Paden’s Safe Haven and Resource Committee (P-SHARC [1]) began its first foot patrol on Tuesday, May 19, handing out flyers to educate people on their rights and monitoring the surrounding blocks of the elementary school for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
[2]The committee was founded in the fall of 2025 by Thomas Mariadason and his wife, Jay Kim, who have children attending Paden. They created P-SHARC in response to an incident on Coast Guard Island last October [3] that involved an ICE protester allegedly driving a U-Haul truck into the military base gates.
“My wife and I were both lawyers who have been in social movements for many years,” Mariadason told the Alameda Post. “We were really worried about the families here and learned that people were not sending their kids to school and are now facing precarity around food and housing.”
Mariadason’s response was to organize locally, where P-SHARC operates on three major principles—to defend and protect, build trust, and collaborate.
“We want to build trust and show people that we’re here together and connected,” Mariadason said. “We worked with different organizations that do mutual aid and work in other schools. The idea is to proliferate more of these small, local projects.”
[4]Now, every Tuesday and Thursday before school, volunteers wearing purple shirts patrol the campus with information sheets detailing the Alameda County Immigration Legal Education Partnership hotline, mutual aid resources, and basic immigration rights information.
Anyone can apply to be a foot patroller, not just parents. According to the P-SHARC [1] website applicants must attend a free training where current members introduce “how to identify, respond, record, and report ICE activity” to newcomers.
If a volunteer spots an ICE agent on or around school grounds, they will blow their purple whistle three times and report it to the school.
“The reason for doing this is not because we think anything is going to happen, but to be prepared should anything happen,” Beth Silver-Cummons, foot patrol volunteer and grandparent, told the Alameda Post. “We have taken training to teach us how to react, what to do, and what we can’t do so that we can be supportive and help protect this community.”
[5]P-SHARC is currently working with the school district and the principal of Paden Elementary. However, the organization may soon change its name to Parents Safe Haven and Resource Committee to encourage other schools to get involved. Mariadason says that parents from Alameda’s other elementary, middle, and high schools have already attended trainings and are working on establishing foot patrols on other campuses.
This foot patrolling model is inspired by similar community organizations from neighboring cities, such as the Oakland Education Association [6] and Bay Resistance [7]. P-SHARC derives its name from the 2017 Alameda Unified School District’s “Safe Haven [8]” resolution.
“We want the school district to uphold that promise. The school district has said that they’re going to do everything to follow that guidance,” Mariadason said. “As parents, we have to hold that accountable and understand what is being promised. It’s our school, the kind of place whose policies and protocols should be informed by our decisions.”
Giuliana Means is a contributing writer for the Alameda Post [9]. Contact her via [email protected] [10].