopy student (referred to as “Canopy mom” in this article) was driving home from a job interview, just before she could turn into her apartment building, an ICE agent stopped her in the street. They refused her request to pull over to prevent traffic blockage and asked where she was from. Newcombe recounted that at first, the Canopy mom said, “Ethiopia,” but then quickly added that she was a U.S. citizen. The ICE agent asked to see her passport — which, according to Newcombe, the Canopy mom brought for her job interview — so she rolled down the window about one inch and pushed the passport against the window glass. After providing evidence for her citizenship, she was subsequently released; however, Newcombe said, she sat in her car for the next few minutes so that agents wouldn’t see which building she walked into. 

Shortly after this incident, in February, according to Newcombe, ICE agents approached another Canopy mom while she was in her apartment complex. Despite adamant refusal from the manager, who repeatedly stated that the apartment was a private building, the agents pushed their way inside. They then wandered the halls and knocked on doors, but no residents responded. Although nobody was detained, Newcombe said that ICE agents entering private spaces was incredibly concerning to the Canopy community: “People feel safe once they’re in their building. But this was not safe.”

According to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington D.C., in a September 2025 ruling, the Supreme Court permitted ICE to use race, ethnicity, language, and occupation as valid criteria for stopping individuals. This practice is especially relevant to the Shoreline and Canopy communities — as Newcombe stated, “90% of the families that we work with … are from Eritrea and Ethiopia.” She added that dark-skinned parents who “had not felt targeted before suddenly realized … how much their skin color was causing the racial profiling that they hadn’t anticipated.”

Student tutors have echoed similar concerns. Newcombe recounted conversations with a Lakeside senior and former Canopy tutor, saying that his parents are worried for him and that he is now driving with a copy of his passport. She also cited efforts from Canopy staff to facilitate conversations with parents to teach their children how to drive while being dark-skinned: “This is how your hands should be. This is what you do,” she would tell them. “Make sure you don’t hand your documents to anyone. You don’t hand out your passport.” 

Shortly after Newcombe sent out the email to tutors, one tutor’s mom contacted her to let her know that her family was uneasy about tutoring if the security of the building could not be guaranteed. Newcombe quickly followed up, and contacted the Canopy board to make plans to secure Canopy’s building. “What can we do?” she remembered wondering. “We’re not like Lakeside, which has a perimeter fence. We don’t have an office where we can then hold people and lock a door behind us. All the things that make Lakeside, Shorewood, or any of the schools safe, we don’t have the capacity for.” 

With restrictions on time and resources, Newcombe said the Canopy board created a plan to keep their community safe during tutoring sessions. First, all doors are locked except the front door, which is the only point of entry and exit. The main door is heavily reinforced by adults, including Canopy leadership and a newly-formed ICE watch team “made of people who are volunteers from the local community who have had rapid response resistance training. They have whistles and know how to be respectful of distance, not touching an ICE officer, but talking to them or recording what they’re doing,” Newcombe said. Other than reinforcing the main door, these volunteers also watch the parking lots, make sure all parents enter and exit safely, and keep an eye out for ICE activity. While ICE has not come to Canopy’s main building specifically, these volunteers are trained to respond to ICE agents using “language from the [Shoreline] school district as far as their protocol in stopping any ICE activity on campus.” According to Policy 4300, Limiting Immigration Enforcement in Schools, Shoreline’s protocol includes verifying and recording the person’s credentials (including at least their name, agency, and badge number), recording names of all people they intend to contact, collecting the nature of the person’s business at school, logging the date and time, and requesting a copy of the court order or judicial warrant, which is then reviewed by a district official and/or legal counsel. 

Another part of the Canopy board’s plan to ensure the safety of all its community members is handing out “Know Your Rights” cards. They ordered these cards, downloaded them in Tigrinya and Amharic — the two main second languages that Canopy families speak — with the reverse side in English. This way, if a tutor or parent is confronted by an ICE agent, they could repeat these rights to them. However, Newcombe said that “the hard thing is ICE is not following any rules, and they’re pulling people who are citizens and anybody who’s got an accent. So, that’s the fear: that people will be targeted when they start to speak. Kids won’t have accents, but their parents might. That’s the scary part.” She cites an alternative to this, saying that people could hold these cards up to the window if approached by an ICE agent. 

Tatler also reached out to a Family Advocate from the Shoreline School District; however, they declined an interview, writing, “I have to pass on linking myself to anything ICE related. Getting into specifics gets a bit sensitive.” However, they provided a few resources for students who want to learn more about ICE, including Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network (WAISN) and Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP). These resources offer information, including “Know Your Rights” cards, Rapid Response training, and ICE activity updates. 

According to Newcombe, these physical encounters weren’t the first related to ICE concerns: in December 2025, a former Canopy tutor had to relocate due to worries about ICE. During the interview, that student requested that her name and current location remain private to protect the safety of her family. Tatler can, however, disclose that she is a current senior in high school and formerly attended Shorewood High School, less than 3 miles away from Lakeside’s campus. Her parents are Guatemalan immigrants who are in the process of attaining U.S. citizenship. 

According to her, though ICE activity started last July in the Shoreline community, it didn’t begin affecting her until last November. When her family began hearing stories of ICE activity in neighboring cities like Lynwood and Edmonds, she said they were very worried about being detained because “of what [they] look like and who [they] are.” 

One Thursday in November, their fear became much more real. Upon their return from a family trip, one of their neighbors informed them that ICE had taken her husband and several other neighbors on their way to work. When the neighbor’s husband pulled into the parking lot of Walgreens, “all of a sudden, there were agents banging on his door to open up. They broke his window down and took him out of the car,” the former Shorewood student said. Afterwards, she noted that ICE would frequently follow other residents and take them as they saw fit. 

“This was really impactful for me and my family because I’ve known these neighbors for my whole life. It was also [during] the time that my mom would always leave for work, so it was crazy for us to think that if we hadn’t planned that trip, my mom probably would’ve been taken too,” she said. 

According to the former Shorewood student, this period of time was terrifying for her family; her mother was a small business owner and her father traveled constantly for his job, but for a month, both were too scared to leave their apartment. Daily tasks like grocery shopping and buying supplies for her parents’ jobs laid squarely on the student’s shoulders. 

“I didn’t understand [the situation] at first,” she said. “I just found it annoying that I had to go out all the time, thinking that nothing’s going to happen. But looking back, I obviously didn’t understand the true extent of what was happening.”

Finally, in December 2025, her family made the difficult decision to move in the middle of her senior year to prioritize their safety. This decision didn’t come out of nowhere; the family was already planning to move after she graduated high school. However, the student said the increase in ICE activity alarmingly close to their neighborhood made them reevaluate their original plan, and they decided they “would rather I graduate somewhere else than [my parents] being taken and having to go back to Guatemala. We had some family friends who had heard about what had happened to our neighbors and asked us to move … to a safer location,” the student explained.

While Tatler will not share her family’s location, the former Shorewood student mentioned that the main reason she chose her current location was because of safety and connections. “The [place] we moved to, although we don’t know a lot of people, is a lot more closed-off … there’s almost no risk of ICE agents coming undetected.” As she elaborated, “the work acquaintances and family friends we did have up here were really understanding of our situation and wanted to help us out with everything that we went through. We also had this family resource center, and when they heard about our situation, they decided to help us out with a lot of financial stuff.”

After finishing the interview with Tatler, the former Shorewood student sent some additional context and information in a text message, reflecting, “My family was very lucky because we had people helping us out and resources during this super tough moment, but so many other families don’t have that when they go through these types of tragedies.” She mentioned her neighbor’s husband, who ended up spending three months in a Texas detention center and was deported in February 2026. Over these few months, the neighbor’s family put in a lot of time and resources to prevent the deportation, just to be told there was nothing they could do. Some of her other neighbors who had been detained alongside him decided to self-deport while others fought their case. 

“My senior year has been pretty rough with the halfway move, and I also have this embarrassment to talk about what happened. Even now, I’m not planning to tell people at my new school what happened. Although I obviously don’t owe it to them, I recognize that I shouldn’t be scared or embarrassed to talk about what happened to my family, but these are feelings that come up,” she wrote. She voiced her appreciation for people who speak out and spread awareness for those who can’t, such as the walkout on February 5. 

Newcombe echoed this, saying, “I hope that [schools] can have more honest conversations with their students. I talked with the Canopy student leadership team, and these students from both Lakeside and Shorewood said that their teachers weren’t really talking about this.” She added she strongly believes advisory groups at Lakeside are a great space to have these types of conversations.

UPDATED 3/12/26: This article was updated to correct a typo (“exit” replaced “exist”) and clarify that the person who followed up on the Canopy email was Newcombe.