“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 since 2024. Officials from Chelsea and other metro-area districts say as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted raids in 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.”

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 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 , and several districts in the 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 , members of a House judiciary subcommittee argued that the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn , 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 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 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.

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 like 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 Educational 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.’ ”

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 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 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.

, 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, outside Minneapolis, 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 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 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 , according to 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. 

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 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 and nearby , which have English learner populations above 30%, according to the state. “Illegal students,” she said, are impacting schools as a whole. 

“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 . It’s the town where ICE agents 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 . 

“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 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.  

Maykol Bogoya-Duarte, the Detroit teen whose detention by federal immigration authorities last month caused an outcry and led to calls for his release, has been deported, his attorney said Friday morning.

Attorney Ruby Robinson said he learned late Thursday night from Maykol’s mother, in an 11:15 p.m. voicemail, that the teen was back in his home country of Colombia.

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Robinson said he hadn’t yet spoken with Maykol, but hoped to do so later Friday. He said the teen is now with his grandmother in Colombia.

Chalkbeat reached out to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to confirm the deportation, but did not get a response. His information is no longer available on .

while he and a group of other newcomer boys attempted to join a field trip at Lake Erie Metropark, about 25 miles away from Detroit. Rockwood police stopped the teen for allegedly tailgating another car. Maykol did not have a driver’s license, only a City of Detroit identification card, Robinson has previously said.

His detention prompted advocacy from his teachers, fellow students, community members, and lawmakers who pleaded for Maykol to be allowed to remain in the country to finish high school. He was 3.5 credits shy of a high school diploma at Western International High School, where he was enrolled.

“I’m devastated,” said Kristen Schoettle, who taught Maykol at Western.

“The cruelty of this country really shakes me,” Schoettle said. “This kid, my bright student, was passed along to prisons for a month, scared and facing awful conditions I’m sure, for the crime of what — fleeing his country as a minor in search of a better life? And the US government decided his time was better spent in prison than finishing out the school year.”

Schoettle said she hopes to hear from Maykol today.

“I hope he’s safe with his grandma. I hope he can recover from this traumatizing experience and still will dream of a better life. I’ll miss him in my classroom next year and our city and our country are worse off without people like him,” she said.

Schoettle shared examples of Maykol’s classroom work with Chalkbeat, including what he wrote when asked earlier this year to write about freedom.

“I think the freedom in this moment is a little confusing since we can’t leave safely since we don’t know what can happen and it seems strange to me since we have to be more careful than usual,” he wrote in Spanish.

Thousands of people signed a petition earlier last week .

for more than 2½ hours at the district’s school board meeting on June 10. Afterward, the board released a statement saying it wanted Maykol to be able to stay in the country to earn his diploma.

Maykol’s mother attended that school board meeting, though she didn’t speak. Robinson, senior managing attorney with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said the organization isn’t representing Maykol’s mother.

“But I would suspect she will try to return to Colombia at her own expense based on what she learned with Maykol’s month-long, taxpayer-funded, and entirely unnecessary and harmful detention.”

During the May 20 traffic stop that led to his detention, police officers could not communicate with him in Spanish and called Customs and Border Protection agents to translate.

Maykol, who came to the U.S. when he was 16, had already been going through a legal process to return to Colombia after receiving a final order of deportation in 2024. He was working with immigration officials and the Colombian Consulate to obtain the documentation he needed to fly out of the country with his mother.

While he made those arrangements, Maykol planned to finish high school in Detroit.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Pinellas County Schools Superintendent Kevin Hendrick was looped in on a Feb. 24 directive from his police chief ordering campus officers to detain and question anybody they encounter with a federal deportation order and to alert U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, obtained through a public records request. Hendrick was also notified by district police Chief Luke Williams of plans to deputize school-based officers under a federal program that grants immigration arrest authority to local law enforcement agencies and that’s experienced since the beginning of Trump’s second term — in large part from new partnerships in Florida.

Immigrant rights groups and privacy advocates have for years warned that school-based police officers could share information about undocumented students and their families with federal immigration officials and that the program to deputize local cops, known as 287(g), could give immigration agents a foothold in schools. 

The revelations in Pinellas County, advocates said, offer clear evidence of collaboration on immigration matters between the law enforcement division of the country’s 28th-largest school district and outside police agencies. The instructions given to school resource officers, they assert, could violate constitutional protections against unreasonable detention and children’s legal right to a free public education regardless of their immigration status. 

“It should alarm and enrage every parent, teacher, and taxpayer in Florida that school police are being pressured to become informants for ICE and unconstitutionally detain members of our school community,” attorney Alana Greer, the director and co-founder of the Miami-based Community Justice Project, told ����Ӱ��. 

Greer noted the school district police department’s directive to assist ICE, and , were voluntary decisions that undermine community trust and its mission to promote campus safety. “We don’t need or want armed cops in our schools doing ICE’s bidding. ​​These efforts do nothing to keep our kids safe.”

The Florida Phoenix that the Pinellas County school district had applied to take part in 287(g), the nation’s first K-12 school district to take that step. In response to the resulting public outcry, Hendrick, the superintendent, said the district police chief acted in error and without his or the school board’s approval. The district didn’t respond to questions last week from ����Ӱ�� about emails Hendrick and other district leaders received from Williams outlining the police chief’s intention to participate. 

Records show the school district’s lawyers had planned to meet to discuss the 287(g) application before it became public and Isabel Mascaranes, the district spokesperson, was listed on the form as the point of contact for ICE “to coordinate any release of information to the media” regarding immigration enforcement actions. Asked by ����Ӱ�� what knowledge she had of the 287(g) application before it was submitted to ICE, Mascaranes responded, “Can I get back to you on that?”

In a follow-up email, Mascaranes didn’t elaborate on when she first learned of the agreement, simply noting that she routinely handles “all media requests and releases.” She acknowledged the district police chief “maintains ongoing communication” with the sheriff’s office and other local law enforcement agencies and his decision to submit the 287(g) application was “guided by state and federal directives, intending to remain fully compliant with the law.” 

ICE and the Florida governor’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office also declined an interview request.

Voicemail records obtained by ����Ӱ�� show it was ICE — not the district — that withdrew Pinellas school police from 287(g) consideration. 

“ICE will not be entering into an agreement” with the district, Melanie White, an ICE deportation officer, said in a voicemail to Williams, adding that the immigration enforcement agency “will not extend the program in that way” to include K-12 school district police departments “at this time.” 

‘An absolute priority of the Governor’

Perhaps nowhere more than Florida, home to an residents, has Trump’s immigration agenda been so forcefully embraced, with state and local officials looking for ways to bolster ICE enforcement. That includes Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who was tapped by Gov. Ron DeSantis to lead a new State Immigration Enforcement Council. The council was tasked with carrying out a state law extending immigration enforcement far into the realm of state and local police.

Records obtained by ����Ӱ�� show Gualtieri threatened Williams and others to get on board or face the governor’s wrath.

While “immigration stuff is confusing,” Gualtieri said in a Feb. 25 email to Williams and the heads of other Pinellas County law enforcement agencies, “it is also at the forefront of Florida politics and an absolute priority of the Governor.”

“The new law puts legal obligations on all of us to ensure we do certain things and the consequences for not doing so include removal from office by the Governor, including his power to remove police chiefs, city managers, mayors and commission/council members,” he continued, adding that he would hold a call to “on how to best comply with the new Florida law.”

DeSantis, who claims he’s created for mass deportations, signed the law in February that establishes prison sentences for undocumented immigrants who cross into Florida after illegally entering the U.S. and requires jails and sheriff’s offices in the state’s 67 counties to participate in the 287(g) program and facilitate arrests. A police agencies to stop enforcing the state law in April, saying it likely violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and “unlawfully encroaches” on the federal government’s authority to enforce federal immigration laws. DeSantis and the Florida state attorney general are  

Florida lawmakers failed to pass a stricter bill this year which would have required all law enforcement agencies with at least 25 officers to form ICE partnerships. That law would have required Pinellas County school district police and other law enforcement agencies outside of sheriff’s and corrections departments to join forces with ICE. Even though that more far-reaching mandate did not pass, dozens of Florida law enforcement agencies voluntarily formed federal immigration enforcement partnerships, including the police departments at .

Pinellas County Schools Police Chief Luke Williams signed the 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement under pressure from the county sheriff, public records obtained by ����Ӱ�� show. (Source: Pinellas County Schools)

And even though the Pinellas school police were not legally required by the law that did pass to pursue 287(g) or to act in concert with ICE when coming into contact with someone with a deportation warrant, Williams, the police chief, told the superintendent, the school board’s attorney and other districts leaders that they were.

Gualtieri “gave instructions on how deputies and officers should respond to the new law with respect to immigration and immigration enforcement,” Williams wrote in a March 5 email outlining his decision to submit the 287(g) application. “As you know we are bound to follow the law and during the conversation we were all advised that the expectation is that we do so.”

In that same email, Williams said he related Gualtieri’s directions about filing the 287(g) form to school board attorney David Koperski and “and we both agree we must follow the law.” The chief filed the form on Feb. 26.

Even without 287(g) arrest authorities, Williams told the superintendent that school-based officers would follow procedures outlined by Gualtieri to question and detain for up to an hour anyone they encounter with a federal arrest deportation order but who was not otherwise wanted on a criminal charge. 

Gualtieri’s Feb. 24 order came after ICE added some 700,000 people with federal deportation orders to the massive National Crime Information Center, a centralized database that law enforcement agencies nationwide use to track and act on criminal warrants. Without 287(g) powers, the sheriff wrote, local officials lacked authority to arrest people with deportation orders alone. Instead, local officers should contact the local ICE office “to have someone respond to the scene.” 

More than 1.4 million people nationwide have — a third of whom live in Texas or Florida and include longtime residents, people without criminal records and those with U.S.-born spouses and children. A heightened focus on people with final deportation orders regardless of their criminal histories is part of the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown. 

“If an ICE officer cannot arrive at the scene within one hour, then collect as much information from the person as you can and release the person and ICE will have to try to find them through their fugitive operations,” Gualtieri said. After forwarding the message to school-based officers, Williams told the superintendent that “Schools Police will do the same.” 

Schools have for decades been considered a safe haven for undocumented students and their families after the 1982 Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision enshrined childrens’ access to public schools regardless of their immigration status — a right Trump-aligned conservatives in several states are now actively trying to undo. 

On the second day of Trump’s second term, the president scrapped that instructed immigration agents to avoid making arrests at schools and other  

Trump border czar Tom Homan defended the policy shift in February, claiming Central and South American gang activity in the nation’s schools required there be “no safe haven for public safety threats and national security threats.”

“People say ‘Well, will you really go into a high school?” Homan said in . “Well, people need to look at the MS-13 members and Tren de Aragua members who enter this country, a majority of them between the ages of 15 and 17. Many are attending our schools and they’re selling drugs in the schools and they’re doing strong-armed robberies of other students.” 

On the same day that the Pinellas schools 287(g) application became public, Chief Williams wrote that he had no desire to ferret out the immigration status of students and families, despite his stated intention to facilitate ICE arrests.

“I do not know the status of any of our students, or parents and do not care to,” Williams said in his March 5 email to Hendrick. “I do not want to place yourself or the School Board under scrutiny because I followed my beliefs but failed to follow the law.”

‘A new chilling dimension’

A week after Trump’s inauguration, dispelling social media posts claiming immigration agents had visited a Pinellas high school and outlined how school principals should respond if they were to show up in the future. 

Certain educational records should not be released to federal officials without a subpoena, the memo noted, but ICE agents were in their authority to “bring a student to the front office for an interview” and make arrests. “We recommend cooperating” with ICE’s requests, the memo advises, and educators “should make an effort to contact the student’s parents before the school makes the student available to the Agent, unless the Agent directs the staff otherwise.”

Other districts have adopted starkly different policies. In April, the Department of Homeland Security said agents to conduct wellness checks on unaccompanied minor children who arrived at the border without their parents. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told NPR the officials were denied entry onto the campuses and that school principals followed “a fairly rigid set of protocols specific to these types of actions.”

Renata Bozzetto, the deputy director of the nonprofit Florida Immigrant Coalition which filed the lawsuit against the state immigration law, said the communications between the school district police chief and the county sheriff were “absolutely horrible” and could deter children from enrolling. She said she was particularly alarmed to learn that school district law enforcement officials had access to data about people with deportation orders and questioned to what degree “parents are being run through the system.” 

Federal law restricts the types of student information that public school districts can share with third parties. However, records , like logs of campus crimes, . 

School districts have for decades been navigating how much information they should share about students with law enforcement “but adding ICE to the mix is a new chilling dimension to that relationship,” said Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union focused on surveillance, privacy and technology. 

That Williams acted on the 287(g) application without formal approval from the superintendent or school board, Venzke said, highlights a lack of district control over its police department to ensure a “student’s right to an education is protected.” The directive to detain anyone with an administrative deportation order absent evidence of a crime, he said, “raises significant equity and constitutional concerns.” 

If school-based officers are “roaming school hallways looking for students that have administrative warrants out against them,” Venzke said, “that is not an educational atmosphere in which students can feel safe and can learn.”