Months before the Los Angeles school board approved a $6.2 million contract with AllHere, an AI chatbot maker that is now being investigated by the FBI, top district leaders were invited to a meeting with its CEO and a consultant, who is a close friend and associate of schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

The Jan. 18, 2023, calendar invite for the gathering at the district’s downtown headquarters, billed as “AllHere Meeting,” was shared with ����Ӱ�� by a former central office staffer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. 

The AllHere contract in question is widely believed to be connected to the high-profile raids on Carvalho’s home and district office in late February. 

����Ӱ�� has not received confirmation on whether the meeting took place or what specifically may have been discussed, but the invite suggests district administrators were consulting with AllHere principals five months before the contract was voted on.

It also calls into question public statements by Carvalho, who was placed on paid leave Feb. 27, that he . He said the education technology venture represented by his longtime friend and business associate Debra Kerr won the job based on legally mandated bidding. Kerr called the Jan. 18 meeting.

AllHere filed for bankruptcy in September 2024 and its founder and CEO, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was later arrested on charges of identity theft and defrauding investors. 

����Ӱ�� filed extensive public record requests with Los Angeles Unified School District in September 2024 for documents related to the AI chatbot contract, including all proposals, bids or submissions made by AllHere and any other companies vying for the work. The request also asked for documents detailing how the district evaluated AllHere’s qualifications and determined that the small Boston-based firm with little to no artificial intelligence experience was capable of carrying out the contract.

On Feb. 11, 17 months after those requests were filed and two weeks before the FBI raids, a senior paralegal in sent ����Ӱ�� an email asking if we still wanted the documents.

Through his attorneys and a spokesperson, Carvalho since the FBI probe exploded into public view. The Los Angeles Times reported that he denied any wrongdoing, pointed out that “no evidence has been presented by prosecutors supporting any allegation that (he) violated federal law” and pressed to return to his job.

“Mr. Carvalho remains confident that the evidence will ultimately demonstrate that he acted appropriately and in the best interests of students,” said the statement that was issued through the spokesperson and the law firm of Holland & Knight, according to the Times. “We hope the school board reinstates him promptly to his position as superintendent.”

Kate Brody, the vice president of communications for , a 2,000-member LAUSD parent and educator advocacy group, sees the moment differently. Her group has called for an audit of all the education technology contracts entered into under Carvalho, saying they lack independent research into their efficacy and now is “the time to peel this whole thing back and take a look, not just at what’s going on with AllHere, but the inappropriate amount of access that all these companies have.”

“The evidence is increasingly clear that this technology is not really for the benefit of the students,” she told ����Ӱ��. “Our big question has been for a long time — whose benefit is it for?”

Carvalho has not been accused of any wrongdoing and authorities have not provided details about the investigation. The warrants underlying the . 

In  after the Board of Education placed Carvalho on paid leave and named an acting superintendent, the district said that while it understood “the need for information, we cannot discuss the specifics of this matter pending investigation.”

Kerr could not be reached for comment and attorneys for  Smith-Griffin did not respond to requests for comment. District spokesperson, Britt Vaughan, could not be reached for comment.

Kerr and Carvalho

Federal agents also . Her ties to Carvalho go back to his days leading the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, a period of time in his prominent career that is also now reportedly under investigation. According to , grand jury subpoenas have been issued seeking records from the district’s inspector general and a fundraising foundation overseen by Carvalho while he was the Miami schools chief.

Kerr was a key player in executing the failed contract between AllHere and the nation’s second-largest school district. In addition to her being in a position to call senior staff to a meeting at district headquarters, according to the calendar invite, Kerr’s son Richard, a former AllHere account manager who began working for the company in 2022, told ����Ӱ�� in September 2024 he pitched AllHere to LAUSD school leaders.

Among ����Ӱ��’s long-unanswered public records requests were any conflict of interest disclosure forms filed by AllHere, its employees, third parties involved in the contract or LAUSD personnel.

The location listed on Kerr’s hourlong invite to discuss AllHere was the office of LAUSD’s longtime chief spokesperson Shannon Haber, who has since retired. Other invitees included senior advisor of communication Bích Ngọc Cao, senior director of engagement and partnerships Antonio Plascencia Jr.. and director of development and civic engagement Sara Mooney. 

Mooney is also the former executive director of the , the district’s separate fundraising arm includes Carvalho. Attempts to reach Haber and the other meeting invitees, which also included Vaughan, the district spokesperson, and marketing director Lourdes Valentine, were unsuccessful.

Earlier calendar entries shared with ����Ӱ�� show Carvalho had an hourlong meeting scheduled with Kerr and someone identified only as “SN” on Oct. 21, 2022, about eight months after he took the $440,000-a-year job in Los Angeles. The meeting was scheduled for 12:30 p.m. at a place “to be determined.”

In 2022, Kerr was busy consulting for and promoting AllHere in multiple Florida cities, according to . She also did consulting work for Rethink Ed, a New York-based company that provides social-emotional and wellness resources. In May 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national school shutdowns, to support students with autism and other related disabilities during remote learning. 

“We appreciate partners like Rethink Ed which assist us in empowering these very deserving students with a variety of innovative and helpful tools to successfully engage in distance learning,” Carvalho said in a statement when the Miami-Dade contract was announced.

Roughly two years later, when Carvalho was leading LAUSD, the firm

Other calendar entries shared with ����Ӱ�� show that right before the scheduled meeting with Kerr that October Friday, Carvalho had back-to-back interviews lined up with reporters from The Wall Street Journal and Politico. Later that day, he was scheduled to attend a retirement dinner for Michael Hinojosa, the former Dallas schools superintendent, at the Ravello restaurant at the Four Seasons in Buena Vista Lake, Florida, near Orlando.

Two days before Carvalho was due back in Florida for that celebration, the a $1.89 million contract to provide text-messaging support to students struggling with attendance, academics and social-emotional issues. The SMS tool was a precursor to its AI-powered chatbot. 

Carvalho told the Los Angeles Times he had getting the three-year deal in Miami although the newspaper reported that the bidding process began while he was still in charge. 

Two years later, in November 2024, the district would move with Miami-Dade schools for a period of three years after the ed tech company abandoned its contract.

����Ӱ�� filed public records requests on Sept. 13, 2024, asking for copies for all of Carvalho’s daily calendars going back to his first date of employment at LAUSD. The district has yet to produce them.  

AllHere then gone

Also invited to the Jan. 18, 2023, meeting set up by Kerr was AllHere’s Smith-Griffin, who six months after landing the L.A. schools deal was charged with defrauding investors of nearly $10 million.

Her case, which involves allegations of securities and wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, is being heard in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The Harvard graduate and former middle school math teacher  pleaded not guilty in December 2024. Conferences on her case were postponed three separate times in 2025 to allow the parties time to work on a possible disposition. The last was a 60-day adjournment on Sept. 25, 2025, and there’s been no activity in the file since then.

By the time Smith-Griffin was arrested at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 2024, the company she founded in 2016 had been forced into bankruptcy, unable to pay its debts, including a disputed $630,000 commission claimed by its largest creditor: Kerr.

Carvalho and Smith-Griffin spent considerable time together in the spring of 2024, appearing at multiple ed tech conferences touting “Ed,” their sunny chatbot that was seen as catapulting LAUSD into the K-12 AI vanguard. They said communicating with Ed would provide an unprecedented level of support, accelerating learning and strengthening well-being for students and families, many of whom were still struggling from the pandemic. 

“He’s going to talk to you in 100 different languages, he’s going to connect with you, he’s going to fall in love with you,” Carvalho raved at the April 2024 ASU+GSV conference in San Diego. “Hopefully you’ll love it, and in the process we are transforming a school system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one’ through absolute personalization and individualization.”

None of that materialized for the district, whose enrollment has since and which is now and

After AllHere shuttered and a former company manager-turned-whistleblower told ����Ӱ�� that students’ private data  was not properly protected in the push to launch Ed, Carvalho vowed to investigate. He promised a task force of outside experts who would dig into what went wrong with the AllHere contract and determine how the district could strengthen its bidding process to avoid future debacles.

Carvalho told the Los Angeles Times in July 2024, he expected. Some 19 months later, there’s been no further news or shared task force findings. The district’s independent inspector general’s office launched its own investigation around the same time. 

However, the office’s and reports to the Board of Education make no mention of AllHere. In 2024, the IG opened a total of 62 cases, closed 54 and identified nearly $2.5 million in waste. In 2025, it opened 38 cases and closed 43, including some from previous years, though none appear to have involved AllHere. No financial waste was identified in 2025. 

Inspector General Sue Stengel at the end of 2025 after three years. The office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Equally elusive is what happened to Ed or the underlying tech tool for which LAUSD paid AllHere $3 million out of its $6.2 million contract. Although it’s been reported that school officials said the district was not financially harmed in the contractual fallout, and it received the services and products it spent several million dollars to acquire, it’s difficult to substantiate that.

When Carvalho unveiled Ed at a major March 20, 2024, celebration attended by Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, he said the chatbot would be in 101 elementary, middle and high schools as part of a pilot program. By the fall, Ed was supposed to go districtwide. 

Much later, that reported group of Ed testers had been “to a small number of schools (that) tried it out, each with a sample of students and parents.” In July 2024 after the district “unplugged” Ed in the wake of AllHere’s demise, that it was “hard to find students, teachers or other staff who have used any part of the system since its official launch.” 

Absent human interactions with Ed, the district has been slow to produce documentation from AllHere of services rendered. Among the public records sought by ����Ӱ�� in September 2024, which LAUSD now appears ready to provide, are “purchase orders, invoices, and payments records related to any and all goods and/or services provided by AllHere.” 

Staff reporter Amanda Geduld contributed to this report

The findings span the early weeks of the second Trump administration. Since that time, immigration enforcement has escalated dramatically, particularly in Democratic cities targeted by the president, including and . 

Schools became fair game days into the new administration when it against enforcement actions near or on-site. Hospitals and churches, too, are no longer exempt from raids.

Earlier this month, a day care teacher in Chicago was dragged out of her preschool by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and their families. A federal judge ruled her and she has since been . 

The incident, caught on camera and made public, has drawn widespread condemnation. 

“Schools should be safe environments for children to learn, for their brains to develop and for them to form secure attachments,” said Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at , an early childhood advocacy group.  

Boteach noted, too, 20% of the early educator workforce are immigrants and while a vast majority have legal status, their families and communities might not. 

“If they are fearful and anxious, they are bringing that fear and anxiety with them,” she said. “And now you don’t know when enforcement will strike and that can be incredibly traumatic even if the child is a U.S. citizen.”

Many high school students, including in , have already been held or deported. 

The 113,000 children in the Stanford study — they attended Bakersfield City Elementary, Fresno Unified, Kerman Unified, Southern Kern Unified and Tehachapi Unified school districts — lost more than 81,000 days of instruction in the two months following the January raids, which lasted three days and targeted agriculture workers. 

None of the Central Valley schools returned calls or emails last week requesting comment. 

Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, examined daily attendance data, which helped him pinpoint a falloff he attributes to harsh immigration tactics.

“That really allowed me to identify how things changed when the raids began,” he said. “Something very distinctive occurred.”

Dee examined data from August through May in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years and from August 2024 through February of this year. He said he was surprised by the magnitude of the impact the raids had on attendance.

Forceful immigration tactics, pandemic-related learning loss and mental health issues combine to exhaust students and families to the point that kids stay home from school, he said.

“I see this increase in absences as an indicator of ways in which we are exacerbating all of those problems,” Dee said. “Aggressive interior immigration enforcement drives families with school-age children away.”

Just this week, student absences in Charlotte, North Carolina, two days after federal immigration agents swept into the city, arresting 130 people. The Charlotte-Mecklenberg School District Monday. 

Adam Strom, co-founder and executive director of Re-Imagining Migration, said the relationship between schools and families is based on good faith. Immigration enforcement, a powerful disruptor, can be catastrophic.  

“Schools ask immigrant families for profound trust — trust with their children, their personal information, their futures,” Strom said. “When ICE raids their communities, families respond by withdrawing from public institutions out of caution — a protective instinct that’s entirely rational. The attendance data tells us exactly what happens when institutions meant to build belonging become sources of fear instead.”

And, he said, that anxiety extends well beyond families with undocumented members.

“When people with legal status, and even citizens, are being detained based on how they look and speak, every immigrant family regardless of documentation worries about whether their children will be safe on the way to and from school,” he said. 

Immigration agents have swept up , including children, holding some detainees for days. Dee said aggressive immigration tactics not only hurt kids, but schools themselves as they are funded based on attendance. 

As to why absenteeism holds steady even weeks after a raid, he said the impact of such enforcement actions linger. Some families become shut-ins. Others might move away in search of safety. 

He said, too, the 81,000 missed days of instruction shoots up to 725,000 when applied to the entire four-county region. 

Some fuel California’s agricultural industry. Reports show roughly half have citizenship or other work authorization. California is home to nearly : Roughly 112,000 between the ages of 5 and 18 are enrolled in the state’s schools. 

Dubbed “Operation Return to Sender,” the Central Valley raids, conducted by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, began January 7, 2025, during the tail end of the Biden era — and the day after the 2024 presidential election was certified by Congress. 

Three former Biden aides said the man who led the effort, Gregory Bovino, and conducted the Central Valley action — hundreds of miles from the U.S. border — without the permission of higher-ups. While border patrol officials said they were targeting only criminals, subsequent investigations found that they of 77 of the 78 people arrested during the sweep. 

The American Civil Liberties Union and U.S. Border Patrol officials in February for these enforcement actions, which it deemed a “fishing expedition.” Bovino has since led other controversial immigration operations, including those in and the one . Reports this week say enforcement target.

Dee said kids in early grades were more likely to miss school than their older peers because those living with undocumented immigrants tend to be younger and families with small children might be more fearful of deportation.

Kathy Mulrooney, director of the Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Strategy Program at , said young children also suffer a particular cognitive trauma when the adults around them are detained. 

“Even if babies don’t have the words for what’s happening, their bodies feel the fear,” she said. 

When a parent is suddenly taken, Mulrooney said, or when a community is shaken by aggressive immigration tactics, students are left with little ability to feel the type of safety and curiosity they need to learn.

“Simply put, when a child’s brain is in survival mode, learning takes a back seat,” she said. 

Schools and other organizations serving undocumented students are taking their activities underground, fearful of revealing all they do to help newcomers navigate life in America — lest they be targeted and shuttered by the Trump administration.

Some have asked staff to use secure messaging systems like Signal instead of text and email to keep sensitive conversations from public reach. Others say such discussions should happen only over the phone. 

A few are reconsidering the distribution of once-standard , afraid they could overstep some unclear federal boundary about immigration enforcement, while others are scrubbing the names and locations of their sites from the internet. 

No matter the strategy, the goal is the same: avoid federal audits, funding cuts and closures that could be prompted by their work with undocumented students and families, but also the administration’s edict against diversity, equity and inclusion.

“Because of the threats from the federal administration about revoking the of nonprofits, we want to keep ourselves from being targeted,” said one man who asked not to be identified because he works for an organization that serves undocumented youth. 

Groups like his can lose their IRS status, which allows them to collect tax-deductible donations, if they engage in political activities. For this reason, he said, they are carefully policing staff members’ speech in public and in private. Political discussions or commentary on social media are forbidden. 

“Anything that could be perceived as obstructing or challenging federal immigration policies, we don’t put in writing,” he said. “Anything that could be seen as a criticism of the administration — or anything that could be seen as partisan — we’re going to completely avoid.”

An administrator for a small Illinois school district that serves mostly Hispanic children said that while it still provides help to all families — including connecting them to rental and tax-preparation assistance — staff are more guarded about publicizing their efforts. Any high-profile association between the school and these types of services can be a flag to their families’ immigration status.

“We’re not trying to draw attention,” she said, asking that she not be identified in order to protect her students. “I don’t want any light shining on our district.”

Her fears around immigration were heightened in February, she said, when she received two letters addressed to her office from the Department of Homeland Security, asking for the whereabouts of two children. 

“I ignored them,” she said. “I just pretended like it didn’t happen. I did not respond in terms of providing the information and so far, nobody has followed up.”

Those early efforts took place just weeks after Trump returned to office and are among the administration’s first known attempts to target and locate undocumented children. Reports of federal agents undertaking welfare checks on young immigrants who crossed the border unaccompanied did not surface until months later. 

Some of those visits have led to . Hundreds of kids, their caretakers hauled away, have been placed in in recent months. 

Many schools, including the one in Illinois, are curbing the use of words like “diversity” and “equity,” in all their communications. They’re worried they could be accused of obstructing the law: Trump has likened the use of these terms — “inclusion” among them — to a type of he will stamp out by withholding the offending group’s .   

These schools and advocacy organizations are also barring staff from participating in protests or rallies related to immigration — or student detainment. 

And they said school-sponsored events, like a normally well-attended spring family night for the parents of English learners, have been nearly empty — or worse, cancelled — since Trump took office and immigrants avoid large gatherings.

Catherine Lhamon, executive director of The at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that now is not the time to retreat. Lhamon, the head of the Education Department’s civil rights division during both the Obama and Biden administrations, said efforts to avoid Trump’s dragnet have proven futile. 

“The impulse to keep your head down and hope that you will escape notice has been demonstrably ineffective during the first months of the Trump administration,” she said. “Fulfilling your mission, doing the things that took you to this work, standing for your principles, that’s what each of us should do.”

Lhamon said, too, that discouraging staff from speaking out publicly in defense of their students erodes the bond between the two. 

“It also strikes at the core component of schooling, that is to teach people how to think critically, how to question authority,” she said. “That is the function of schooling. Curtailing that is a mistake.”

And while Trump has threatened Harvard University with the loss of its 501(c)(3) status, the Nonprofit Alliance notes his , although House Republicans are . 

Whether Trump’s threats are idle or actual, their impact has changed how immigrant-focused entities operate. 

Barbara Marler, a long-time educator-turned-consultant in Illinois, has worked with newcomer students for decades. She’s now offering school districts and other education-focused clients the option of combing through their records to find and erase any DEI-related terms an AI bot could flag as troublesome. 

Such wording could trigger Freedom of Information requests that Marler described as “nefarious” and one school administrator, already inundated by them, deemed harassment.

“Never, in my career of over 40 years, have I felt the need to do this,” said Marler, adding that a majority of school districts in vocal, right-leaning communities feel compelled to adopt these precautions. “They want to do right by their [English learners], but are worried that legal challenges would bankrupt them in the worst-case scenario — or board meeting harassment would be triggered in the best-case scenario.”

Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and director of the notes most of the people who work for organizations that serve immigrants want to draw attention to children and families who’ve historically been cast aside.

“We know exactly what it feels like to feel ostracized by a system that was not built for us,” she said. “We come into this work to amend that. And so the reality of the situation at this moment is heartbreaking. We do not join these fields to mince our words and hide our intentions.”

Some groups, including those that operate inside immigrant-friendly states or cities, with big budgets and robust legal defense, might feel emboldened to push back, she said. But small organizations, particularly those run by immigrants, who might themselves be undocumented or whose staff have mixed status, can’t afford that risk. 

Trump himself was forced to close his own 501(c)(3), a private foundation established in 1987, as part of a 2018 after his family was found to have used money earmarked for charity to further the president’s . Trump, who was $2 million in damages, called the investigation “harassment.” 

Antero Godina Garcia, professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, said even a public retreat in name only by those groups that serve immigrants marks a loss for the community. He worries that it will shrink these organizations’ reach and the families they assist will have fewer places where their identities are recognized and affirmed.

“It is not just less services and opportunities for these communities, but also a broader erosion of how individuals can see themselves as valued within the social fabric of this country,” he said.  

But the man who works for the organization serving undocumented youth, who voiced concern about preserving its tax-exempt status, said it’s difficult to determine what types of comments or activities are considered over the line by the Trump administration. 

“It gets complicated because things that we think are normal and are legal, such as offering know-your-rights training, the administration could easily perceive that as obstructing their policies, making them hostile to us,” he said. 

As for the written footprint, Marler, who has attended numerous conferences on how best to serve multilingual learners, has observed a telling shift in the types of in-class translating applications marketed to teachers. These tools were long promoted for their ability to keep records, allowing educators to go back and examine communications over time to learn more about students and families. 

Now, Marler said, those same companies are marketing privacy. 

“One of their top-selling points was there was no record of the material that was translated,” she said — so communications couldn’t be subpoenaed or subjected to public records requests. “Now, that is their sales point.”

Brian came to the United States from Mexico when he was just 2 years old. He had no idea how he would pay for a four-year degree until he won designed for students like him. A business management major, he graduated from Northeastern Illinois University in 2020 and now lives in Virginia, where he works in education policy and also owns several rental properties. 

“I always pushed myself, but the biggest push of all came from my parents,” said Brian, a lawful permanent resident who asked to be identified by his first name only for fear he could be . “They would ask us to pursue our education because that’s why they came here. They wanted us to make a better life than what they were able to.”

College graduates like Brian with temporary immigration statuses might not be the primary focus of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation effort, but they are no less alarmed by the forced removal of those with

Much of the nation’s attention has fallen on undocumented laborers — an Episcopal bishop in January to show mercy to “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals” —but the administration’s deportation scope is widening and has grown to ensnare those .

More than of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants have earned at least a bachelor’s degree, according to a 2022 report from the Center for Migration Studies of New York. Ernesto Castañeda, director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab at American University, said many people underestimate this group’s educational attainment. 

Most don’t know some immigrants are more credentialed than Americans upon arrival, he said. For example, ages 25 or older reported having a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2023 compared to 36% of U.S.-born Americans, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Deporting this population would mean an enormous drain of “brain and brawn,” Castañeda said. 

“If we expel those people, there would be a big economic loss — and a loss of decades of innovation and scientific discovery, as well as in arts and culture,” he said.

While Trump’s immigrant policies have been cited for making it more difficult to fill , and jobs, it will also shrink the nation’s pool of highly skilled workers, said Prerna Arora, associate professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

“Do we have the necessary workforce to complete the things that we need done, especially in a modernizing society?” she asked. “So many of these [college-educated, undocumented] people — and this is what happens across fields — want to go back and help communities from which they are a part.”

Higher education in the crosshairs

More than undocumented students were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities in 2023, representing 1.9% of all college students. The figure was higher pre-pandemic when it stood at 427,000 in 2019. The American Immigration Council attributes some of the decline to COVID and ongoing legal challenges to , the Obama-era program that gave temporary deportation relief to hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, allowing them to study and work.

One Florida lawmaker now seeks to from state colleges and universities entirely: they’ve already lost access to Texas is  

Trump has made higher education a key focus of his immigration enforcement actions, targeting international students — many because of their political speech or protest actions around the war in Gaza. Thousands have as part of his crackdown, though the administration recently in the face of court challenges.

Still, these international students’ future remains unclear. They are increasingly as to raid dorms, and place them in far from home. 

Another academic, a 32-year-old woman from Senegal, who has lawful permanent resident status but asked that her name be withheld because she , called these removals heartbreaking and unjust. 

“We should be investing and supporting young people, not criminalizing them,” said the woman, who came to the United States with her family at age 7.

She grew up in Harlem and scored high enough on the selective admissions exam to be accepted to Brooklyn Technical, one of New York City’s premier public high schools. A law and society major, she graduated from Brooklyn Tech in 2011. 

It was an enormous accomplishment. Her father had no formal schooling in his home country and her mother attended only through the ninth grade. Their daughter has a master’s degree. 

“My life and achievements are proof of what results when we make these investments,” she said. “So apart from the devastating impact these actions have on these young people’s lives, these actions harm communities — and all of us as a country.”

Roughly 88% of undocumented higher ed students are enrolled as undergraduates and 12% are in graduate or professional schools. Forty-five percent are Hispanic, 24.9% are Asian, 15.2% are Black and 10.8% are white, according to the , which based its findings on data from a one-year sample of the 2022 American Community Survey. 

California, Texas, Florida, New York and New Jersey make up the top five states with the most undocumented higher education students. More than 27% of undocumented graduate students nationally earned their undergraduate degree in a STEM field.

David Blancas, 37, got his bachelor’s degree in secondary education and mathematics at Illinois’ Aurora University in 2009 — he was a stellar student and won a scholarship that covered most of the cost — and worked as a math teacher in Chicago public schools for five years.

He got his master’s in urban education from National Louis University in Chicago in 2013 — also funded by grants and scholarships — and currently works in a leadership role at an organization that helps renters become homeowners through counseling and financial assistance.

Like Brian, Blancas, born in Mexico, came to the United States as a toddler. His father arrived in Chicago first to secure a job — as a busboy and then a cook — and an apartment before his wife and children joined him.

Blancas is the first in his family to graduate from college: His mother dropped out of school before eighth grade and his father stopped attending by ninth grade. 

But they always prized education. 

“They loved school,” Blancas said. “They constantly talked about how they were good at it and how they were very sad that they couldn’t continue because of financial reasons. To them, education was like the biggest thing.”

The Senegalese-born scholar said the same, despite the obstacles she faced: She wasn’t aware of her citizenship status until she was told that she needed a Social Security number to fill out the federal financial aid form for college and found out she didn’t have one. Thankfully, she said, she was accepted by DACA and went on to earn her bachelor’s degree in political science and economics from Hunter College in 2015. 

She worked 35 hours a week in a retail store to cover her tuition and soon joined , which recruits college graduates to serve in high-need schools. She paid for her master’s at the out-of-pocket with her teaching salary. She eventually became an assistant principal and now works in policy and advocacy for a national nonprofit aimed at helping schools better serve all students — including immigrants. 

Living that suburban American life

and state police are in its and deportation push. Chicago, where Brian grew up, is a sanctuary city, one that has pledged by law not to cooperate in these efforts. The president has taken aim at with Chicago its most prominent target: The Justice Department is the city and the state of Illinois for allegedly impeding its enforcement campaign.

As a boy and a young man, Brian wanted to be a part of the Chicago Police Department and spent hours watching Law & Order SVU to get a sense of that life. He applied for a job there as soon as he earned his associate degree. 

“That’s when they told me they didn’t accept DACA recipients,” he said. “I was heartbroken. I did the physical, I did the mental exam and everything, and they did the vetting — they interviewed my neighbors and other people. It was a hard reality check. It was difficult for me to accept that.”

After the setback, he pushed on.

“It’s not just about me or my family,” said Brian, who also works in education policy with an eye toward immigrant students. “It’s for my entire community — to break that stigma that undocumented immigrants are uneducated or that we’re lazy or that we’re just mooching off of the system. People don’t know that for DACA, you have to go through a background check. You have to pay a fee, show that you’re working, you’re paying taxes, that you’re going to school.”

It’s frustrating to see people fighting to end the program, he said. Blancas, also allowed to work under DACA, agrees. He has a wife and two children and lives what he described as a typical middle-class life. 

He said he understands America’s desire to protect its border, to ensure entry to only those who will add to the economy. But that’s exactly what they are getting from the very people they are trying to chase out, he argued. 

“We have our own house,” Blancas said. “We both have really great jobs that give back to the community. We’re able to provide a great life for our children. We’re living that suburban American life, which is amazing.”

A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a newcomer how much they were loved in a place they once called home. 

These are among the items teachers have given their multilingual learners after hearing their families planned to leave rather than risk being detained by immigration agents.

“One of my students told me last week that their family had decided to go back to Brazil because they were afraid of deportation,” said teacher Joanna Schwartz. “It was his last day here. I scrounged up a T-shirt with our school’s logo on it and a permanent marker and my student had all of his friends and teachers sign it.”

She said she taught the fifth grader for three years. 

“It’s nothing big, but it was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him,” she said. 

Some immigrant students wrestling with the fear of deportation leave school with no warning. They simply stop showing up and ignore the calls and emails that follow. 

Other times, they give their teachers just a few hour’s notice, often a single afternoon, to process and accept the loss of a relationship that might have lasted for years. A tight hug, a kind word and then … gone.  

Such scenes are unfolding throughout the country as the Trump administration and , striking terror in the hearts of the undocumented and their advocates. 

Faced with the fallout, teachers who’ve spent their entire careers advocating for immigrant students — fighting battles even within their own districts to ensure they have a robust education — are left fumbling for the right words to say or gift to give a child under extreme stress. 

Schwartz, who teaches multilingual learners in Philadelphia, uses her prior training as a therapist to help kids through these toughest of moments. 

She said she often gives these children “transitional objects,” something tangible, like the signed school T-shirt, to help them feel connected to their friends in the United States as they move back to their homelands.

Schwartz wrote her departing student a letter in which she “reminded him of his many strengths and told him how much he will be missed,” she said. She added drawings, stickers and her email address. 

“I wish I could do more,” she said. 

Areli Rodriguez was devastated when, last winter, during her first year of teaching in Texas, one of her most promising and devoted young students left for another state: The boy’s family was growing wary of and headed to Oklahoma, where they hoped they’d be safer. 

“He was my first student who left for this reason,” she said of the fifth grader who had arrived in the United States from Mexico less than a year earlier. “It was so gutting. It just broke my heart.” 

The family didn’t know the Sooner State would impose some of the harshest in the nation. Those included state schools chief Ryan Walters saying he would comply with Trump’s order allowing immigration enforcement in schools and a failed edict that Oklahoma parents be required to report their own immigration status when enrolling their kids in school. That proposal was rejected by the governor this week, who said children should not be used

Rodriguez is not sure where the child is today. As a parting gift, she gave him a soccer ball signed by all his classmates.

Video: A fifth-grade student leaving Areli Rodriguez’s Texas classroom leads his classmates in a chant in Spanish about self-worth. ����Ӱ�� obscured the students’ faces to protect their identity and provided the English-translation captions. (Areli Rodriguez)

The boy, who was chosen as student of the week when he departed, led the class in a call-and-response chant by Rita F. Pierson just moments before he was gone from the district for good.  

I am somebody.

I was somebody when I came.

I’ll be a better somebody when I leave.

I am powerful, and I am strong.

… I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go.

And, his teacher noted, she wasn’t the only gift-giver that day: The boy left her one of his favorite toys, a Rubik’s Cube. 

In a diary entry, he wrote to Rodriguez and another beloved teacher: “To say goodbye to all of you, Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. [S], I want to tell you that you are my favorite teachers, and I’m sorry for any trouble I may have caused. Maybe I wasn’t the best student, but I am proud of myself for learning so much.”

Rodriguez didn’t need the note to remember him.

“I think about him all the time,” she said, adding that he embodies what she loves most about multilingual learners. “For him, school was a gift, an opportunity, a privilege. He just worked so hard. We had academic competitions. I coached him. He did creative writing in Spanish and he placed. His parents were so supportive — they looked at education as something they wanted to seize.”

His classmates felt the loss, too, Rodriguez said. 

“There would be times when I would sit there at recess and watch them play without him and you could tell there was an element missing,” she said. 

The Department of Homeland Security is urging undocumented people to This isn’t the first time they’ve felt such pressure: Former President in a single term, double that of Trump’s first four years in office. But many of those he turned away were newly arrived at the border. Unlike Trump, Biden shied away from . 

The current president is targeting this population in other ways, too. Trump signed an executive order Feb. 19 aimed at . It’s unclear how this might impact education: Schools receive federal money, particularly to help support low-income children, but they also cannot turn away students based on their immigration status, according to the 1982 Supreme Court decision . 

That landmark ruling, however, , most recently in Tennessee where lawmakers this month introduced a bill saying schools can deny enrollment to undocumented students. The sponsors say it’s their intention to challenge Plyler.

‘We hugged long and hard’

In addition to the T-shirts, cards and other mementos, educators are preparing something else for withdrawing students, a far more practical gift meant to help them resume their education elsewhere — and quickly. 

Genoveva Winkler, regional migrant education program coordinator housed in Idaho’s Nampa School District, said she’s given more than 100 families copies of their students’ transcripts in English and Spanish. 

“This school year, we are preparing ‘packets’ for the families with all that information,” Winkler wrote in a Facebook message, adding her district also gave them textbooks supplied by the Mexican Consulate that parents can use to prepare their children academically and bolster their Spanish. “The students are not 100% bilingual. Parents are taking all steps necessary to make the transition easier for their children.”

Indianapolis teacher Amy Halsall said four children from the same family, ranging in age from 7 to 12, left her school system right after Inauguration Day, headed back to Mexico. 

“They didn’t specifically say that it was immigration related but I would guess it was,” Halsall said. “This is a family that we have had in our school since their sixth grader was in first grade. The kids were really upset that they had to leave.”

The youngest and the eldest told Halsall they want to be ESL teachers when they grow up, she said. The two middle children hope to be mechanics and one day open their own shop. Halsall gave them a notebook full of letters written by fellow students and pictures of their classmates.

“I told the kids that they had learned a lot and always did their best,” she said. “I told them that they worked hard and were on their way to being bilingual. We hugged long and hard. I told them if they ever came back to Indianapolis that they should call us or visit.

I told them if I was ever in Mexico, I would call them. I tried hard to keep things positive but it was hard for all of us. Everyone had tears in their eyes.”

The anxiety continues, Halsall said. Just last week, another child, age 8, told her he worried that “La Migra” — ICE agents — would take his mother away while he was out. 

“I told him that he was safe at school and if he got home and no one was there to call me,” she said. 

Another teacher, in Virginia, said she had two such students leave school so far this academic year. One hailed from Guatemala and the other from Mexico. Both were in their mid-teens and had impeccable attendance, she said.

The boy from Guatemala, a solid student who wanted to accelerate his path toward graduation, would often say how perplexing it was that some of his peers didn’t show the same dedication to their studies that he did. 

Both teens expressed concern to fellow students about possible immigration raids shortly before leaving school for good. Their teacher did not have a chance to say goodbye in either case. Their departure, she said, left her feeling “completely empty.”

“I’ve loved watching them integrate in our school and seeing how they realized they can have this pathway if they choose,” she said. “Watching that choice ripped away by fear is devastating.”

But educators said they are determined to help these students learn, even through this difficult time. Diana Herrera, who teaches in California’s Central Valley but who declined to name her school, vowed to protect her students as if they were her own children. Even with her sensitivity to their plight, she said, attendance has dropped — including among those born in the United States. 

“They are concerned for their family members,” Herrera said, through tears, adding her school has not given teachers any directives on how to address or quell their concerns. “If I can’t give them the right answer or if I can’t make them feel better, they are not going to continue coming.” 

Trump recently removed barriers that once kept immigration agents away from . Conservative forces — who have urged undocumented residents to consider — have also, , been strategizing to undo , the landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that a child cannot be denied a public education based on immigration status. 

Amid these challenges, Cheruba Chavez, who is an English language and special education teacher in New Orleans, pledged to keep her students safe and engaged: Those who miss school will get follow-up calls encouraging them to return, and those who transfer will receive all the help they need to avoid gaps in their learning.

“They are coming to school for something that no one can take away from them: an education,” she said. 

Despite the anxiety around immigration and deportation, Hector Villagra, vice president of policy advocacy and community education at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said he believes campus raids are unlikely. 

But he said staff members should understand their legal obligation: Villagra, an attorney, said schools typically do not have to honor what he called “administrative warrants” from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Most are mere forms issued through the Department of Homeland Security or ICE and are not judicial warrants signed by a judge or magistrate, he said. 

“These documents do not give ICE agents any authority to enter school premises without permission,” he said. 

Dan McNeil, general counsel for the American Federation of Teachers, echoed his remarks at the teachers union’s virtual town hall Thursday night. He said ICE agents on campus should be referred to the school’s administration. As for teachers, they can remain mum. “You have the right to remain silent,” he said. “You should not disclose the immigration status of your student — or even let them know if a student that they ask about is on campus.” 

ICE did not immediately respond to questions about its authority. 

Alejandra Vazquez Baur, cofounder of the National Newcomers Network, said attorneys, not front office workers, should be the ones to decipher which warrants must be acted upon.

She added that Trump’s tactics, which she characterized as “an attack” on immigrant families, are designed to make them believe they do not belong in public spaces. “Families fear to send their kids to school,” she said. “This is about exclusion, racism and power. The cruelty is the point.”

But Vazquez Baur added that immigrant advocates are using this moment to organize, unite, share ideas and push back, when possible, against the president’s directives. 

Even so, tensions remain high on the ground and some schools are cancelling in-person events for parents who are worried about coming to campus, said Nancy Rosas, senior director of schools for the Internationals Network. “Overall that fear makes people behave like they want to hide in the shadows,” she said. 

Viri Carrizales, president of ImmSchools, founded in 2018 to support educators in creating a welcoming environment for immigrant students, said the consternation around immigration has left some educators worried about addressing the matter head on. 

Carrizales, who was undocumented in her K-12 and college journey, said some school staff are prohibiting the distribution of “know-your-rights” cards to students for fear of drawing attention to their schools: She said, too, their silence on these critical issues makes immigrant families feel unsupported. Some are withdrawing their children entirely. 

����Ӱ�� also reached out to multilingual learner teachers on Facebook. While some said attendance held steady, others, like Tammy Ingraham Baggett, who teaches multilingual learners in Harris County, Texas, said numbers declined noticeably in the past week.

She said two students told her they were going to miss school because of possible immigration raids: One child, whose mother was concerned for her safety at school, asked to work on her assignments at home for the rest of the week because of ICE. 

“Is your mom scared?” Ingraham Baggett recalled asking the ninth grader. “She said emphatically, ‘Yes.’ I asked if she was scared. She shrugged, eyes downcast, and nodded yes.”

Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the National Parents Union Policy & Action Center, whose organization has taken a strong stance in favor of immigrant communities, said she is worried about students in Republican states and about those living in the suburbs or in rural areas. 

“I think a lot of our kids in our urban cities are in districts that have the infrastructure to provide regular communication with parents in multiple languages,” she said. “That’s muscle they’ve already built — and it’s one everyone should have.”

Some suburban and rural districts might not have that same capacity, she said.