“Half My Students Were Gone”: How Trump’s Immigration Agenda Is Disrupting Education

Shortly after President Donald Trump's inauguration, rumors of ICE agents in Massachusetts schools led students to stay home. Mother Jones illustration; LM Otero/AP

When Sam, a third-grade teacher in the greater Boston area, walked into her classroom January 30, about a third of her students were absent. “The sun was beating down so hard and it was reflecting off the desks in the room, and the desks were empty,” Sam remembers. “And I was like—oh my god. This is so sad. I don’t know why it touched me like that: the sun beaming on the tables that were empty.”

Sam’s school district in Framingham, Massachusetts, is diverse: English learners make up 37 percent of the student population. But it wasn’t a one-off. Educators and school officials in other metro Boston districts reported similar noticeable drops in attendance, too, as students fear President Donald Trump’s increased push to mass deport millions. (The teachers asked that their names be withheld for fear of attracting unwanted attention to their schools.) 

In January, one middle school science teacher told Mother Jones, there were days when “half my students were gone…they all agreed to stay home.” Many of her students—including Brazilian, Haitian, and Guatemalan children—live with undocumented family members. When messages started circulating on WhatsApp warning that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement was patrolling the area the last week of January, many became afraid to leave their homes.

Their anxiety was justified. Almost immediately upon taking office, the Trump administration rescinded a previous policy that limited ICE arrests in or around so-called “sensitive” locations: places of worship, hospitals, and schools. To keep with campaign promises, the White House began advertising its deportation efforts and sending a message to all undocumented immigrants that nowhere is safe

“Some students asked, ‘Are we going to practice, like an [active shooter] drill, for when ICE comes?’” she said. There’s no protocol for that, but the teacher tries to reassure them that she’ll do what she can to make her classroom safe. 

The Trump administration’s assault on public education has been thorough: from proposing to dismantle the federal Department of Education and redirecting federal funds to private schools to threatening teachers who fail to align with the president’s ideological priorities. But there are other more insidious ways in which the federal government is undermining schooling for some of the country’s most vulnerable youth. Trump’s immigration-enforcement-first agenda has given rise to legitimate apprehension, waves of misinformation, and even threats of vigilantism. As a result, immigrant students throughout the United States are afraid.

In Boston-area schools, that environment has had far-reaching effects on students, teachers, and entire communities.

“There was this picture of two people getting arrested and pinned to the ground next to unmarked vans” that students and their families passed around on WhatsApp and Snapchat, one teacher in a district west of Boston told Mother Jones. Reports also spread of ICE agents at a grocery store, Market Basket, in Chelsea. “A couple kids told me they saw people getting arrested from the downstairs of their building, in their apartment complex,” another educator said.

The chilling effect could be felt almost immediately in some cases. Chelsea Public Schools communications director Michael Sullivan said news of ICE activity in the local grocery store January 22 coincided with 1,031 of the district’s 6,137 students—almost 90 percent of whom are Hispanic or Latino—not showing up to school that day. The only other out-of-the-ordinary showing, he noted, took place on the nationwide “Day Without Immigrants” action in early February. 

In Lynn, a school district northeast of Boston, the week of January 27 saw an absenteeism rate 20 percent higher than the week of January 13. And in Malden schools, a rumor went around one day in late January that ICE agents were lurking in the parking lot of a local CVS store, startling the students to the point that a high school principal went to CVS to investigate and later announced over the school’s intercom that they were safe. 

Last month, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office issued guidance on “schools’ legal obligations” to protect immigrant students and guarantee their right to free public education. It instructed schools to follow a protocol when dealing with ICE interactions with students, including obtaining a signed judicial warrant and consulting with the district’s legal counsel. The directive also noted that under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, schools are generally prohibited from divulging student information to ICE without parental consent.

Some school districts were preparing for these scenarios even before Inauguration Day. Kellie Jones, director of bilingual education at Brockton Public Schools, a district south of Boston with high numbers of Cabo Verdean and Haitian students, said the district hosted two immigration-focused forums in partnership with the mayor and police to clarify the schools’ duty to enroll students irrespective of immigration status and how to respond to ICE’s presence. 

Still, false rumors of ICE raiding Massachusetts schools in late January unleashed fear in the community. “I can say that I had a report of a high school class that normally had around 35 students in it and that Thursday [January 30] had seven,” Jones said. Districts like Brockton do not collect information on students’ immigration status as a matter of policy but do keep data on, for example, their English language level. In Brockton, which has enrolled hundreds of recent immigrants in the past couple of years, about a third of students in grades 2-12 are not yet English proficient, Jones said. 

“Some of the anxiety is not necessarily when they are in school, but in these soft spaces between school and home,” she explained. “We’ve had questions like: ‘Well, I’m a walker, will I be safe walking from school to home and home to school? Will someone be waiting for me when I get off the bus?’” Jones fears students and families will disengage from after-school programs and activities. 

In some cases, lowered attendance numbers may have a domino effect on districts trying to exit state-run “receivership”—a status under which a school district’s administrative responsibilities are outsourced to the state and local student support resources are cut—due to low attendance and low test scores.

But it’s hard to convince kids to focus on a homework assignment if they’re afraid they or their families might be deported, teachers say. 

Immigrant students who were brought to the US as children say they are frustrated: They feel like they’re being punished for something out of their control. Others aren’t entirely sure what “undocumented” means. The middle school science teacher said some of her students, Haitians with Temporary Protected Status that was recently announced as being scaled back, wonder what happens next. 

“Some kids came here on foot,” she added. “I have this student who’s like: ‘I just got here four years ago, and we went through 30 days of crossing the desert, swimming rivers, all these different things. We hopped on the back of ‘la bestia’ [the beast] and came here, and now we might be getting deported.’”

A number of school districts in Massachusetts have sent reassuring messages to the communities and publicly declined to cooperate or share students’ records with ICE. But that hasn’t always been the case. During the first Trump presidency, Boston Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, came under fire for feeding student data to the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a law enforcement hub that enables information sharing with federal immigration authorities. In 2017, a school incident report triggered the deportation of an East Boston High School student to El Salvador.

In early 2020, the advocacy group Lawyers for Civil Rights found through public records obtained via litigation 135 instances of student incident reports made available to ICE going back several years. That included write-ups for nonviolent disciplinary infractions. After that information came to light, exposing what Lawyers for Civil Rights called a “school-to-deportation pipeline,” Oren Sellstrom, the organization’s litigation director, said the city of Boston reaffirmed its commitment to an ordinance limiting the exchange of information between local law enforcement and ICE. 

“I think it’s always been and remains a concern among those who work with immigrant communities that what is written on paper may not be honored in practice, and that remains a concern,” Sellstrom said. “Although, at least theoretically, there are now more protections in place, the concern still does remain that some of that information sharing may, in fact, still be happening.” (Boston Public Schools didn’t respond to questions from Mother Jones before publication.)

Jones of Brockton Public Schools, who has held her position as bilingual education director for a decade, said what’s happening now “is very comparable to what we saw the first time” with Trump. The difference now, she notes, “is that we are more knowledgeable and we are better prepared.”

Districts—and, increasingly, individual teachers—are trying to take student safety into their own hands. The Worcester School District, the second largest in Massachusetts, told bus drivers not to cooperate with ICE. Some teachers say their districts are training them to differentiate between ICE and other law enforcement agencies and to identify the specific type of warrant an ICE agent would need to legally enter a school. Others are printing out “red cards,” pocket-sized pamphlets describing a person’s legal rights to refuse to open the door if an ICE agent knocks. One Boston-area teacher said students were eager to take them home.

“I didn’t tell my administration this or ask for permission, but I ended up printing out red cards in Spanish and Portuguese, and I laminated them and handed them out to kids that have confided in me that their parents weren’t documented or they weren’t documented. I guess those kids told other kids. And by noon, I had 20 to 30 kids coming in and asking if I could print them one, too.”

Students are doing what they can to protect their families, and teachers are doing what they can to protect their students. But that doesn’t mean the fear won’t cause lasting harm. 

“It’s not just a scare tactic, it’s a reality. People are actually scared,” said Sam, the Framingham teacher. “People are openly having conversations in front of their children, which we are then hearing in elementary schools, about self-deportation and leaving the country.” Then, when students don’t show up in class, “that has a real impact.”