Pro-ICE Comment Costs Teacher 14-Year Career

Envelope with YOURE FIRED and pointing finger.

A two-word Facebook comment was enough to end a 14-year teaching career in a school district where politics and parenting fears collide every day.

Quick Take

West Chicago District 33 accepted PE teacher James Heidorn’s resignation after backlash to his “GO ICE” Facebook comment.
The fight wasn’t only about speech; it became a referendum on trust in a school where most students come from Hispanic families.
District leaders framed the decision around disruption to learning, not politics, while critics framed it as student safety and trauma.
The case exposes a hard reality for educators: “off-duty” posts can become “on-campus” crises overnight.

How a Personal Post Became a Schoolwide Emergency

James Heidorn taught physical education at Gary Elementary in West Chicago District 33 for more than a decade. Then came the comment: “GO ICE,” posted from his personal Facebook account in reaction to news about local police cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Word traveled fast, and the district learned about the post on Jan. 22, 2026. Heidorn resigned, retracted the resignation the same day, and the district placed him on administrative leave while it investigated.

Parents and activists treated the post as a direct threat to a fragile sense of safety. Gary Elementary sits in a district where a large share of students are Hispanic, and families reported recent ICE activity affecting parents and children. That context matters: a teacher isn’t a random adult with an opinion; he’s a daily authority figure who supervises kids, enforces rules, and, in practice, substitutes for mom and dad for hours at a time.

Why “GO ICE”Hit Hard in a Predominantly Hispanic Community

Support for immigration enforcement sounds abstract until you live in a town where a traffic stop, a workplace visit, or a knock at the door can split a family. That fear showed up in public outrage, petitions, and calls for dismissal. Parents voiced concern that children could feel targeted or unsafe with a teacher cheering for an agency associated—rightly or wrongly—with raids and removals. The emotional logic was simple: a trusted adult’s public cheer can feel like a warning.

Heidorn’s defenders saw something else: an employee punished for a political view expressed off the clock. They argued that “GO ICE” reads as support for law enforcement doing its job, not a statement about specific children at Gary Elementary. That argument resonates with conservative common sense: the rule of law matters, and employees shouldn’t lose livelihoods because a loud crowd dislikes their viewpoint. The tension is real, because schools don’t operate like normal workplaces.

The District’s Rationale: Learning Disruption Becomes the Deciding Factor

District leaders emphasized a practical problem: the building couldn’t function normally. A listening session brought parents to the microphone, and some families kept children home in protest. Administrators also faced a basic duty of care: when families no longer trust staff, routine discipline, parent conferences, and even a scraped-knee visit to the nurse become politically charged. The board president stressed the district’s focus on minimizing disruption to learning rather than taking a partisan side.

That framing holds up better than vague claims about “values” or “harm,” because disruption is measurable. Attendance drops. Teachers lose instructional time. Staff spend days in meetings and investigations. When a school becomes a proxy battlefield for national immigration fights, children pay the price first. Conservative readers should still ask a hard question: did the district set a clear, viewpoint-neutral standard, or did it simply respond to pressure? The public record offered few policy specifics.

Resignation, Separation Terms, and the Career Cost

On Feb. 5, 2026, the school board accepted Heidorn’s resignation and approved a separation agreement. Reports indicated he would receive salary and benefits through the school year and a neutral reference—terms that signal a desire to close the matter without a prolonged public fight. Heidorn later described the experience as professionally and personally devastating and said he cared deeply about students, while exploring ways to continue working in education.

The separation details also reveal how modern institutions manage reputational risk. Paying out the year can look like generosity or like a settlement to avoid further disruption, depending on your lens. Neutral references help a departing employee move on while protecting the district from claims it torpedoed his future. Nobody “wins” that arrangement; it simply ends the immediate crisis. For families, it removes an adult they no longer trusted. For Heidorn, it ends a vocation in one community.

The Bigger Lesson: Schools Have Become the Front Line of Immigration Politics

This episode didn’t happen in a vacuum. It landed during a period of heightened national attention on immigration enforcement, with intense media coverage and strong public emotions on both sides. Local officials and community speakers echoed the idea that recent enforcement actions created trauma for children. Meanwhile, supporters warned that punishing a teacher for a short, lawful comment invites ideological enforcement in the other direction—today a pro-ICE remark, tomorrow a pro-border-wall bumper sticker.

The fairest conservative takeaway rests on consistency: schools should protect kids from targeted harassment while also protecting employees from viewpoint discrimination. Those goals can coexist if districts write clear, content-neutral social media standards tied to job performance and disruption, then apply them evenly. If a pro-ICE comment triggers discipline because it shakes trust and disrupts learning, an anti-ICE comment that does the same should face the same scrutiny. Equal rules beat emotional rulemaking.

IF A TEACHER CAN BE FIRED FOR SUPPORTING ICE, THEN TEACHERS SHOULD BE FIRED FOR OPPOSING ICE. Chicago Area Teacher Forced to Resign for Supporting ICE Speaks Out https://t.co/sO5F1Qrduq

— ArmyMom224⛪️✝️🇺🇸🪖 (@ArmyMom224) February 16, 2026

Parents will keep demanding safe schools, and teachers will keep speaking online. The question is whether districts can resist mob management long enough to enforce predictable standards. When leaders fail that test, every controversy teaches the same lesson: the loudest voices set the terms, and everyone else—students included—learns to walk on eggshells.