Portland Grade School Says It Was Forced to Move Due to 'Unsafe' Tear Gas, Munitions from Neighboring ICE Facility By Sean Neumann

A Portland grade school says it’s relocating due to dangerous and violent conditions a local ICE facility has caused amid its aggressive responses to protesters outside their building.

The Cottonwood School, located in Portland, Ore., is calling its relocation an “emergency move,” according to an automated response PEOPLE received from a school official’s email account.

PEOPLE reached out to school administrators for the southwest Portland public charter school following reports from local KATU, KGW8, and KPTV, which first reported the decision to relocate amid responses from ICE agents against local protesters outside its facility.

“Cottonwood is currently in the process of an emergency move,” an email message from Laura Cartwright, the interim executive director of the Cottonwood School, read Friday, explaining that it could take multiple days to respond amid the school’s relocation efforts.

Cartwright told KATU earlier Friday that school officials decided to move the school out of concern for their students’ safety, as ICE agents continue using tear gas that neighbors have complained is both toxic and dangerous to the local community. 

The charter school’s interim executive director also explained that educators have also routinely found “munitions” on its playground outside.

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“In terms of our impact, we have been impacted mostly by chemical weapons that are being used against protesters in the vicinity of our school,” Cartwright told KATU. “So daily, we were finding munitions on our play yard, we were getting footage in the evenings of green gases, and gases being used near our gardens and enveloping our area.”

The school official told KGW8 that Cottonwood moved to a school building owned by Bridges Middle School more than a mile away, which recently moved to a new building for an unrelated reason.

Cottonwood Schools teaches students between kindergarten and eighth grade, according to the outlet. Cartwright told KGW8 that school officials first noticed an uptick in violent clashes and the use of dangerous tear gas towards the end of the last school year, telling the outlet the school was “losing enrollment regularly” due to its proximity to the ICE facility.

“Our garden was enveloped in gases one evening and we started to think we might not be able to mediate this in the school year and open on time,” Cartwright explained to KGW8.

Cartwright told KPTV in another interview that the persistent issues stemming from the ICE agents were “making it unsafe for the future” of the school, which begins its next school year in two weeks as teachers are still moving in to its new location across town.

A spokesperson for ICE, whose deportation officers have fallen under widespread criticism in recent months for hiding their identities behind masks, did not respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.