The start of the new school year often brings excitement and joy. For many students, it is a time to reunite with friends and meet new teachers. However, for many immigrant families in the United States, the return to school symbolizes a return to another public space surveilled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). For many, this signals renewed fear of family separation, illegal detention, and deportation.
ICE arrests and raids across the U.S. have significantly increased in 2025, with government officials claiming record highs of criminal arrests. However, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reports that as of August, 70% of those detained had no prior criminal convictions. Meanwhile, the official ICE statistics page offers no arrest or detention data since December 2024, right before the current Trump administration took office. This omission effectively hides a mass illegal detention of immigrants.
Now, as schools reopen, the psychological strain on immigrant children and children from mixed-status families is expected to grow.
“We anticipate that several students will be missing due to the raids, because parents are afraid of being separated from their children, and children are afraid of leaving their parents. Our school has been hit hard by ICE raids,” says Karina to El País, a special education teacher from Westlake, California.
With schools already starting, students, parents, teachers, and communities prepare for another school year marked by Donald Trump’s illegal deportation campaign and heightened ICE surveillance.
Trump Administration Overturns Years-Long Path Towards Protecting Schools
For over a decade, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security maintained an internal policy recognizing certain “sensitive locations”—including schools, medical facilities, and places of worship—as off-limits for immigrant enforcement. This policy was introduced in 2011 by the Obama administration to uphold essential institutions as safe and accessible spaces for all individuals, regardless of immigration status.
In 2021, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, under the Biden administration, expanded this policy to include additional protected places where children gather, such as playgrounds, child care centers, and school bus stops.
However, recent events show a clear departure from this policy, as schools are now becoming more surveilled by ICE.
ICE agents can now more easily carry out raids and make arrests on school property after the Trump administration overturned the policy entirely. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents no longer have to honour “sensitive locations” when conducting enforcement activities, leaving already overburdened, under-resourced schools with the responsibility to protect children.
As ICE agents continue to detain, arrest, and deport residents, parents now face the risk of being detained while dropping their kids off at school.
Another Barrier to Education: ICE Raids Threaten Childhood Development
The fear of being stopped and taken away while simply accompanying your children to school can terrorize any learning community. This fear undermines the very foundation of what should be every school’s mission: to promote an effective and safe learning environment. This deepening fear and uncertainty for families and communities make it increasingly difficult for students to focus on learning and for school staff to fulfill their roles effectively. Ultimately, ICE surveillance and encroachment exacerbate an already present educational disparity affecting students from immigrant backgrounds.
When ICE raids began occurring near school zones in January, student absences rose by 22% compared to expected levels based on the previous two school years. In California’s Santa Clara County, schools recorded a decrease of 5,000 students in January, with the number doubling to 10,000 in February.
This pattern is not new. In 2020, Jacob Kirksey, an associate professor of education policy at Texas Tech University, found an immediate effect of growing student absences concentrated around larger enforcement incidents during the height of the Trump administration’s first term. School district leaders consistently reported that families did not feel safe sending children to school whenever local immigration raids made headlines.
In Trump’s second term, things have only escalated. ICE raids have been shown to significantly increase the prevalence of anxiety disorders in students from immigrant families. The heightened fear and uncertainty associated with potential family separation can lead to what is known as separation trauma, a psychological condition that deeply affects emotional and cognitive development. Separation trauma disrupts students’ sense of safety and stability, which impairs their academic focus, attendance, and overall school engagement. Over time, these stressors can prevent children from learning and reaching their socio-emotional and academic milestones.
Education as a Human Right
The ability to access education safely without fear of arrest, surveillance, or separation is not just a moral principle—it is a fundamental international human right.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) establishes that everyone has the right to education, regardless of citizenship status. Although access to education is often linked to citizenship and national borders, the inherent human right to education itself transcends these limitations. Every child, regardless of their citizenship status, should have the opportunity to learn and develop. Likewise, in the United States, all students have a right to public education, “regardless of a child’s or guardian’s citizenship, immigration status, or English language proficiency.” These rights are upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe.
Yet, despite these projections, actions by ICE have increasingly undermined these rights. Community members and teachers have observed a disturbing pattern of enforcement targeting immigrant families near schools.
“As teachers, our priority is keeping the children safe, and we’re not going to let them come and bother our parents, or bother our students,” one teacher in Los Angeles told CNN in response to an ICE raid near a local school. “Our responsibility and our priorities are our students, and we’re going to be there—whatever it takes.”
Teachers at the Frontlines Protecting the Right to Education
Teachers face more and more challenges when a growing number of students are absent, both in terms of meeting the differentiated needs of their students and managing classrooms. Recent cuts to the Department of Education under Trump’s Administration have also forced schools to scale back on critical student resources and protections.
With the school year underway, many teachers are preparing to protect their students. Despite facing chronic underfunding, low pay, and heavy workloads, many teachers are expanding their roles beyond instruction. Teachers are helping families navigate complex legal systems and connecting them to immigration attorneys or local advocacy groups that are also facing the threat of losing funding. They are providing emotional support to students experiencing fear or separation due to budget cuts in mental health services at schools.
Now, in the face of increased ICE surveillance, teachers are also actively working to shield students from the psychological toll by reimagining what it means to teach and care in a time of fear. Several school districts across the United States have implemented training programs to prepare staff for ICE’s presence on school grounds. The Minneapolis Public Schools have been training principals and school staff on how to respond if ICE agents show up at school buildings. The training emphasizes that staff are not required to assist in the enforcement of administrative warrants and should seek to verify the identity of law enforcement and notify the district’s general counsel for review before allowing entry.
For some educators, becoming self-sufficient is also a necessity. Teachers have collaborated with local organizations to develop virtual learning options and community-based classrooms housed in trusted neighbourhood centers. In some districts, school staff have also launched a “walking school bus” initiative where teachers and community volunteers escort groups of students to and from school. If there’s an ICE agent present, the adults would be able to respond to them and take the kids inside.
These responsibilities are not formally recognized in most teachers’ job descriptions (and probably shouldn’t be, as their primary role should be to teach). But as schools increasingly become sites of surveillance, educators continue to adapt to meet both the academic and emotional needs of their students, often at personal and professional cost.
Building Collective Power Against Immigration Enforcement
In response to the growing threat of immigration enforcement near schools, several community organizations have collaborated to provide training sessions aimed at protecting students, staff, and families from the impacts of ICE raids.
In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), in partnership with Unión del Barrio and the Association of Raza Educators, organized a series of training sessions to help prepare school communities for potential encounters with ICE. These sessions focused on identifying agents representing different federal branches of immigration enforcement and patrolling neighbourhoods for ICE activity.
Local advocacy groups and city officials have also launched the Los Angeles Rapid Response Network (LARRN). The network, backed by over 20 immigrant rights organizations, is a coordinated hotline and response system designed to monitor and respond swiftly to ICE activity across the city. The hotline is also meant to combat misinformation and help families understand their rights when faced with ICE agents.
Some states have even moved to add “sensitive location” protections at the state level. The New York City school system unanimously approved a resolution that barred ICE agents from entering school grounds or accessing student records without a judicial warrant. Chicago Public Schools and Central North Carolina school districts have also explicitly stated that ICE agents must present a judicial warrant to enter school facilities. A bill in California also mandates that all school districts, county offices of education, and charter schools must promptly notify all students, parents, staff, and community members whenever ICE agents are present on school grounds.
In Kona, Hawaii, nearly 100 educators and allies protested to keep immigration agents out of schools and homes after a child was taken from his elementary school following his father’s detention. Organized by the Hawaii State Teachers Association, the protest sought to protect students from immigration-related trauma and promote safe school environments for all children.
“And I’m done sort of twiddling my thumbs and just saying to myself, ‘Well, I’m going to close my classroom door, and I’m not going to worry about it, because it is going to affect my school.’ It is going to affect my students, and I don’t want it happening on my watch, whether I’m in Hawaii or anywhere else,” says Julie, a teacher from Waikōloa Elementary and Middle School.
Reimaging Education in an Era of ICE
In many states across the United States, especially in California, school funding is directly tied to daily attendance. As immigration raids and surveillance increase, it’s not just education that suffers—entire education systems become destabilized, which will have an impact on all of society.
Community-led resistance efforts organized in response to the growing surveillance of ICE offer a reimagining of education as more than a public service, but as a space of collective care, resilience, and resistance. Solidarity built across families, schools, and communities disrupts the isolating effects of ICE surveillance.
As Joy Masha, program manager at the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools, reflects in her article Learning for Justice, becoming a “village” means embracing collective care and shared responsibility to nurture children and families. In this framework of education, people can nurture children intellectually, emotionally, and socially through community bonds that resist fear and foster political agency.
Edited by Melanie Miles
