Even before Donald Trump moved into his second term as president, experts and advocates predicted a drop in school attendance by students from immigrant families, arguing that a “climate of fear” would prevent students from showing up in their classrooms.
Now, emergent research suggests just how quickly that happened, and how staggering some of the attendance drops were.
Immigration raids “coincided with a 22 percent increase in daily student absences” in schools in California, according to a working paper from absenteeism expert Thomas Dee, an economist and professor at Stanford University. The paper inspected data from five school districts in the Central Valley region of the state during the first two months of the current Trump administration.
Young students missed the most school. And “it wasn’t just a January blip,” Dee says, because the study showed sustained drops in attendance.
It’s important to be cautious about extrapolating that figure nationwide. Dee’s research centered on the aftershocks of “Operation Return to Sender,” a high-profile immigration raid that occurred just before President Trump took office for his second term. At the time, in its closing days, the Biden administration attributed the raids to an immigration officer who “went rogue.”
That’s significant because high-profile raids likely have a larger impact on absences than quieter raids, and the region Dee studies has a high number of agricultural workers, many of whom are likely to be impacted by immigration raids.
Still, the Central Valley region of California represents a uniquely important place in America’s economy, where a large share of food production occurs, Dee says. It may be the absences foretell education enrollment trouble in this critical area, he adds. The study focused on the earliest instance of immigration enforcement, and the country’s practices have only become more aggressive since, Dee says.
What’s more, this latest research fits a pattern that shows immigration raids harm students.
That’s true going back to the first Trump administration, according to research from the Center for Law and Social Policy, which found that immigration raids and fear of immigration enforcement contributed to a chilling effect on school attendance.
There are an estimated 9 million K-12 students who live with at least one adult who is not a U.S. citizen, according to a figure from KFF, meaning those children could be directly affected by fear of immigration enforcement. Clashes over Trump policies have also fueled protests, especially in Los Angeles. For schools, these absences disrupt classes by removing students who need the instruction time, and also introduce more stress and disruption even to students from non-immigrant families, experts warn. Long term, if this affects enrollment, it could decrease funding for already beleaguered schools.
Unsafe Spaces
For many students, immigration raids are equivalent to a natural disaster, says Jacob Kirksey, an assistant professor in Texas Tech’s College of Education, because the raids cause similar numbers of absences.
Natural disasters also cause a significant amount of psychological strain and fear. In the wake of the destruction caused by the Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles, the second-largest school district in the country, nearby schools tried to double down on mental health services. That’s because schools can serve as a safe haven for students, Vivien Villaverde, an associate teaching professor at the University of Southern California and former social worker, told EdSurge previously.
When it comes to immigration, that safe status is precisely what’s in doubt. In some ways, that’s literal. For instance, the Trump administration rescinded the Protected Areas Policy, a federal rule that blocked Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from operating near locations like schools, child care centers and places of worship.
But that’s already known, so what’s new?
Dee’s paper shows just how quickly absences connected to immigration enforcement happen, says Kirksey, of Texas Tech.
In his own research, Kirksey has found that after an incident involving high numbers of immigration arrests in the mid-2010s, attendance declined by 11 percentage points among migrant students and 10 percentage points among Latino students in a high school district in a small, urban city in California. This hurt student performance. And the district registered an attendance decline of 2 percentage points longer term in connection with immigration enforcement actions.
Then, after the “Load Trail” raid, a 2018 workplace raid in Texas, Kirksey noted the rippling effects it had on students: Absenteeism went up, reading and math scores went down and more students left the area.
Commenting on Dee’s paper, Kirksey adds that it hints at the mechanisms behind these students missing school: notably, that parents are afraid to send their kids to school, and the students do not have a sense that they belong in school.
This could have long-term implications.
Absences correspond to a bunch of other outcomes for students that educators and researchers care about, Kirksey says. An upcoming paper from Kirksey, shared with EdSurge, argues that the Load Trail raid also produced declines in four-year college enrollment and pushed high schoolers toward work, especially for Hispanic and English-learner students.
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