The mother who arrived at an East Tennessee school the week of Sept. 21 to withdraw her son, a freshman, told staff they weren’t leaving right away. They planned to self-deport to Guatemala a week or so later.
No one in the family had been apprehended, the woman told Veronica Calderon-Speed, an English language learner teacher at the school. But, the mother said, she didn’t want her children to come home one day to an empty house.
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“She added, ‘It’s getting very bad, and this is what I think is best for my family,’” the veteran educator recalled, saying her son wasn’t the only one to leave. “We had a recent immigrant student this school year who registered with us and lasted all of two weeks because her dad was detained and her mom needed to move the daughter, a freshman, to a different school district. Earlier that day, she had withdrawn her elementary-age child.”
Immigrant advocates say the Trump administration’s latest enforcement efforts — in some ways more punishing than what came before — are again leaving children and families too afraid to attend class.
Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, found daily student absences rose 22% among more than 100,000 children living in California’s rural Central Valley in the wake of early 2025 immigration raids.
A national study by Dee in 2020 showed that partnerships between federal immigration agents and local law enforcement reduced the number of Hispanic students in heavily Hispanic counties by 10% within two years.
Dee is currently working on a new report, this one examining the effects of 2025 U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids on enrollment across the country.
“The era of interior immigration enforcement we’ve seen since the beginning of 2025 is just really unusual in terms of its intensity and its breadth — including rolling back the restrictions against enforcement in sensitive locations,” Dee said, referring to an edict early in President Donald Trump’s second term that removed longstanding protections against stops and apprehensions at schools, hospitals and churches.
“Immigration enforcement exacerbated all the dimensions of our failing and incomplete educational recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic,” he added.
At least one Connecticut school district has linked low attendance rates at the start of the school year to the ongoing dragnet, which reportedly included family members being arrested after putting their child on the school bus Aug. 26. ICE disputed the arrest, according to news accounts, but the fallout prompted schools Superintendent Kara Casimiro to send out a message meant to reassure parents.
“Missing school does not make a child safer,” she wrote. “It disconnects them from the people and support built specifically for them.”
The impact of Trump’s more recent enforcement policies extends far beyond attendance. The administration has systematically denied immigrant children food, healthcare, legal representation and the ability to contact loved ones after they’ve been detained, advocates said.
“It’s the most anti-child agenda I have ever seen in my entire career,” said Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy.
The Trump administration did not return emails about these measures’ impact on children.
Calderon-Speed, the East Tennessee teacher, sees the results firsthand. Between last year and this year, she said, her school has observed a significant decrease in enrollment.
“Missing school does not make a child safer, it disconnects them from the people and support built specifically for them.”
Kara Casimiro, schools superintendent
“Usually, our beginner ELL class, which is composed of students who are recent immigrants, starts off with five to seven students in August and by now the numbers usually climb to the teens,” she said. “This year, the number has remained at seven.”
And even when they are able to attend school, these children struggle to participate, she said, calling the long-term impact devastating.
“These kids are facing constant instability, which makes it nearly impossible for them to focus on their learning or feel safe enough to pay attention in the classroom — let alone engage in the lessons,” she said. “They are missing out on consistent instruction, building relationships with their peers, and feeling like they belong. They’re in survival mode now more than ever.”
Cervantes said she can’t pinpoint which of Trump’s immigration tactics have hurt kids most.
“You can’t rank them,” she said. “Experts in child development say that in order for children to thrive and become healthy adults, they need access to their parents, access to healthcare, nutritious food, housing, childcare and a quality education. And these are all things that are very specifically being targeted.”
And newcomer children are faring no better in immigration court. Records show one sizable group — unaccompanied minors, those who came to the country without their parents — have less than a 2% chance of getting their asylum claim approved. And their removal orders have tripled as compared to the final years of the first Trump presidency.
Relatedly, more than 25,000 children lost funding for their legal representation after Trump failed to renew a critical contract that would have paid for their defense. A watchdog group reported that in August 2026 only 24% of defendants — including unaccompanied minors — had an attorney to assist them in court when a removal order was issued.
Heather Yountz, a senior immigration attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, talked about immigration hearings in Texas where 80 children come before a judge at once without adequate representation, some as young as 3. “It’s a kangaroo court at the highest level,” she said.
No other attorneys have stepped in to completely fill the void, advocates said. Many free or low-cost legal aid groups take months to answer calls.
Ernesto Castañeda, director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab at American University, agreed, saying, “Translation and legal defense pro bono are harder to find than at any time this century.”
And despite their age, those under 18 are not immune from arrest: ICE has detained more than 6,200 children during the president’s second term, according to The Marshall Project.
The administration has also recently allowed immigration agents to deny green cards and visas to those who have received public benefits, with that new rule taking effect Sept. 18. This comes on the heels of the government’s decision to remove food stamp eligibility for many legally present immigrants, including children.
“Basically every aspect of a child’s well-being is being undermined by this web of different policies,” Cervantes said.
And many lawfully present immigrants — including refugees and asylum seekers who have not yet obtained a green card — became ineligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program on Oct. 1.
Among the more alarming recent shifts in policy and practice, some immigrants detained by the government will no longer be added to the federal online detainee locator system, a critical tool that helps families find their loved ones — and attorneys locate their clients.
Repeated attacks on childcare workers — some targeting much-needed preschool teachers and aides, particularly through Head Start — also have left children increasingly unprotected, Cervantes said.
Some parents deported to dangerous countries have already been killed there, including a St. Louis County, Missouri, mother and father who were found shot to death in a sugar cane field in Guatemala in July. The couple’s youngest child, a 14-month-old, survived and was found near their bodies, according to local news reports.
In another case last month, a 20-year-old recent high school graduate from Haiti committed suicide after he lost temporary protected status, which allowed him to live and work in this country. Pierre Damas Bel, 20, of Springfield, Ohio, said he felt ashamed of his government-issued ankle monitor and called his father to talk about it a few hours before walking into traffic.
Even if they somehow manage to stay in the country, older immigrant kids’ educational options are narrowing: The government has sued every state — Arkansas, Hawaii and Utah are among the latest — that offered in-state tuition for students who have not yet earned citizenship, closing another door for those who came to this country in search of opportunity.
And furthering the fear among immigrants, the Supreme Court on Sept. 29 ruled that the administration could, for now, continue to send deportees to third-party countries to which they have no ties.
Alejandra Vázquez Baur, director of immigrant students policy, advocacy and partnerships at EdTrust, said this barrage of changes to immigration and refugee policies is “exacerbating dropping enrollment in districts across the country.”
But it’s not just the kids who will suffer, she said.
“Regions that previously served thriving refugee communities are serving fewer new families — and they now have to grapple with less funding to sustain their programs,” she said. “And yet, that support is almost more important in a political environment that threatens young people’s basic survival.”