U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman said he is in favor of forming a team of Marin educators to move swiftly to support any school threatened by immigration agents authorized by the Trump administration.

“So far it has not happened,” Huffman said Monday to about 150 educators and officials at the Marin County Office of Education in San Rafael. “But the level of misinformation is very high.”

Abbey Picus, a Novato Unified School District trustee, proposed the “rapid response” team idea as a way to be prepared if agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency enter a campus as part of the administration’s deportation efforts.

“As a community, we need a specific plan of action,” Picus said. “We need to show up at these schools. This is not what Marin stands for.”

Huffman also urged Marin educators “take to the streets” in nonviolent protests to resist such Trump administration ideas as vouchers for private schools, lax compliance with federal court orders or cuts to Medicaid.

“You need to do stuff, whatever you can, big and small,” said Huffman, whose district includes Marin and five other counties. “And do your own self-care — don’t be despondent.”

The event was Huffman’s first in-person address to Marin educators since the November elections. It follows Trump administration moves to fire half the staff at the U.S. Department of Education and threats to dismantle the agency altogether.It also has threatened to withhold federal funding for such programs as Pell grants for college, special education programs and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in schools and colleges.

Higher education in particular is in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, Huffman said. Phil Kranenburg, a former College of Marin trustee, said people need to gather together to resist the rise of fascism and Nazism.

“We are seeing this pattern again, and we feel it,” he said at the forum. “How can we react in such a chaotic mess?”

Kranenburg said he would like to see Marin organize community discussions on the topic.

“Please do that — and be in a group,” Huffman responded. “All of this ugliness that we see on a national level does not have to be how we engage in Marin County.”

David Finnane, principal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in the Sausalito Marin City School District, agreed with Picus’ proposal.

“It’s so impactful to have the support of one’s colleagues,” Finnane said.

Finnane said he received great benefit from a similar team some years back, when he was the principal of White Hill Middle School in Fairfax. One of his students had died by suicide, he said, and a caring group of educators from throughout Marin gathered around him to help him and the school to deal with the pain.

Huffman, a resident of San Rafael, said he and other Democrats in Congress have themselves formed a similar team to monitor the status of federal lawsuits and court orders that push back against the Trump’s actions.

“We are tracking over 130 separate lawsuits right now,” Huffman said. He said the lawsuits “deal with all of these cuts, many of them illegal, many of them that the courts have already ruled to be illegal.”

The team is “not just tracking the status, but also the level of compliance by the Trump administration of these different court orders,” he said. “That’s going to be an important part of providing some checks on abuses of power right now.”

On immigration, the Marin County Office of Education has run bimonthly countywide groups since November for educators to learn about immigration law and the legal rights and responsibilities at school sites, said Ken Lippi, a deputy superintendent. Those groups are meeting on an as-needed basis, Lippi said.

“We have a similar group related to mental health and the social-emotional stress many people are feeling now,” Lippi said.

As to such a team on immigration issues, Lippi said it’s a good idea that the county will get behind.

“We’re going to take it and our leadership team will work on it,” he said. “I think it’s something worth talking about.”