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Community members packed a high school auditorium in Chelsea, Massachusetts, last month to oppose the school board’s plan to cut 70 positions, including reading coaches, special education staff and counselors.
“These support systems are what students really rely on,” one girl told the board. “As someone who struggles a lot with being overwhelmed and anxious, sometimes I just need someone to talk to.”
The layoffs will help reduce an $8.6 million budget deficit, due in part to the loss of 350 students.
Sarah Neville, a board member in the Boston-area district, knows one reason enrollment is down. Under federal law, districts can’t ask whether students are U.S. citizens, but almost 90% of the 5,700-students are Latino and 47% are English learners. The state education agency estimates that the population of English learners in Massachusetts schools has dropped by 7,000 since 2024. Officials from Chelsea and other metro-area districts say absenteeism increased as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted raids in Boston last fall.
“We’re low hanging fruit for ICE because so many of our folks are undocumented,” Neville said. “When they say, ‘We’re going to go target Boston,’ you find the vans actually hanging out in Chelsea.”
Community members in Chelsea, Massachusetts, crowded the city council chambers for a school district budget meeting on March 14. The meeting had to be moved to the high school auditorium. The district is proposing to cut multiple positions due to enrollment loss. (Sarah Neville)
The district is among several across the country now confronting the financial impact of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Whether students are absent from school, families have been detained, or they’ve left the district or the country on their own, the empty desks add up.
Districts no longer have federal COVID relief funds to fall back on, and many already saw steep enrollment declines during the pandemic. The Chelsea board is one of several in Massachusetts asking the legislature for one-time grants to help address the shortfall. With fixed costs like payroll and contracts with vendors, a sharp drop in enrollment “creates chaos,” Neville said.
In Texas, officials from Houston, San Antonio and several districts in the Rio Grande Valley are among those who say the immigration crackdown has contributed to further enrollment loss and, with it, potential drops in state funding.
Districts’ heightened concerns over finances come as conservatives increasingly argue that American taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill to educate undocumented students in the first place.
During a heated hearing last month, members of a House judiciary subcommittee argued that the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn Plyler v. Doe, a landmark 1982 ruling in a Texas case that guaranteed children a right to a public education, regardless of citizenship status.
“The financial costs of Plyler are undoubtedly staggering, clearly representing a significant burden on localities,” said Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who chaired the hearing. “But it isn’t just fiscal costs we should be worried about. Our nation’s classrooms routinely deal with illegal alien students, many of whom know little to no English and may struggle with other learning disabilities.”
Pointing to Census Bureau figures, a 2024 report from the subcommittee estimated that educating non-citizen students in U.S. schools costs about $68 billion a year. But during the hearing, Democrats highlighted long-term benefits of providing students access to education, like $633 billion paid in state and local income taxes and contributions to the U.S. economy worth more than $2.7 trillion.
Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy is an outspoken advocate for overturning a 1982 Supreme Court case that guaranteed undocumented children a right to a public education. (Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
The witnesses included James Rogers, senior counselor with the conservative America First Legal Foundation, who called the Plyler opinion ”egregiously wrong from the start” and an example of judicial overreach. He predicted that the current conservative majority on the court would overturn it if given the opportunity. Republicans in several states like Tennessee have proposed legislation to collect students’ immigration status. If one of those bills passes, opponents are expected to challenge it in court.
But Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said that excluding undocumented students from school or charging tuition would mean “only certain classes of children whose parents can afford to pay are entitled to the blessings of liberty and the hope of a better future.”
Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, warned that at a time when chronic absenteeism remains above pre-pandemic levels, non-citizen children wouldn’t be the only ones out of school if the court overturned Plyler.
“It will extend beyond the families to peers and ultimately it will be impossible to enforce truancy laws,” he said. “Any child who doesn’t want to be in school will know to simply say ‘I’m undocumented.’ ”
ICE Raids Caused Enrollment to Drop. Now Districts Are Paying the Price
The ‘bottom line’
For now, most Texas districts want to hang on to as many students as possible.
“When you’re a rural school district, every kid has a big impact on your bottom line,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “When you lose five or 10 kids, you have to cut programming. You can’t cut teachers, so you have to start looking for other ways to do it.”
He expects to see a request during next year’s legislative session to allow for some “transition period” before funding drops, but “whether something passes is another question.”
In California, where state funding is based on districts’ average daily attendance, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill last October that would have added immigration enforcement as one of the emergencies that triggers a waiver of the funding rule. The change was unnecessary, he said.
In Minnesota, districts are still hoping for some relief. On their behalf, a national nonprofit asked lawmakers to temporarily suspend a state law that requires districts to drop students from the rolls if they’ve been absent for 15 straight days. The legislation allows exemptions for emergencies.
Operation Metro Surge, in which the Trump administration deployed roughly 4,000 ICE agents to the Minneapolis area, “no doubt qualifies as a calamity that would trigger application of the exemption,” leaders of the National Center for Youth Law wrote to state House and Senate leaders last month.
Fridley Public Schools, near Duluth, Minnesota, has lost 20 students because of the 15-day rule.
“Some of our children have been in an apartment for 14 weeks and haven’t been able to leave,” Superintendent Brenda Lewis said on a recent webinar.
Roughly 100 more have left since the surge, possibly taking advantage of the state’s open enrollment policy to relocate to other districts. The loss means a $1 million hit to the district’s $51 million budget. The district also missed out on $131,000 in meal reimbursements from the federal government because low-income students weren’t in school to eat breakfast and lunch, Lewis said.
Fridley’s enrollment would have been down another 400 students if the district hadn’t quickly implemented a virtual learning program, Lewis said. But federal agents used the device distribution process to apprehend those they suspected to be undocumented, she said.
“We had ICE agents arresting people because they knew they were coming for the Chromebooks,” said Lewis, whose district is part of a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its policy of allowing immigration enforcement near schools and other “sensitive” locations. “ICE agents will board your buses. They’ll board your vans. They’ll pull the vehicle over and start interviewing children about immigration status. By interviewing, I mean interrogating.”
‘In-your-face presence’
The Trump administration recently offered to limit such actions in an effort to end a government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security. Julie Sugarman, who studies immigration policy affecting K-12 schools at the Migration Policy Institute, said a “less-aggressive” approach near school grounds would likely lead some missing students to return.
“The in-your-face presence absolutely is causing people to stay home,” she said.
The Chicago Public Schools last fall saw steep declines in attendance that coincided with Operation Midway Blitz, according to an analysis by Kids First Chicago, an advocacy group, and the Coalition for Authentic Community Engagement, representing multiple nonprofits. On Sept. 29, the Monday after enforcement activity began, nearly 14,000 students at schools serving high percentages of Latino students were absent, the report showed.
Students from multiple Chicago schools demonstrated against ICE in February. (Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The district uses enrollment counts from the early part of the school year to make budget and staffing decisions. If students missed school on those days, or if the district eventually dropped students out for extended periods, those absences could affect funding, explained Hal Woods, chief of policy at Kids First Chicago.
District leaders can only estimate how many undocumented students are entering, or leaving, their schools, and that’s a problem, Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said in testimony before the House subcommittee. She blamed 2014 Obama-era guidance that warned districts against asking for students’ or parents’ citizenship status for enrollment purposes.
While many English learners are U.S. citizens, she called out districts under state takeover, like Fort Worth and nearby Lake Worth, which have English learner populations above 30%, according to the state. “Illegal students,” she said, are impacting schools as a whole.
ICE Raids Caused Enrollment to Drop. Now Districts Are Paying the Price
“Teachers are being forced to … do Google Translate on their phones,” she said. “All of these things obviously impact the total education system, and the taxpayers are left holding the bag.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said immigration enforcement affects all students. He pointed to Willmar, Minnesota, about 150 miles west of the Twin Cities and the site of a Jennie-O turkey plant that employs many immigrants. It’s the town where ICE agents had lunch in a Mexican restaurant and then returned to detain the owners and a dishwasher.
In December, as rumors of an ICE raid spread, hundreds of kids, including white students, stayed out of school, Superintendent Bill Adams told reporters.
“I remember walking in the hallways going, ‘Holy God, where are all the kids?’” said a district employee who declined to speak for attribution due to the sensitivity of the topic. “It was eerie.”
In October, Adams said enrollment in the 4,400-student district was down by over 170 students, amounting to a loss of more than $4 million. To make up for some of that gap, the district is selling a house it used to teach independent living skills, like cooking and doing the laundry, to older students with disabilities.
“It’s just hit our community really bad,” the employee said.
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