NEW YORK — As President Trump’s immigration crackdown catches New York City students in the crosshairs, an influential panel appointed by the chancellor is recommending steps for local schools to take to better defend immigrant children and their families.

The 50-member advisory council on multilingual education said all schools should form teams of teachers and staff, who receive training to serve as advocates for multilingual and immigrant students. A team liaison would coordinate on issues that arise with the Education Department’s district and central offices.

The panel also called on principals to repurpose space in their buildings as welcome centers and “care closets” — filled with school supplies, clothes, food and other basic necessities for families. Districts should help the school administrators partner with local organizations, according to the recommendations.

The proposals were part of a sweeping, 10-page plan released Tuesday on how to promote multilingualism in the city’s schools, whether that involves expanding services for students learning English or native English speakers who want to learn a new language.

“We welcome students no matter where they’re from,” said Naveed Hasan, who sat on the panel, “and what language they speak, because that’s the fabric of New York City.”

“I hope we continue this and stand up to sort of federal overreach and hateful rhetoric,” he added. “I don’t see it taking root in the city in any meaningful way.”

Driven in part by the registration of tens of thousands of minors seeking asylum in the United States, nearly 1 in 5 of the city’s students are now classified as “English Language Learners,” collectively speaking more than 156 languages.

There have been no confirmed reports of federal immigration enforcement inside the city’s schools during Trump’s second term. However, several high-profile student detentions and deportations — with increased frequency over the summer — have put undocumented and mixed-status immigrant families on edge, and unleashed a wave of informal rapid response teams, made up of impassioned parents, immigration advocates and teachers.

At the crux of their report, the advisory council — announced late in the 2023-24 school year, several months before Trump was re-elected — called for greater investments in bilingual programs and certified teachers.

There are two types of bilingual programs in the city’s schools: transitional bilingual and dual language classes. In transitional classrooms, all children start out speaking the same language and, as their vocabulary improves, gradually spend more time learning in English. Dual language programs, as the name suggests, offer instruction in two languages and can foster multilingualism and cultural exchange between native English speakers and students just acquiring the language.

Most English learners are not in bilingual programs, but in classrooms with certified English as a New Language teachers, who are trained in language acquisition strategies but do not necessarily speak the same language as their students.

Twenty-eight new bilingual programs opened this school year, for a total of 566 such programs citywide. Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos, during her State of Our Schools speech last month, announced a new pilot program to standardize English language development curriculum across 80 schools.

“We are already starting to incorporate these recommendations into our work,” Aviles-Ramos said Tuesday at a Brooklyn press conference to announce the recommendations.

In her first sit-down interview with the Daily News after she was appointed chancellor, Aviles-Ramos, who frequently speaks of her own Puerto Rican heritage, said last year that one of her goals was to promote multilingualism and expand transitional bilingual programs. Before her appointment, she served as the point person at school system for the influx of migrant students.

“In other countries, it is an expectation that you know more than one language,” Aviles-Ramos reiterated at P.S. 331 The Detective WenJian Liu School of Civics and Entrepreneurship, a new elementary school in Dyker Heights with a transitional bilingual program in Chinese.

“And so, it baffles me as to why in this country, speaking multiple languages is something that we look down upon. But regardless of what’s happening in the rest of the country, here in New York City, we stand together when it comes to diversity — linguistic diversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity.”

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