From Sanctuary Promises to Praxis: Educator and Community Resistance to Raciolinguistic Profiling in Multilingual Spaces

• In Event: Speaking Truth to Cacophony: Raciolinguistic Frameworks as Resistance to a Renewed Onslaught of Racist Policy

Abstract

OBJECTIVES

This paper examines the lived responses and resistance strategies of educators, students, and immigrant community members amidst intensified federal immigration enforcement and raciolinguistic surveillance. It builds upon previous policy analysis to explore how multilingual school and community actors negotiate increased raciolinguistic profiling during immigration enforcement and how they co-construct spaces of resistance and refuge through grassroots praxis. The study aims to document the emerging pedagogies, coalitions, and narratives that disrupt current ideologies equating non-English language use with criminality and illegality.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

This research is grounded in raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), borderland epistemologies (Anzaldúa, 1987), and critical sanctuary studies (Alvear Moreno, 2024). These frameworks illuminate how language, race, and power intersect to mark multilingual bodies as suspect, while also highlighting the transformative potential of counter-practices rooted in community care, narrative resistance, and translingual solidarity. The work also engages intersectional analyses of minoritized belonging and stress (Crenshaw, 1989) and educator agency in contexts of structural constraint.

METHODS

Using qualitative case study and narrative inquiry methods, the paper draws on a series of semi-structured interviews, field notes, and policy artifacts collected during the academic year from New York State school districts. Participants include bilingual educators, school administrators, students, and local community organizers.

DATA SOURCES

Primary data include interview transcripts with 10 stakeholders, school district documents on sanctuary policy implementation, local news and social media posts responding to ICE activity, and school-based communications about immigrant student protections. Visual artifacts such as protest signage, bilingual school posters, and community safety guides are also included as multimodal data sources. Public data from advocacy groups further contextualize the narratives.

RESULTS

Findings reveal that raciolinguistic surveillance manifests through both overt enforcement (e.g., ICE raids) and covert institutional practices (e.g., silence about sanctuary protocols). Yet, these structures are not uncontested. Educators and a few school districts engage in “quiet defiance” by circulating know-your-rights materials in multiple languages and providing remote learning opportunities for those afraid to report to school in-person. Students and families co-create safety protocols, host community healing circles, and strategically “code-switch” to navigate public spaces. These acts—while small in scale—constitute powerful disruptions of criminalizing narratives and illuminate the possibility of sanctuary not as a static policy, but as relational, situated praxis.

SIGNIFICANCE

This study contributes to the field by shifting the focus from the promises of sanctuary policies to the lived practices that resist its erosion. It offers a critical lens on how raciolinguistic ideologies operate within educational institutions while also centering the grassroots strategies that reclaim multilingualism as a site of dignity, resistance, and justice. By documenting how raciolingusitic surveillance is negotiated and how communities are resisting on the ground, this work provides insight into the evolving terrain of racial justice in multilingual education.

Author

• Jordan Gonzalez, St. John's University