On the morning after immigration raids swept through California’s Central Valley on January 7, 2025, classrooms sat half empty. Daily absences among immigrant students spiked by 22 percent—the equivalent of 725,000 lost learning days in just the first two months of 2025 alone. Similar effects reverberated across the country, with teachers reporting increased absenteeism, slipping grades, and visible anxiety among immigrant children. America’s ongoing immigration crisis had finally broken through the schoolhouse gate.
The disruptions to learning that follow immigration raids constitute a new, de facto form of educational exclusion, where fear, xenophobia, and aggressive immigration enforcement converge to deter Hispanic children from attending school. Across the nation, anxieties about detention have turned the routine act of attending school into a risk many immigrant families are no longer willing to take. Each missed day of school worsens academic outcomes, as students fall behind on their coursework, perform worse on standardized tests, and face declining graduation rates.
More than forty years ago, the Supreme Court presciently sought to prevent precisely this kind of exclusion from educational opportunity. In Plyler v. Doe (1982), the Court struck down a 1975 Texas statute that had permitted public schools to charge tuition to the parents of undocumented children, ruling that, by conditioning access to education on a family’s ability to pay, such practices violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, the Court held that states cannot deny students a free public education based on their immigration status.
Writing for the majority, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. recognized that preferential tuition requirements turned economic disadvantage and documentation status into barriers to learning. He warned that without access to free public education, undocumented children would face a “lifetime hardship” and risk being relegated to a permanent illiterate underclass. “By denying these children a basic education,” he explained, “we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation.” Importantly, Brennan emphasized that deprivation of education was unlike deprivation of any other public good, as it “takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual.”
By tying education to the very essence of equal citizenship, the Court underscored that education is not a privilege reserved only for the wealthy or U.S. citizens, but rather something that must be made available to all children on equal terms. Thus, it made clear the Constitution’s promise of equal protection extends to all children who live within America’s borders, regardless of income or immigration status.
The U.S. has consistently fallen short of Plyler’s promise, however. Since the decision, school districts have pursued a variety of efforts to thwart undocumented children’s access to the classroom. Measures range from requiring proof of a green card, Social Security number, or visa status at school registration to legislative proposals mandating that school districts track and report the number of undocumented students in their classrooms. Recently, several state legislatures have even considered bills to reintroduce tuition or enrollment requirements that mirror the restrictions struck down in Plyler.
The push to undermine Plyler is now coming from the federal level, too. The Trump administration has mounted its own initiative to curtail educational access for immigrant children, attempting to bar undocumented children from participating in Head Start programs and to withhold federal funding for English Language Learners.
With each new restriction, Plyler’s fragile promise erodes further. The Court’s ruling may appear intact on paper, but, in practice, fear and political hostility have created new barriers to access, with striking costs to American education.
Empirical evidence from across the United States in the past decade confirms a concerning pattern: Immigration enforcement measurably depresses attendance and academic performance among immigrant students.
Throughout the country, fear of deportation tied to immigration raids has prompted a surge in absenteeism, not only for immigrant students, but for Hispanic children as a whole. In school districts located within 25 miles of areas where mass deportations were carried out from 2009 to 2015, chronic absenteeism among Hispanic students increased, and math test-score gaps between Hispanic and white students grew modestly (by 0.08 standard deviations).
Likewise, in a study spanning seven large school districts in California, a standard deviation increase in county-level immigration arrests from 2014 to 2018 corresponded to a 5 percentage point increase in student absenteeism for Hispanic students. This relationship was even more pronounced among Hispanic high school students who were English language learners, whose absenteeism rates rose by up to 8 percentage points. And the negative consequences of the deportations didn’t end when the raids did. School attendance remained low for weeks and, in some cases, months after an immigration raid.
