Superintendent Steve Joel had reason to be concerned when he got a call from the police chief telling him that federal immigration authorities were coming to the local Swift & Company meat-packing plant to round up undocumented workers as part of a six-state raid. Of the 8,000 students in the Grand Island School District in Central Nebraska, some 1,100 had parents working at Swift. The raids underscored how seemingly tangential issues--issues of immigration, employment, housing, health care, even issues of foreign policy--can impact the lives of educators and their students. By 2006 there were at least 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States and, among them, some 5 million children to teach. After describing the aftermath of the Swift & Company raids, the author discusses the crisis in education faced by these children, and describes the roots of the achievement gap between Hispanic students and their white counterparts.