Some parents in Fresno, California, were scared when they saw on social media that immigration raids were going to happen at the city’s schools. It turned out that the raids were all lies. A lawsuit says that many Denver kids didn’t go to school because of a real immigration raid at an apartment complex. And in Alice, Texas, a school official told parents the wrong thing when they said that Border Patrol agents might get on school buses to check people’s papers.
Schools all over the country are already being affected by President Trump’s immigration policies. This is because parents and children, even those who are here legally, are becoming more anxious, and school leaders are having to deal with this. Trump’s executive moves made it possible to deport a lot more people and ended a ban on enforcing immigration laws in schools.
Not all public and school officials have been working to get immigrant parents to send their kids to school. Some have even done the opposite. At the same time, Republicans in Oklahoma and Tennessee have proposed laws that would make it hard or even impossible for children born in the U.S. to parents who don’t have proper paperwork to go to school.
Many families have had trouble telling the difference between fact and gossip as they think about the risks.
Some parents in the Alice Independent School District in Texas were told that U.S. Border Patrol agents could ask students about their citizenship during field trips on school buses that go through checkpoints about 60 miles from the border between Texas and Mexico. It turned out that the information was wrong.
After Trump was inaugurated, Angelib Hernandez of Aurora, Colorado, started keeping her kids home from school a few days a week. She no longer sends them at all.
She is afraid that immigration officers will go to the schools where her kids go, arrest them, and split up her family.
“They told me, ‘Hopefully we won’t ever be detained by ourselves,'” she explained. “That would scare them.”
Hernandez and her kids got here about a year ago and asked for refuge. She was following the right steps to legally stay in the U.S., but changes to immigration rules have made her situation uncertain.
Her fears have grown stronger over the past week. From Spanish-language media to social media to other students and parents, she says she thinks “everyone” is spreading the idea that immigration agents are going to go into schools in the Denver area. You can trust the school to keep your children safe. “But we don’t believe it.”
It is known that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have never gone into a school. But families are so scared about the idea that some school districts are trying to change the rule that lets agents work in schools.
The Department of Homeland Security was sued by Denver Public Schools last week because they said the Trump administration was getting in the way of the schooling of the kids in their care. Last year, Denver took in 43,000 people from the southern border. Some of them were children who ended up in the city’s public schools. The district said in the lawsuit that the raid on an area apartment complex by immigration officials was one reason why fewer kids were going to schools where a lot of foreign kids go in recent weeks.
Students and families in Denver schools have been given help during this uncertain time, but lawyers for the district say that this help includes “tasks that distract and divert resources from DPS’s core and essential educational mission.”
Conservatives across the country are asking whether immigrants who are not in the country legally should even be able to go to public school.
Republican Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters pushed for a rule that would have made parents show proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or visa, in order to get their kids into school. Parents would have been able to register their kids even if they didn’t have proof, but supporters of the rule say it would have made them very unlikely to do so. Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor of the state, was against the rule because he thought it went too far.
There is a bill in Tennessee by Republicans that would let school districts decide if they will let kids in without papers. As they say, they want to start judicial challenges. This would give them a chance to overturn a 40-year-old decision that protected every child’s right to go to school.
Immigration policy has huge effects on schools in the United States. A group called Fwd.us, which works to improve criminal justice and immigration, said in 2021 that 600,000 K–12 children in the U.S. did not have legal status. A parent is living in the U.S. illegally for almost 4 million children, and many of them were born here.
It has been shown that immigration raids make it harder for students, even native-born students, to do well in school. Researchers in North Carolina and California have found that the number of Hispanic kids who go to school and enroll drops when local police take part in a program that gives them the power to enforce immigration law. In a different study, test scores of Hispanic children fell in schools that were close to places where there were workplace raids.
Since Trump took office, anywhere from 700 to 1,000 kids a day have dropped out of school in Fresno. Carlos Castillo, head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Fresno Unified School District, said that officials in the central California district have gotten a lot of scared calls from parents about rumors of immigration raids, including raids at schools. There have been no real school raids at all.
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