Some, freshly pressed passports in hand, end up in their parents’ country of origin — even when it’s not their own.

Others are sent to live with family or friends while an unlucky number are placed in foster care, their parents’ rights in jeopardy and reunification precarious. 

The teenagers among them are sometimes thrust into a parenting role themselves: This overnight push into adulthood can leave them managing mortgages while their peers are picking prom dresses in the first of many sacrifices, immigrant advocates told ����Ӱ��. 

“A lot of these older siblings are forgoing college plans and looking for work, trying to figure out how to be mom and dad for their siblings,” said Wendy D. Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families for The Center for Law and Social Policy.  

An 18-year-old Texas resident was left without parents or his U.S.-born siblings more than a year ago when his entire family was stopped by federal agents as they were driving to get medical care for his seriously ill sister. All ended up being sent to Mexico. Using the pseudonym Fernando Hernández García, the young man testified before a House and Senate hearing last week that he was forced to give up college in order to work full time to try and keep the family home.

There are measures in place to help families with this unwanted transition. In 2013, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued the , a federal guideline meant to ensure “immigration enforcement activities do not unnecessarily disrupt” parental rights. 

It allowed ICE to consider whether it needed to hold these immigrants. And if they were detained, the directive encouraged the agency to house them near their families so they could participate in child placement hearings. 

The agency was also advised to arrange transportation to and from court or otherwise allow parents or legal guardians to participate in such proceedings by phone or video.

“It required some sort of cooperation between ICE and local child welfare agencies,” Cervantes said. 

But this directive has been under attack for years. It was weakened during the first Trump administration, bolstered in the Biden era and diminished once again when Trump took office for the second time — and launched a mass deportation campaign.

found that the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children were arrested and detained in the first seven months of Trump’s second term. The news site also determined the Trump administration is per day as did the Biden administration. 

That 11,000 number will have ProPublica reported, if arrests and detentions continued at the same pace in the ensuing months.

The data obtained by ProPublica covers a period up to mid-August 2025. Some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive immigration enforcement sweeps occurred after that in targeted cities, including Chicago, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Minneapolis.  

“I do fear in the months ahead that we could see more instances where kids unnecessarily end up in the child welfare system because of the way ICE has been conducting its raids,” Cervantes said, adding its tactics have been carried out “in a way that really doesn’t give us any assurances they are abiding by their own policy to allow parents to make decisions about what happens to their kids at the time of arrest.”

Families too afraid to reach out

Added to this anxiety, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the execution of these and other directives, is in flux. The DHS is now in the second month of a partial government shutdown as congressional Democrats push to rein in the actions of federal immigrant agents and make them more publicly accountable. 

The department is also in the midst of a leadership change: Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin will replace former Secretary Kristi Noem, who was

Despite concerns about his temperament — a former cage fighter, Mullin once tried to coax a union leader into a physical altercation during a Senate committee hearing — his nomination was .

It’s unclear how Mullin, a 2020 election denier, would wield his authority. But he has said he and recently defended the killing of two Minneapolis residents who protested the government’s immigration enforcement efforts, calling victim Alex Pretti “deranged.” He later said he should not have made the comment, but declined to apologize for it. 

Parents considering their family’s future in the current environment are sure to wonder what comes next as they contemplate the limited tools available to them, including , which allows people subject to immigration enforcement in some states to designate a caretaker for their kids. 

It’s a valuable lever, said Julie Babayeva, supervising attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group: It goes into effect the moment someone is detained. But many families are reluctant to apply for it, she said. 

“We have been talking to PTAs, schools and community organizations in heavily immigrant communities,” Babayeva said. “It’s just difficult for people to trust this. They think, ‘What if I tell you my phone number and that leads to ICE coming to my house?’ People don’t understand that we’re not giving this information out to anyone, that it is confidential.”

shows 19 million children in the U.S. have at least one immigrant parent and that 1 in 6 — or 9 million school-aged children — live in a household with at least one noncitizen adult. An overwhelming majority of these kids are U.S. citizens. 

A Los Angeles teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because of her own citizenship status, recalled the case of two elementary school-aged children — and a toddler — left with their nearly 80-year-old grandmother, who had to return to work to support them after their parents were taken by ICE. 

Such disruptions inflict enormous psychological and emotional damage on children, she said. 

“They’ve heard the rhetoric of Trump saying he’s going after criminals and though they know that’s not true, they still don’t understand why their parents would be targeted,” she said. 

Roughly were deported in Trump’s first year in office and of the in ICE detention as of February, more than 73% had no criminal convictions. 

Eric Marquez, a teacher at New York City’s ELLIS Preparatory Academy, which serves older, immigrant students, said that from a classroom perspective, what stands out most is that these newcomers often present as remarkably composed. 

“They tend to put on a brave face, adapt quickly on the surface and rarely bring up in conversation the people in their lives who may have been detained or deported,” he said. “There’s often an understatedness to it.”

At the same time, teachers can sometimes see the impact indirectly, including shifts in focus, attendance and energy, he said. 

Ellis Prep’s own Dylan Contreras was among the first high school students to be detained by ICE when he was arrested after a May 2025 court appearance. Held in a Pennsylvania detention center for 10 months, he was and returned to school for the first time March 24.

Immigrant families are not the only ones puzzled and angry over the administration’s tactics. Residents in Springfield, Ohio, worried their Haitian neighbors will be deported because their Temporary Protective Status is in jeopardy, have stepped up to do something about it — in this case, house their children. 

One woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of attracting stirred up by Trump, secured emergency foster care credentials to support kids who might need somewhere safe to stay while they wait for a more permanent placement. The process took eight weeks to complete, she told ����Ӱ��.

“I am ready for 0 to 18,” she said of the age of children she could take in at a moment’s notice. “I want to keep siblings together.”

A sudden rush of unhoused kids felt imminent earlier this year when Haitians’ protective status was set to expire and word spread that federal immigration agents would soon arrive in Springfield to deport them. After some 600,000 Venezuelans lost their last year, a lawyer representing the group said “hundreds and potentially thousands of Venezuelan nationals (had)

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court prohibited the Trump administration from ending Haitian deportation protections and in the case in late April. 

Separation not easily undone 

Once separated, family reunification can be difficult, notes Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who has studied immigration for years. Bureaucratic hurdles mean it can take months for a U.S. citizen child to get a passport to join their parents in a foreign country. 

Oliveira said, too, some of the children who enter foster care have family eager to shelter them but they won’t step forward because they are too afraid to interact with the government.

These new forms of family separation are among many fears undocumented immigrants face. But it’s not the worst of them, Oliveira and other advocates said: Detention is by far the most frightening prospect. 

“It’s been harder and harder to get in touch with people who are detained,” Oliveira said. “Sometimes months go by and (federal authorities) don’t even tell you where they are. So, parents are even more worried about that than the actual deportation.”

And, she said, limited communication with family makes it challenging to come to a conclusion on child care. 

“You can’t make decisions,” Oliveira said. “You can’t make phone calls. You can’t figure out what the plan is.”

Already, Cervantes said, her office has seen the fallout. 

“We’ve heard about 15- and 16-year-olds living by themselves for several weeks because their parents were detained and they had no idea where they were,” she said. “ICE was not checking to make sure they were OK. These are U.S. citizen kids.”

And there are other, practical issues that make it hard to reunite in a foreign country, Oliveira said, recalling one family trying to meet up in South America. 

“The dad got deported and the mom was here with the kids, and then she was trying to leave and go back to Brazil — but she was nervous that if she went to the airport, she would be arrested,” Oliveira said. 

When children are left with undocumented relatives, it’s nearly impossible for them to leave the United States to deliver the kids to their parents, said Shaina Simenas, co-director for the Young Center’s Technical Assistance Program.

“If you have a young child that is left with another relative who has their own immigration needs, how would you get them to the country of origin?” she said. “We’re working with a lot of families who are from Venezuela, and there are so many challenges even getting Venezuelan passports — or getting flights to Venezuela. And, of course, there is the financial toll of buying international flights and paying for passports and travel documents.”

Simenas believes poor record-keeping on the part of the government means a lack of accountability. 

“ICE doesn’t consistently and reliably identify whether adults are caregivers for children and so that alone makes it harder to track what might have happened to their children after a parent was taken,” she said. 

Many families separated during Trump’s first term have not seen justice, she noted. Nearly 1,000 children were still waiting to reunite with their parents in 2023, according to . 

“For families being separated now,” she said, “I think there are even fewer ways to track them, to be able to support and ensure they have access to reunify.”

But just because we’re always worrying doesn’t mean that we’re always wrong. Children today are struggling with their mental health — struggling to maintain a semblance of hope about the future they’re inheriting. — report feeling so discouraged that it interferes with their daily lives. 

This youth mental health crisis has been with us for a moment. In 2018, in response to the horrifying Parkland, Florida, school shooting, President Donald Trump’s using federal School Safety funding for investments to “expand the pipeline of school-based mental health services providers.” The ensuing began in 2019, near the end of Trump’s first term. 

And yet, despite the issue’s ongoing urgency, the second Trump administration . Among the schools that felt that loss was the Multicultural Learning Center, a public charter school on the outskirts of Los Angeles County. As the administration’s decision works its way through the courts, it’s worth considering what might be lost if we stop investing in supporting children’s mental health. 

A $4.6M grant for students’ well-being

Winter is sunny in Canoga Park, where the Multicultural Learning Center’s campus is cloudless, ice-free and pushing 70 degrees. The air’s crisp on a dry December Thursday in the school’s courtyard garden, which hosts a series of green, thriving native plants and a sign that outlines the school’s goals for its learners: “Caring, Respectful, Responsible, Safe, Tolerant.” 

The dual language immersion charter school opened in after California voters approved a statewide mandate largely banning bilingual education. Its status as a charter allowed it flexibility from that decision, which it used to pursue a child-focused pedagogy in both English and Spanish. Co-founder and executive director Gayle Nadler says that these elements serve the goal of “learner agency. We want our students to be ready to advocate for themselves.”

This focus on students’ social skills and well-being sharpened as the school reopened after the pandemic. This tracked national—and international—trends. A of the pandemic’s impact on children found that they “consistently point[ed] to a decline in child wellbeing globally.” At the Multicultural Learning Center, school leaders now estimate that they had capacity to support only one-quarter of their children who needed services. 

In 2022, seeking to grow that capacity, the school applied with several other charters for one of . They were awarded nearly $4.6 million over five years, which launched at the beginning of 2023. Simultaneously, the school secured funding from to construct a small “Wellness Center” where students could receive the mental health support they needed. 

That $4.6 million made it possible for the school to staff the center with two full-time therapists and a rotating group of graduate interns preparing for careers in social work or therapy. “The funds get used to partner with universities to have master’s-level students do their fieldwork with us,” Nadler says, “to hire recently graduated candidates from those same universities to work on our staff.” 

The program at Multicultural Learning Center modeled the twin purposes of the grant: create more demand in the job market for school-based mental health therapists by funding those positions while making the schools a training ground for future therapists.

When the administration zeroed out the grants last April, it blocked MLC from accessing the last $1.9 million originally budgeted for the project.

The sudden loss of funds left grantees like Nadler in a lurch. She estimates that her school’s share of the money raised their mental health services capacity to a level that they were meeting the needs of at least 95% of students who needed support. To try to recover the resources they’d been expecting, the school joined a lawsuit headed by Washington state. 

The federal government technically ended the grants by denying their renewal, arguing that they were no longer aligned with the president’s second term priorities. While federal grants are subject to regular reviews to ensure that grantees are meeting expectations, the Multicultural Learning Center and their co-plaintiffs countered that the administration had made the choice to cancel their grants without any substantive consideration of the work being done. 

In December, , and ordered the administration to undertake an appropriate review of the grants by the end of the month. The administration then disbursed small “interim” grants — $90,000 in the Multicultural Learning Center’s case — while individual reviews took place. As the deadline for these reviews neared, the Education Department requested an extension from the court while it prepared an appeal.��

On Feb. 24, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused, ruling that the administration appeared unlikely to convince the courts that it had provided grantees adequate reason for canceling their funding. 

In the meantime, the ruling meant that the department had to release the originally promised 2026 funds for the mental health grants for recipients like the Multicultural Learning Center.

The saga is far from over. As the Education Department plans its appeal, it released six months of the promised 2026 funding. In a letter sent to grantees, the department explained that the remaining half may be made available after it conducts an “updated performance and budget report,” depending on how the lawsuit is ultimately settled.

For now, the school is muddling through, staffing the Wellness Center through the end of this school year with the half-year of funding they were able to pry loose through the courts. Nadler says it’s a priority to maintain these services, but isn’t sure where she’ll find the funds to replace the federal resources if the Trump administration ultimately succeeds in blocking the rest of the 2026 money they’d budgeted for. 

Taking care of the kids still No. 1

Almost anything can become normal if we let it. Remember traveling without a phone in your pocket? Remember when school shootings were so rare that, when they occurred, we expected our political leaders to act to make them even less likely?

Humans can get used to most anything. But that doesn’t mean that we can navigate any particular new normal with an equal degree of ease. This is particularly true for children, who are less practiced at accommodation than their parents and caregivers. You might have grown used to bloodstained classrooms and brazen public corruption, but your 11-year-old’s gonna have questions when they first see these sorts of things. 

As I’ve written many times now, this is the key to understanding the United States’s youth mental health crisis. The various tech boogeymen haunting public discourse — smartphones, social media, screens more generally — are real problems, but insufficient for understanding the depth of the problem. No, today’s kids are gloomy because they are clearsighted: we have dealt them a genuinely terrible hand. 

To dig them (and ourselves) out of this hole, we need to 1) make actual, effective steps towards a safer, stabler and more dignified world worthy of our children’s dreams; and 2) provide mental health services to help repair the damage we’ve done to their well-being. 

“The number one thing you can do to prevent school violence,” Nadler says, “is mental health counseling, build[ing] relationships, taking care of the kids. That’s the number one thing. It’s not metal detectors, it’s not active shooter drills, it’s not armed guards, none of that.” 

“I just can’t imagine a world,” she added, “where we don’t take care of people — and it starts with children.”

Cardona, a fellow at the , through his speeches and other appearances, continues to tell students their ability to speak more than one language is an enormous asset. Not only can it bring them career success, he says, but it deepens their . 

His praise for the multilingual community runs counter to the current administration’s agenda: President Donald Trump issued an executive order in July designating , a pronouncement that immediately sparked efforts to “minimize non-essential multilingual services (and) redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation.” 

Trump and his allies also rolled back longstanding that kept federal immigration agents . Children and their parents have been arrested during pickup and drop-off times, causing absenteeism to spike. And the schools and other groups that serve immigrants are scrambling to stay out of the spotlight, curbing outreach in many cases. 

The dismantling of the U.S. Education Department, too, has left the country’s 5 million English learners with little protection or as to their : After a historic round of cuts, the department’s Office of English Language Acquisition, for example, was left with . 

Cardona, who also works to shore up the leadership skills of other educators through his , said he’s hurt by what has happened to the department whose leadership he left in January 2025.

But even amid the chaos, Cardona sees hope. Trump’s power is temporary, he said. Education lasts a lifetime. 

“Despite what we’re hearing from this administration, the opposite is true,” Cardona said, when asked how he would advise multilingual learners today. “Just wait it out. You don’t have to change your stripes to be successful. I didn’t. Having two cultures and two languages is one of your greatest strengths.”

I caught up with Cardona last week and asked him about the future of multilingual learner education in the U.S. The 50-year-old, who began his career teaching fourth grade in his hometown of Meriden, Connecticut and will be a featured lecturer at Harvard, where he recently at the Kennedy School, was candid in his responses.

What are your three biggest concerns about the state of multilingual learner education right now?

That multilingualism is not being valued as a superpower, that the funding for basic support is up in the air and that it continues to be an ancillary afterthought in many of our communities, as opposed to a tool to provide a skill for students that can serve them well in a globally competitive society.

Programs serving multilingual learners are being sidelined. What’s happening here? 

It reminds me of when the Supreme Court made a decision about affirmative action and there was an extrapolation of intent. They said, “Now, we can’t have programs that support students from different backgrounds because that goes against what the Supreme Court said.” And so they extrapolate, they make up what it means for implementation.

It’s analogous to what is happening here. “Well, we’ve got to cut DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) so that means no parent support, no translating documents, no language line. We’re going to cut those things from the budget because we’re not sure that we want to continue to support ESL programs because the new secretary said no DEI, that we can’t favor one group over another.”

They’re extrapolating or blaming up to get away with cutting things that they don’t understand — or agree with in the first place. There is an overprescribing of an intent that was really never there. Part of it is to justify budget cut decisions or because in some places, now it’s not chic to promote multilingualism. So why bother?

There are places in our country — Arizona, for example — where there are . So, they took it further. This is what California went through in the ’90s and 2000s with (a voter-approved measure that required schools to teach immigrant children only in English). And so you have people doing underground work of multilingual education, which is sad, that in 2026 we have people hiding what they’re doing to promote multilingualism when in every other country it’s almost a prerequisite.

Because of what’s happening at the federal level, people have permission now to kind of get rid of some of the programming that we know supports students and families who are learning English — or multilingual programs where students are learning another language.

What is causing some districts and schools to do this? Is it racism or budgetary concerns? 

From my perspective, it’s a little bit of both. “Why are we spending money on these programs when we could spend it on something else?” It’s the low-hanging fruit, and quite frankly, you’re not going to see too many parents of Latino students speaking up at board meetings if they’re worried about being harassed by immigration. Because the browner you are, the more you’re subject to vilification. 

It starts at the top. You’ve got the president , murderers, painting a picture that immigrants are bad people.

To exclude racism would be Pollyannaish on my part, but to think that it’s only that would be minimizing the nuanced realities that many districts face, saying, “If I have to cut, I’m going to cut where I’m going to get the least resistance.”

How does it make you feel to see the Education Department dismantled? 

It hurts because I know the impact it’s going to have on the students furthest from opportunity. The damage that has been done in the last 12 months will take decades to correct. 

Why do you think it will take decades to repair what’s happening to multilingual education? 

I’ll start with the Office for Civil Rights. When you take out the arm of enforcement that ensures students’ civil rights are being protected, accountability is gone. So what does that mean? That it could be the Wild West and no one’s paying attention because we closed seven of the 12 offices whose job it was to make sure students’ civil rights were not being violated. 

When you cut — or threaten to cut — (English Language Acquisition grants) or you run applications for grants through an AI scanner to pick out the words “diversity” or “equity” to make sure you’re not giving grants to those grantees, you’re basically creating a culture of “don’t do this — or else.” 

And people, in order to get the funding they need to provide the basic needs in their districts, are going to move away from programs that could be viewed as helping address disparities in access and outcomes. 

And what about other moves inside the department? 

I see special education going to HHS (Department of Health and Human Services), and I often say they’re sending it to the least competent Kennedy. So, let’s look at what’s happening there. That department has been downsized as well. When you take 50% of the Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and you dismiss half the people and then you take the other half and you send them over to the HHS, where they’ve diminished their staff, and now you’re asking them to do the supervision, oversight and support. When you remove that, you’re left with great variance throughout our country in the ability to provide services, support, and accountability. 

I would argue that the red states, the ones who voted for this administration, are the ones that are going to suffer the most — the rural communities where they only have their local public school. They don’t have other options. 

This administration will only last for a finite amount of time. How might a new administration roll back these changes?  

I have hope in not just the federal government picking up where it left off, but I am very encouraged by my conversations with the multilingual learner community. They’re building alliances that do not rely on the federal government — because they checked out. 

They’re developing a framework. For example, , (an advocacy group for multilingual learners) is led by the same people that fought Proposition 227 30 years ago. They built an alliance back then and they created what’s called the State Seal of Biliteracy. So, when they , they said, “We’re going to acknowledge that if you’re multilingual, you’re going to get a State Seal of Biliteracy, a badge of achievement.” And when I was secretary, all 50 states adopted that seal. 

The pendulum is going to swing back, but the federal government is only going to be one player. I’m counting on these coalitions to accelerate the remediation and innovation around English language development. I see that happening across the country.

If you could speak directly to multilingual learner teachers, what would you say? 

Consider yourself blessed and fortunate that you’re serving at a time when our students need you, where you’re providing that emotional safe harbor. Your words are the ones that they’re going to remember — not what’s being said on CNN or Fox News.

Absenteeism is rampant in the immigrant community. How can schools get these students back in the classroom?

This is not the answer for that question, but the first thing that came to mind is vote. We need to get off our asses and see the impact that this had on our students, and we need to be angry. We need to not allow for this to continue any longer than it needs to.

With regard to the students that are right now home, I struggle to look a parent in the face in a community where they’re being harassed by ICE and say, “Send them to school, don’t worry, they’re 100% safe,” because we know that’s not true.

What I will say to those families is know your rights. And also, know the culture in which you’re sending your children. Is that school protecting your child? Will you have alert calls? Does your district have a practice to prevent schools from becoming hubs of immigration (enforcement) efforts? 

In many parts of our country, we’re not protecting our students from having our schools be the places where these raids are happening. I had a student in my hometown get picked up when he was going to an immigration center to check in, as he was supposed to. He missed graduation because he was following the rules.

What do you make of this moment for us as a nation? 

We’re going through a period right now where a lot of the fundamental principles of democracy are being questioned. It’s a stain on our beautiful country’s history. The pandemic of prejudice that we’re dealing with now is harder to lead through than the pandemic of disease that we went through five years ago. We got through the pandemic of disease because we came together. What’s happening now is this pandemic of hate and prejudice is pulling us apart. But if you look deeper, you see stories of resilience and of the power of unity.

That afternoon, agents appeared in front of at least two nearby elementary schools, reportedly waiting for parents to pick up their children, “and at one point they were looking into kindergarten classroom windows and just scaring the living daylights out of the children,” said the director, who asked not to be identified to protect the children she serves. “They have guns, they have rifles. They look scary.”

Helicopters also flew overhead at a circling as kids paraded through the streets in their costumes, according to stories collected from Illinois Head Start families on how the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in their state last fall affected them.

Earlier on the 31st, the Illinois director said she had gotten word through phone calls and Signal channels that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had flooded the area, she told ����Ӱ��. A family on their way to enroll their young daughter in an early learning center that shares space with her Head Start program was stopped a block or so away at a major intersection. The father was detained in front of his wife and child, she said.

A dozen Head Start associations representing more than 100,000 children across the country, including the one in Illinois, sent a letter to Congress Tuesday demanding that immigration agents be barred from entering Head Start, child care and pre-K classrooms and premises, including parking lots. 

For nearly three decades, that was a largely accepted practice: Immigration enforcement was prohibited in and around schools, hospitals, places of worship and other so-called sensitive locations. 

One of the first things President Donald Trump did at the start of his second term in January 2025 was . Reinstating those constraints is now one of at least meant to rein in ICE enforcement that congressional Democrats say they need in order to support long-term Department of Homeland Security funding and end the partial government shutdown that is

Their conditions were outlined in a signed by the House and Senate Democratic minority leaders, U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, and include more widely publicized rules, such as prohibiting agents from covering their faces with masks and mandating visible displays of identification. 

This week’s entreaty from the Head Start associations echoes those congressional demands. The early learning groups also urged federal lawmakers to ban DHS agents from interfering with school drop-off or pickup at their programs, including at bus stops, citing another incident in Chicago where a father was his two young kids to school. They were left in the back of the car alone.

“Across the country, children are being harmed by immigration enforcement actions,” the letter reads. “Head Start programs report that children are experiencing changes in behavior and exhibiting signs of fear and anxiety. Families are missing work, keeping their children home, and facing housing and food insecurity.”

Last Thursday, Senate Democrats blocked a spending bill , extending the shutdown and demonstrating they remained firm in their demands.

That same day marked a major change in the department’s increasingly unpopular leadership, with Trump Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. The move followed questions about her handling of department spending as well as mounting criticism around her response to the deadly ICE shootings of two American citizens at protests in Minneapolis earlier this year. 

Trump announced his plan to nominate Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin as her replacement, though his new pick does not seem to signal any planned shift in enforcing the president’s mass deportation agenda. 

‘Safer but not safe’

Policy limiting immigration enforcement near schools, hospitals and churches was formally introduced in the early days of the Clinton administration through a

In the decades since, similar policies have been modified, clarified or codified by presidents from both parties. In 2011, near the end of President Barack Obama’s first term, his administration formally expanded the policy, which was then further clarified under President Joe Biden in 2021.

Trump’s January directive marked a significant departure from these largely bipartisan, long-standing rules, including during his own first term, when DHS issued a saying they would continue to follow sensitive location protocol. 

According to a DHS the policy Trump put forth in his second term was instituted to prevent “criminal aliens — including murders [sic] and rapists” from being “able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.” Some more stringent guardrails have since been reinstated for places of worship, but not for schools or early learning centers.

Providers in Illinois — and across the country — argue this scenario only serves to traumatize children and make their educational spaces less safe.

“We’ve had kids that aren’t coming anymore because they’re too afraid to come to school,” said Kelly Neidel, the executive director of a different Head Start agency in Illinois, which also provides wraparound services to families. “Our food pantry [has] declined. So these people are making a choice … to eat or potentially get picked up.”

In April 2025, a number of organizations filed a lawsuit in Oregon, challenging Trump’s new edict and in September, they were joined by , including staff and parents from a preschool.

In February, the country’s two largest teachers unions filed an , citing an incident in Oregon in which agents smashed in the car window of a father dropping his child off at a day care, as well as students and teachers at Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School being assaulted with tear gas in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Renee Good.

While advocates and providers are hopeful that a forthcoming DHS bill will include a reinstatement of sensitive location protections, some argue it wouldn’t go far enough. 

The Illinois Head Start director, who went out patrolling on Halloween to protect families and kids, said now that she’s seen what federal immigration agents are capable of, it would make her feel “safer but not safe.”

“It might deter them from coming, but would it deter all of them?” she asked. “I don’t know. I honestly cannot answer that question. I cannot answer confidently that they would not enter even if that order was in place.”

Wendy Cervantes, a director at The Center for Law and Social Policy, is helping to lead the charge on federal legislation, which would codify sensitive location policies into law, significantly strengthening their power.

, introduced in the House in February 2025, would prohibit immigration enforcement actions within 1,000 feet of such places, except in certain extreme circumstances. If an officer violated these rules, any resulting information wouldn’t be admissible in court and the targeted person could move to terminate any resulting removal proceedings. 

Since early January, the bill has gained 33 co-sponsors in the House and four in the Senate, meaning over two-thirds of the Democratic caucus is officially in support. It has also been endorsed by over across the country. No Republicans have signed on.��

Some states, including Illinois, have passed their own bills over the past year, but because they have to align with federal policy, they’re largely aimed at providing guidance and setting protocols for how local entities should address ICE. 

“It would make a huge difference to have this done at the federal level,” Cervantes said.

‘A horrendous day’

The Illinois director of programs, who funds centers across a metropolitan area in the state, said that from day one of the second Trump administration she felt a significant shift in the federal approach to early childhood learning. In addition to increased ICE enforcement, her Head Start classrooms — along with thousands of others across the nation — experienced delays in funding that threatened to shutter them. 

Once their grant came through, she and her colleagues had to wade through the realities of operating under the administration’s diversity, equity and inclusion ban, which threatened the core of their work, she said.

Things escalated in September after a father of two, was shot and killed during a highly publicized ICE traffic stop in nearby Franklin Park, Illinois. He had just dropped off one of his children at a Head Start classroom.

“We knew they would eventually be coming our way,” she said, and early learning centers across the region began to prepare. 

That reality hit the morning of Oct. 31 — “a horrendous day” she said, which filled her with fear and made her cry tears of anger. 

And the fear has not subsided, she said, for the families she serves, the staff she employs or for herself. As the child of immigrants and a woman of color, she’s started carrying her passport.

Mirroring steps taken by other early childhood providers in Illinois, images of fake and real warrants have now been posted at the front doors of her centers so staff can differentiate, along with a script of what to say should an ICE agent approach. Head Start Parent Council meetings have moved to Zoom so parents who fear leaving their homes can still remain involved, and centers have organized food drop-offs. 

Programs have installed incident commanders and some have hired security details. Others have their own staff standing guard, but directors fear for their safety too, since many are immigrants themselves.

In November, ICE agents chased one day care worker into the center where she worked in Chicago’s North Side neighborhood. She was in front of children, and subsequently arrested. She was a week later after a federal judge ruled her arrest was illegal because she wasn’t given a preliminary bond hearing.

Volunteer rapid response teams have formed across Illinois to alert providers of nearby ICE activity. In one incident, they were called to stand guard during a field trip to a children’s museum where ICE was “hot and heavy,” according to Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, the executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association, which advocates for all state providers.

“Last fall was terrible,” she said. “I cried every day.” 

“Our ask is keep ICE out of Head Start [and] early Head Start classrooms, facilities, our playgrounds, our parking lots and not interfere in our work or our day-to-day,” she added. “Families need safe spaces to send children … making our facilities safe when ICE is surrounding them is really hard.”

For example, as dramatic as the Trump administration’s demolition of the U.S. Department of Education feels — this simply delivers on a core, decades-old Republican Party , one the GOP only really suspended from 2000 to 2008. 

The administration’s sustained in government programs, society and schools is another of those throwback moves. It might feel new, it might feel unthinkable in a country like ours, one with an exceptional history of linguistic diversity — from German-language to Univisión and , to polyglot sports stars and and . But the current crusade against America’s many non-English languages is actually another atavistic revival of a longstanding conservative project. 

While this monolingual project has found periodic success in the past, the administration’s position occupies surprisingly unpopular turf in the present. from families of school-aged kids suggest that this move runs counter to Americans’ current views on multilingualism — particularly in U.S. schools. 

Polling and focus group data from I published at The Century Foundation suggest that Trump’s English-only agenda is unpopular. My co-authors and I conducted a half-dozen focus groups in English and in Spanish with 64 Latino families across California — and used the results to construct a survey that we administered to a diverse group of 1,000 families in the state. 

We found overwhelming family interest in bilingualism. Fully 94% of families that speak a non-English language at home said that it was “very” or “extremely” important that their child grow up speaking multiple languages. Perhaps more surprisingly, 55% of monolingual English-speaking families agreed. 

Bilingualism isn’t just popular as a value or a possible set of skills for children. Families we spoke with made it clear that they’re enthusiastic about enrolling their children in bilingual or dual language K–12 programs. Nearly two-thirds of families speaking a non-English language at home “strongly” agreed that it was helpful to have their children learning two languages at school, and another 30% “somewhat” agreed. 

Further, when we asked respondents to rank their interest in bilingual education programs on a scale of one to 10, their average rating was a 7.9. More than three-quarters of respondents ranked their interest in bilingual education at seven or higher. Latino families showed similar levels of interest, with 40% rating their interest in bilingual education as 10 out of 10. 

We focused on California families for this study because it, along with Massachusetts and Arizona, hosted a surge of English-only political crusading just a few decades ago. Around the turn of this century, conservatives fought to ban bilingual education and establish English as the “” in their and across the broader country. The organizations, like , carrying this “English-Only” banner were overt in linking their war on multilingualism to an anti-immigrant, anti-multicultural agenda. 

A few years earlier, while running for president in 1995, , “With all the divisive forces tearing at our country, we need the glue of language to help hold us together. If we want to ensure that all our children have the same opportunities in life, alternative language education should stop and English should be acknowledged once and for all as the official language of the United States.”

Many of these 1990s vintage, English-only policies have been by legislation or by voters in state referenda, but the Trump administration breathed new life into them in 2025. Last March, the president signed designating English as the official language of the United States and rescinding non-binding guidance on when federal agencies should provide services in multiple languages. In July, the administration released discouraging federal agencies from offering translation services and instructing them to “prioritize English.” 

If this feels negligible — a minor issue far too insignificant to be politically salient — consider that attacks on multilingualism are (inevitably) attacks on highly popular education programs like dual language immersion schools. The administration’s aggressive detention and deportation campaign is already reducing the daily linguistic diversity of U.S. schools by for of and English learners. 

Should it continue, will shrink the country’s multilingual student population. Not only are linguistically diverse English learners to , they’ve been buttressing school enrollment levels in . 

Put another way: our data indicate that Trump’s immigration agenda may somehow have even more room to fall as it erodes the multilingual vision of American society that people like. 

Many have soured on harsh detention policies that are , and/or law-abiding community members and . Opposition to these policies will only grow as the administration’s ugly treatment of immigrants begins harming the schools of more families — whatever languages they speak at home. 

In late November, the leader of a Native American Head Start program on a reservation in Western Washington State opened an email from the federal government to see that her annual application for funding had been denied.��

The government shutdown had already delayed the much-needed funds by weeks, threatening a closure of her center, which serves toddlers and preschoolers in a tribe of less than 1,000. And now, a week after the government had re-opened, her application had been “flagged for containing language that is not allowable under current federal guidance.”

The culprit? Two trainings for teachers — one focused on inclusionary practices for kids with autism and the other on tools to support young children as they process trauma. Integral to both — and also part of the rejection — an acknowledgment that Native American children would receive priority enrollment in her Head Start classrooms and programming, as federal policy stipulates. 

“But we’re supposed to do those things,” the education director, who asked not to be identified because she fears retribution from the Trump administration, told ����Ӱ��. “So for them to pull them? I’m just — I’m not understanding.”

Ultimately, although she deeply believed the training sessions and prioritizing indigenous children were inherent to her center’s success and part of its stated mission, she wiped the offending language. Her updated grant was almost immediately approved.

Until last week such existential calculations were being forced on Head Start programs across the country by the Trump’s administration 2025 executive order banning practices involving diversity, equity and inclusion. On Tuesday, a federal judge issued temporarily halting the administration’s anti-DEI edict. 

“This is a huge victory for kids!” Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Head Start & Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program, said in a statement. “When a Head Start program has their funding withheld because of their efforts to provide effective education to children with autism, serve tribal members on a reservation, or treat all families with respect, it is an attack on the fundamental promise of the Head Start program.”

The federal early education and support program for low-income families turned 60 last year, a milestone that coincided with perhaps its most challenging and chaotic year. In 2025, the Trump administration  froze — then quickly unfroze, then delayed — grant funding, shuttered five regional offices and fired scores of employees. And during the government shutdown, roughly 10,000 kids across 22 programs lost access to services.

The administration also took aim at Head Start’s of better preparing young children in poverty for school by forbidding providers from overtly addressing issues of race, gender or disability, experts said. The banned word list for grant applications included “disabilities,” “underprivileged” and “Native American.”

The Washington State Native American Head Start director said on reservations “just about every one of our children have been touched by trauma” that relates to their race and the painful history of indigenous people in the U.S. 

“If we don’t know how to work with kids where things are being triggered,” she added, “then how are we going to move forward and have the best education for these kids so they are not shutting down all the time?”

Thrilled but cautious

The Jan. 6 injunction was part of a lawsuit filed in April 2025 against Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials, alleging that the administration was attempting to illegally dismantle Head Start, which serves roughly 700,000 children and families a year.

Roughly 80% of Head Start’s funding comes from HHS and it has long been a stated goal of the right wing to eliminate the program.

The ruling means that for the duration of the ongoing case, the administration can’t enforce the DEI ban nor can it punish Head Start providers for including DEI-related language in their applications or practices in their programs. The judge also ruled the administration cannot fire any more employees at the Office of Head Start, though the sweeping layoffs that have already occurred stand. 

Back in September, the same judge granted a temporary injunction halting the administration from banning undocumented preschoolers and other groups of immigrant children from enrolling in Head Start programs.

In a mandated announcement Friday afternoon, the federal Office of Head Start acknowledged the court’s ruling, saying, certain actions against “DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) … may not be implemented or enforced” for the time being, though they didn’t provide any guidance for providers who were forced to remove training and programming in past applications.

The Office of Head Start and HHS did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether further guidance was forthcoming. 

The Washington grantee expressed cautious optimism in response to the ruling, paired with significant anxiety about what comes next. Her approved application is a binding contract, she said, and since it does not include the trauma and autism trainings or prioritization of native kids, she fears she’ll be deemed out of compliance and forced to pay back the money if she proceeds in that direction anyway. 

She said she could try to re-submit an updated application that includes the previously banned words, but “that would be calling more attention to us, and I really am afraid of the retaliation,” especially given the non-permanent nature of  the injunction.

“Whenever you put ‘temporary’ on something, I’m always cautious,” she added. “Yes, if more things come out I feel like there will be support and it’ll take care of this, but you can’t be certain of that in this political climate.” 

It’s possible the Trump administration could appeal the injunction and it’s not clear how long it will take the underlying case to work its way through the courts.

In the meantime, Ryan, executive director of Washington’s Head Start Association, emphasized that the Trump administration “can’t enforce a contract that is going against the law.” But, he acknowledged, “what that means on the ground is different, because there’s so much fear of retaliation.”

“I’m getting a sense that people will move with a lot of caution at first here to see what happens,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re going to want to make wholesale changes right out of the gate.”

Linda Morris, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and one of the attorneys who filed the suit,  said that while this ruling “doesn’t undo those harms that the administration already inflicted,” it’s still “a huge win for families and it’s a huge win for Head Start providers.”

“We’re thrilled with the decision,” said Morris.

The initial DEI ban, she said, had put Head Start providers in “an impossible bind,” since they were being required to remove programming and words from their grant applications that were required by the statutory text of the Head Start Act. 

They were “in constant fear of being forced to comply with an unlawful directive and potentially be out of step with their mission and their obligations under the Head Start Act or,” she said, “they risk being punished and losing their funding and even being forced to close.”

‘If it weren’t real life, it would be hilarious’

Morris and her ACLU colleagues first filed the lawsuit last spring on behalf of a number of state Head Start Associations as well as parent organizations. Initially, the complaint challenged the mass layoffs and restructuring of the federal Office of Head Start as well as the DEI ban, alleging all were causing irreparable harm.

In July, they updated the complaint following the Trump administration’s unprecedented move to exclude families from Head Start based on immigration status.

The complaint was again updated after the executive director of a Head Start agency in Wisconsin had her Jan. 1 grant application returned with instructions to remove 19 words and phrases, including “institutional,” “historically,” “equity,” “belong” and “pregnant people.” Later that morning, the Office of Head Start followed up with a “complete least of [nearly 200] words” banned from Head Start applications.

In response, senators Patty Murray (D-WA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) issued a Dec. 18 to RFK Jr. expressing “outrage.”

“The chaos you are creating is already jeopardizing services for nearly 700,000 young children across this country,” they wrote, adding that “the ambiguous policy was not accompanied by clarification on what the Administration considers ‘DEI,’ and Head Start programs were left with no meaningful guidance on compliance.”

Ultimately, the Wisconsin provider updated her application to fit this new criteria, but, she wrote in a court record, “compliance is challenging because many of the words on the list are integral to Head Start programming requirements.” The grant application itself, she noted, “already includes some of these prohibited words in pre-populated text … and application questions specifically request responses that include these words.”

“This has put me in an impossible situation,” she continued.

Jennie Mauer, the executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, said this grantee was one of three in her state serving roughly 860 young children to have their applications returned this month because of the DEI ban. Another was accused of non-compliance for writing that they would make an effort to “utilize small businesses, minority businesses, and women-owned businesses.”

“If it weren’t real life, it would be hilarious,” said Mauer. “There are things that are in the form like, ‘Tell us how you’re going to serve children with disabilities,’ but then you can’t say the word ‘disability.’ How do you wrap your head around that? It’s infuriating. I’m just wringing my hands over here.”

The latest ruling, she said, “doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is better, but it means that these worst-case scenarios aren’t going to come to fruition,” at least not immediately.

And while she’s hopeful the government will comply with the judge’s order, damage has  been done to Head Start communities, she said, leaving program leaders, providers and families worried.

“You feel like we’re in this sort of Cold War environment where people are afraid,” she said. “You shouldn’t be afraid of your government.”

Note: ����Ӱ�� replaced two of the photos that ran in an earlier version of this story.

This accounts for close to 10% of all of those served by the early learning programs for lower-income families. 

Due to the timing of federal grants, six Head Start programs serving 6,525 children in Florida, South Carolina and Alabama are already operating without federal funding, the association said. So far, they’ve been able to keep their doors open by drawing on emergency local resources, but that money could soon dry up.  

By Nov. 1, an additional 134 programs across 41 states and Puerto Rico, serving 58,627 children, will face the same fate. In Florida alone, 9,711 Head Start and Early Head Start seats are threatened.

“Programs are scrambling,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. “We don’t want to see our children become the victims or [get] caught in the crosshairs of these types of political fights.”

Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden, called it a significant threat and “the latest attack in a series of attacks on Head Start” since President Donald Trump took office for a second time in January.

“What we don’t know is who’s going to have to close immediately, but some will,” Hamm told ����Ӱ�� Friday, noting the damaging impact closures would have on some of the nation’s most vulnerable children and their families.

Sheridan expressed similar fears: “losing that type of routine, which is so critical for young children — especially young children who have so much going on in their lives — is really problematic for their development.“

“Beyond that,” he said, “it’s going to force parents into making some really tough decisions.”

Head Start parents often work multiple jobs, yet still live under the federal poverty line and so are unable to afford other sources of child care and early learning. If the shutdown continues, Sheridan said, some may have to leave the workforce to care for their kids themselves.

The government shutdown has now dragged into its third week, after Senate Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly failed to come to an agreement on a funding bill. Democrats are that have allowed millions of people to access health care since the pandemic, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Congress passes a bill to reopen the government. 

President Donald Trump has with cuts so far, though interruptions to Head Start funding would impact thousands of families across the political spectrum. For example, in alone, just over 3,700 children are in jeopardy of losing services as of Nov. 1.

This has all compounded existing financial strain on local programs, many of which have struggled to hire and retain teachers, according to the national association. It also follows multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration that have plunged Head Start programs across the country into chaos and uncertainty this year. 

The administration froze — then quickly unfroze, then delayed — grant funding, shuttered five regional offices and fired scores of employees. They also grant recipients that funding would be denied for any programming that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, without defining what that might include — leading to confusion and a lawsuit. 

Then, in July, the administration announced a drastic federal policy shift that would bar many immigrant families from the early education centers. In September, a Seattle judge ruled that these kids can remain in Head Start programs throughout the country, while a case challenging Trump’s order makes its way through the courts.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Office of Head Start, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hamm emphasized that cuts to Head Start services would have a ripple effect across communities, especially rural ones for whom the program may be the only early learning program available as well as a relied-upon contributor to the local economy.

And once a program closes, it can’t always quickly re-open, as laid off staff may be forced to find employment elsewhere.

“Head Start is not a light switch,” she said. “You can’t just turn it off and then two weeks later open it back up.”

Since its inception in the 1960s, Head Start programs have reached and their families, the majority of whom meet federal low-income guidelines. the $12.1 billion program served about 754,800 children from birth to age 5, as well as pregnant mothers and their families in urban, suburban and rural areas in all 50 states and six territories.

They also connect families to community and federal assistance and can help provide a career pathway for parents into early child care and education. The 1,600 local agencies are funded by the federal government, though many also tap into state and local revenue sources.

Historically during shutdowns, Head Start agencies were able to take out loans or dip into reserve funding with confidence that they’d be reimbursed once the government re-opened. While Hamm said she doesn’t have any reason to believe this administration will change that policy, “the way that they have been targeting certain programs and federal staff is leading people to worry,” including banks that have in the past acted as lenders. 

Compounding this anxiety is a concern around other programs that Head Start families often rely on, such as Medicaid; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC; and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.

Despite these hurdles, Sheridan said the Head Start community has really rallied to try and protect and support kids. That being said, the coming challenges are “really disheartening, because children and families should never be put at risk because of political gridlock.”

Newcomer centers opened to ease immigrant students’ transition to school? Closed. 

Hiring new English language learner teachers? Suspended.

These are among the tangible effects of the Trump administration’s targeting services and supports that go toward educating more than 5 million English language learners in the nation’s K-12 public schools.

And there are other, more subtle changes: Many newcomer students, in light of the president’s aggressive deportation campaign, are now too afraid to answer simple questions, the type that not only shed light on their lives but give insight into their academic needs. 

“I’m hesitant to have all the conversations about country of origin — conversations that celebrate diversity and create a community culture of inclusion — because now if you ask a kid ‘Where are you from’ or ‘Where were you born’ you visually see their walls go up,” said Texas teacher Tammy Ingraham Baggett.

Through multiple directives, the Trump administration has gutted the Education Department, including its Office of English Language Acquisition, leaving it with just . The administration rescinded critical guidance on earlier this year while the president’s proposed 2026 budget to support multilingual learners in the classroom. 

Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and director of the , a coalition of over 150 educators, researchers, and advocates from 35 states, said such cuts would have a “substantial, devastating impact.”

Her organization joined forces with another group, Immigrant Connections, to ask educators this past summer to describe what would be sacrificed. Oklahoma, which would lose $6.4 million in funding, would no longer be able to meet multilingual learners’ needs, education leaders said. 

The state would lose valuable school programs, professional development and family engagement geared toward these students — including translation and interpretation services. Likewise, Virginia, Vázquez Baur said, could lose $17.5 million, which would bring about a cascade of cuts, including tutoring for English learners and critical support for students who have gaps in their education. 

“And we know when we lose funding for some groups of students, it hurts all students because resources are pushed to the very edge,” she said. 

Teachers whose multilingual learner programs have already been axed are giving away their textbooks online, hoping they could be of use in another location, and some schools have suspended hiring new English learner teachers, unsure of how many students will show up and attend these classes, immigrant student advocates tell ����Ӱ��. 

Schools could be further hampered in serving these students by the federal government’s recent retreat from its monitoring and oversight role. Without that, Vázquez Baur said, it’s up to states to hold themselves accountable for meeting their legal obligations to educate these children.

She expressed hope that educators will continue to follow the old directives, even in states that support Trump.

“Politics have taken over many state legislatures — including some state agencies — but at the district level, no matter what state you’re in, people are committed to supporting these students,” she said. 

JoAnne Negrín has worked with multilingual learners in New Jersey for much of the past three decades. She’s retired from her full-time post and now serves as a consultant.

Negrín said she has worked hard to identify newcomer parents so that they could fill much-needed positions in the school system, their Ukrainian and Spanish language skills in great demand as the local immigrant population increased in recent years. 

“We were perennially short on classroom aides,” she said. “And parents needed jobs to get settled. So, I started helping them through the process and getting aides in every school that needed them. It was a win for all. We solved a staffing issue, the parents got a paycheck, we got school-level language assistance and the kids got to have a parent in the building while they acclimated.”

But Negrín worries this effort could be lost: She’s particularly concerned about a Venezuelan woman and her husband who were recently hired by the district as bilingual math and science teachers. 

“I spent hours over Zoom helping them sign up for assessments and then walking them through New Jersey certification,” she wrote in a Facebook message. “At that point, I told our HR director to make them his first, best offer because they would soon figure out how valuable they are. He brought them in for around $70,000 each. Now, two years later, they own a home, have pets, they’re part of the community, and they are happy and settled in.”

But it’s they will be permitted to stay. 

“I hate this not only for these teachers, but because I don’t know what the district will do if it loses them,” she said. 

Amy Halsall, a teacher in Indianapolis, said her school has not received funds for professional development so conferences are not being offered — or educators are required to pay for it themselves. 

“We normally have funds for supplies and materials and that is on hold,” she said. “Due to funding cuts and federal policies where parents have to reveal their status, our district is not offering adult ESL classes. We have to be very creative in how we help.”

And newcomer students to her school are scarce, she said: There were just two this year compared to 10 last year. 

Perhaps the greatest loss to Ingraham Baggett’s district, she said, was of the newcomer centers, which were, until recently, thriving inside nine of the district’s 12 high schools. 

Each campus served 20 to 50 such students, she said, with 250 total and four to six teachers per site. Ingraham Baggett, the longest-serving biology teacher in the program, piloted the science courses, wrote most of the curriculum materials and led districtwide training sessions throughout the year for her colleagues. 

“This year I got a phone call in August from my principal, two days before going back to school. The entire district had less than 30 high school New Arrival Center program students enrolled,” she said. “They were consolidating the program. All those program teachers had to be reassigned. Only three got to go to the new campus to continue.”

She said many students who qualify for the services refuse to participate, afraid of being identified as new immigrants. 

“They’re declining services to be less easily identified by ICE, which means they’re missing out on an amazing start to a successful education,” she said. 

Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor of education at Harvard, who spent years researching the educational outcomes of immigrant children for her , said every critical program cut, every staff member let go or reassigned represents another lost opportunity for immigrant children as they and their families feel the walls closing in around them. 

School leaders, she notes, are living through a difficult moment. Long established and trusted programs for newcomer students are suddenly politicized, morphing their existence into an unintended statement, an opposition to a president who has frequently — and educators. 

“It’s this slow burn that has been happening,” Oliveira said. “It comes in all of these different ways. You start to cut that lifeline. Not only are the programs not available, but the people who are able to tell parents about it, distribute the information, inform them … that has been the biggest worry.”

The Trump administration says it will withhold some federal funding from Chicago Public Schools over an initiative to improve outcomes for Black students and guidelines allowing transgender students to play sports and use facilities based on the gender with which they identify.

Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, saying his office has found CPS violated anti-discrimination laws and will lose grant dollars through the Magnet School Assistance Program. The district, with a budget of roughly $10.2 billion, has a five-year, $15 million Magnet Schools Assistance Program grant it received last year.

The feds are demanding that the district abolish and issue a statement saying it will require students to compete in sports or use locker rooms and bathroom facilities based on their biological sex at birth, among other demands.

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However, Illinois law conflicts on both fronts, putting CPS in a difficult position. The state that outlines compliance with the Illinois Human Rights Law, including that schools must allow transgender students access to facilities that correspond to their gender identity. Separately, an Illinois law passed in 2024 and plan for serving Black students.

Chicago Public Schools said Wednesday in an emailed statement that it “does not comment on ongoing investigations.” Previously, its leaders have said that the Black Students Success Plan is a priority to address longstanding academic and discipline disparities that Black students face. They have in defiance of the Trump administration’s crackdown on race-based initiatives.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said earlier this year that if it takes federal funding away from CPS because of the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. His office also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In response to earlier this year, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into the Black Student Success Plan, which sets goals to double the number of male Black teachers, reduce Black student suspensions, and teach Black history in more classrooms. Trainor said in his department’s interpretation, the initiative runs afoul of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year banning the consideration of race in college admissions by offering added support to Black students and teachers exclusively.

“This is textbook racial discrimination, and no justification proffered by CPS can overcome the patent illegality of its racially exclusionary plan,” he wrote.

The OCR also of CPS, the Illinois State Board of Education, and suburban Deerfield Public School District 109 to look into their policies on transgender students using facilities and participating in school sports. Trainor said Chicago’s Guidelines Regarding the Support of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education.

District officials told Chalkbeat recently that the members of a new school board Black Student Achievement Committee tasked with overseeing the plan’s rollout will be unveiled later this month.

Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, issued a statement decrying the federal move to withhold funds from CPS and saying the district will stay the course.

“We will not back down,” she said in the statement. “We will not apologize. Our duty is to our students, and no amount of political bullying will shake our commitment to them.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The decision came just a day after another U.S. district court judge in Rhode Island granted a that offered similar protections to preschoolers That ruling also means undocumented residents can still access adult and career and technical education and won’t be cut off from a range of federally funded emergency services, including for domestic violence and homelessness.

Linda Morris, an ACLU attorney representing the plaintiffs in the Washington state case, said she was elated by the decision, noting its sweeping scope. 

“This is an incredible victory, especially for Head Start providers and Head Start children and families,” she said. “Today’s ruling makes clear that every child, no matter their immigration status, deserves access to early educational support. We are extremely pleased with the court’s decision.” 

In issuing the national injunction, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez strongly rebuked the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees Head Start and funds 80% of its costs, for changing a longstanding legal interpretation and classifying it for the first time as a federal public benefit. 

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for these supports, including food assistance and non-emergency Medicaid. The move to restrict Head Start access is part of a wider Trump administration effort to exclude the undocumented from all taxpayer-funded services and programs, including several that involve education and job training.

The ruling restores Head Start eligibility to children and families who have student visas and other temporary statuses and were also excluded by HHS’s . The move affected the eligibility of more than 500,000 kids, according to the agency’s own analysis, and impacted approximately 115,000 children currently enrolled in the program.

Andrew Nixon, the HHS communications director, said Friday his office disagrees with the injunctions and is evaluating next steps. 

Head Start associations from four states and two parent and caregiver groups sued the agency and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Washington case. 

Joel Ryan is executive director of one of , the.

“I feel relief. I feel like people can breathe a little bit more,” said Ryan, whose organization’s other legal claims against the administration are focused on confusion over its anti-diversity, equity and inclusion mandates and the mass firings of Head Start staff.

Martinez rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that Head Start is a welfare program because it provides other means of support, including meals. Public schools do the same and no one would argue they are not educational in nature, he wrote. 

“Providing services such as health care, nutrition and other social services does not make Head Start non-educational but, as the Head Start Act states, ‘promotes the school readiness of low-income children by enhancing their cognitive, social and emotional development,’” he wrote, noting, too, that Head Start funds do not provide payments of benefits to individual households or families. 

In court Tuesday, U.S. Department of Justice attorney Micheal Velchik tried to parse the degree of learning and instruction that takes place in Head Start from what’s taught at the K-12 level.��

“It’s technically not school or education because it’s preschool. It’s what you do before school and so it’s not really education in that sense,” said Velchik, who mistakenly referred to the program as Head First several times.

Jannesa Calvo-Friedman, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said undocumented parents, families of mixed immigration status and others with full legal standing but who lack documentation told Head Start operators they were keeping their kids away out of fear or confusion.

“The children who are losing education at this time [in their lives] can never get it back,” Calvo-Friedman said, citing studies on the critical nature of early learning. “Unless the directive is stayed or enjoined, defendants will continue to communicate the message that immigrant families need not apply.”

Martinez agreed that allowing the directive to go into effect while the underlying case was being argued would impose imminent and irreparable harm.

“While actual loss of funding from under enrollment might be down the road, families losing access to Head Start due to the Directive’s unclear guidance and chilling effects appears anything but speculative and exists even prior to enforcement,” he notes.  

The judge expressed disbelief at the government’s contention that implementing the restriction immediately would discourage illegal immigration.

“The Court is floored by this argument,” he wrote. “Nothing on the record provides any means for this Court to infer that access to Head Start ‘incentivizes’ illegal immigration.”

Head Start was established in 1965 to help improve kindergarten readiness for low-income children and to support their families. It has served young learners  and their families in the 60 years since. 

In a released today, the foundation and its offshoot, , scored state education departments on whether and how they define immigrant students, collect and report data on their educational progress and fund programs that support them. 

They assigned grades to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., based upon their findings: None won a mark above a C+. Forty-two states ​scored between C- and D- and five — Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Montana and West Virginia — earned an F.

The results come as the Trump administration continues to zero in on this vulnerable student population as part of its multibillion-dollar immigration crackdown: Young people have been arrested, detained — in the case of one Los Angeles teen this month, at gunpoint — and deported. 

The federal government also recently directing schools to accommodate English learners. Immigrant advocates are pleading with state lawmakers to push back by showing their support for these students and better preparing teachers to meet their needs.

“We are witnessing a sinister daily attack on our immigrant neighbors from a federal government bent on stripping immigrants’ access to work, health care, educational opportunities, and even their sense of safety,” said report co-author Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a foundation fellow who heads its National Newcomer Network. “All students show up with a twinkle in their eye, excited to learn — newcomers included — and states need to do more to support them.”

The Century Foundation, founded as the Co-operative League in 1919, recommends states develop specific and consistent definitions for this population, which includes refugees, asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors and migratory children. 

In an effort to better serve this diverse and largely growing student body — there are more than inside the nation’s K-12 public schools — agencies must also collect and publish data on key indicators about their educational experiences, including years in the United States, English proficiency, home language, prior schooling and academic outcomes. Such data points might include school engagement, participation in clubs and sports and any behavioral issues that could arise in school, the foundation concludes.

State education agencies should use the data to inform funding formulas, the report recommends, and to create a newcomer-specific funding structure that supplements federal money. This additional aid should provide support for students in their first few critical years in the public schools system, “with transparent reporting on its use and impact.”

The report highlights the scattershot nature of data collection across the country: 17 states collect no discernable data on immigrant students at all. Twenty-two compile such information to determine eligibility and maintain compliance with federal earmarked for English learners. 

Eight states collect data that might include newcomers, but it isn’t differentiated or used to determine how supports are allocated. Only four have clear definitions of the term “newcomer” and consistently collect robust data about these children. 

requires all districts to submit what it calls Recent Arrivers data and uses the information for federal reporting and to allocate Title III funds, according to the analysis. collects disaggregated immigrant student data annually and later divides it by subgroup, while state, according to the researchers, requires districts to track all eligible English learners in their student information systems and report key data points like birth country and U.S. school enrollment date. 

But outdoes them all, the study shows: It publicly reports disaggregated English learner data by year, including counts and percentages of immigrant, refugee and migrant students, among other groups, and breaks down this data by district, home language and ethnicity. The state, population , had less than residents in 2023. Nearly 84% were of working age. 

“This is exemplary,” the report notes of North Dakota’s approach, adding it allows for a clearer understanding of the diverse needs within this student population and supports targeted interventions for many children, including those with limited or interrupted formal education.

The report cites the unevenness of young immigrants’ educational experience, as they sometimes move between districts striving for stable housing. 

“When these programs differ across district lines within a state, this group of often highly mobile marginalized students may not qualify for comparable services when they move, and their new schools may not receive the resources they need to properly serve them,” the report reads. “State education agencies have the unique opportunity to address these inconsistencies to best support all students, including newcomers.”

English learners nationally had a , as of the 2019-20 school year, compared to the 86% national average.  

At a moment when anti-immigrant fervor was beginning to build in this country, ����Ӱ�� last year tested the enrollment practices of more than 600 high schools, attempting to register a 19-year-old newcomer who spoke little English and whose education had been interrupted. More than 300 schools refused to register him — including 204 denials in the 35 states and the District of Columbia where high school attendance goes up to at least age 20.

Vázquez Baur said newcomer students are here to stay and their presence predates the laws guaranteeing them educational access, including the 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe. The quality of their education, she said, will determine not only their opportunity but the health and well-being of their communities.

“Newcomers students are in our classrooms regardless of what our president says,” she said. “They are valuable neighbors and students. They become valuable leaders in their communities. Especially at this moment, it is the states that are on the front line against the federal government.”

The 14th Amendment has long been interpreted to guarantee the right of citizenship to nearly all children born on U.S. soil. Three district courts concluded Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order taking away that right was likely unlawful and issued universal preliminary injunctions barring the order from taking effect.

In a 6-3 vote Friday, the high court’s conservative majority found the lower court judges overstepped. 

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” reads the majority opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. 

The court ruled that Trump’s birthright order would not go into effect for 30 days. During that time, the possibility exists that the plaintiffs could successfully reargue for another nationwide injunction under the new rules set by the Supreme Court. But if they fail, birthright citizenship may no longer be automatic in the 28 states that have not challenged the president’s directive.

Trump, appearing in the White House briefing room Friday, said “the Supreme Court has delivered , the separation of powers and the rule of law.” 

The decision does not address the constitutionality of Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship, considered settled  law for nearly 160 years. But it comes at a time when the president is aggressively trying to extend his powers through a barrage of executive orders that now can no longer be as forcefully blocked across the country by a single federal judge who deems them unlawful or unconstitutional. Judges have issued since Trump took office for a second term in January, the Associated Press reported.

It also coincides with the administration’s far-reaching and controversial immigration enforcement campaign that has targeted and swept up those without secure legal status, including students. Educators and advocates are particularly concerned about the fate of young children. 

“The timing could not be worse, with increased ICE activity across the country,” said Adam Strom, executive director of Re-Imagining Migration. “As educators, this makes our jobs even harder. When you fear that your citizenship can be taken away, it’s very hard to learn.”

The ruling came just days after the Supreme Court decided on Monday to to countries other than those in which they were born. Immigrant advocates say both decisions run counter to core American values. 

David C. Baluarte, CUNY School of Law professor and senior associate dean for academic affairs, said if Trump is able to implement his birthright order, some children born in the United States to undocumented parents or those temporarily in the U.S. would be in great jeopardy.

“That means they will be an undocumented immigrant here, and everywhere, in perpetuity — or unless they can convince some country to give them citizenship,” Baluarte said.

Walter Olson, senior fellow at the right-of-center Cato Institute, said now is a “particularly bad” time for the high court to weaken a critical means to check the power of a “scofflaw administration.” 

Olson said the president, through this particular directive, signaled from the outset of his second term that he was seeking to be “very radical” in his authority. He said the birthright issue was a remarkable choice because it was not at all up for debate. 

“The law was very clear on behalf of birthright citizenship,” Olson said. “So, the executive order deserved the immediate unpopularity and outrage that came with it. It’s settled law.” 

reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Trump argued it “has always excluded” people born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” including those whose mother was unlawfully present in the country and whose father was not a citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the child’s birth. 

This same restriction applies to those children born to mothers whose presence in the U.S.�� is lawful but temporary, including those visiting under the Visa Waiver Program or on a student, work or tourist visa — if the father is also not a citizen or lawful permanent resident, Trump contends.

Margo Schlanger, law professor and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse at the University of Michigan Law School, said the Supreme Court left open three pathways through which the lower courts can block nationwide policies by the Trump administration they believe to be unlawful.

The first is through a lawsuit filed against the government by a state. The second involves a nationwide class action lawsuit, which can be cumbersome, complicated and time consuming: It’s often difficult to prove any group of people have enough in common to constitute a class. The third would allow a lower court to “set aside” a rule it deems unlawful under the . 

Schlanger notes that every one of the three remaining pathways has “major” procedural obstacles. She predicts that the state plaintiffs will go back to their district courts and argue that even under these new Supreme Court rules, they still have grounds for a nationwide injunction because that is the only way to guarantee complete relief from an unlawful executive order. 

At the same time, she said, in one or more of the other cases, private plaintiffs might try to expand to a class. Both or either type of case could land the issue back before the Supreme Court — not for procedural arguments, but to decide the issue on its merits. 

“I don’t expect the Trump administration would win at that point,” Schlanger said. “What they were doing is using this case as an opportunity to restrict the authority of the non-Supreme Court federal courts.” 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Friday’s decision leaves Americans with one less tool to fight an “out-of-control” executive branch. 

“Today, the justices have kneecapped the lower courts’ ability to protect Americans from Trump’s most pernicious policy abuses, making it far more difficult to resolve key questions by requiring additional litigation,” she said in a statement. “People need courts to protect them from this or any other administration wreaking havoc on our nation’s laws and Americans’ lives.”

Carter was in first grade when the suspensions began. His mom describes it as the year “all hell broke loose.”

As he made his way through the public school system in York County, South Carolina, the now-15-year-old, who has multiple disabilities, continued to struggle.

The situation reached a crescendo in 6th grade, when Carter was suspended out of school for 7.5 days and in school about a dozen times, according to school district records and his mother’s estimates. This was in addition to numerous lunch suspensions — during which he was forced to sit at a table alone in the cafeteria — and bus suspensions, which meant Carter couldn’t ride school-provided transportation. His offenses, Kimberly Tissot, his mom, said, ranged from minor ones,  like “incessant talking” and “cussing,” to the more extreme, including breaking one classmate’s glasses and threatening another.

While Tissot understands why these behaviors needed to result in clear consequences, she argued that every one of them was a manifestation of her son’s disabilities, which include ADHD, fetal alcohol syndrome, a disability involving written expression and a mild intellectual disability. They could have been avoided, she said, if Carter’s school had followed his Individualized Education Program, which lays out the supports and services the school is legally mandated to provide Carter so he can progress and learn.

Ultimately, her son, who has difficulty connecting his actions to their ramifications, was left confused and convinced, “he’s in trouble because he’s bad,” said Tissot, who is also the president and CEO of , an advocacy organization. 

Carter is one of hundreds of thousands of students with disabilities across the country who are suspended from school each year. It’s long been documented that this population of kids is generally more likely to face exclusionary discipline , but because of where he happens to live, Carter is particularly susceptible: No state removes students with disabilities from school for 10 days or fewer at a higher rate than South Carolina.

There, some 15% of special education students faced out-of-school suspensions for up to 10 days in the 2022-23 school year — nearly twice the national average, according to ����Ӱ��’s analysis of the most recently available data.

These numbers may also be a substantial undercount, according to experts who told ����Ӱ�� they’ve witnessed widespread in South Carolina — in some cases to avoid the legal protections that kick in for students with disabilities once they’ve been kept out of the classroom for more than 10 cumulative days. Tissot said she was asked to pick Carter up from school without an official suspension on multiple occasions, a practice she knew to push back on only because of her advocacy work. And she said she only learned of some of Carter’s in-school suspensions, which weren’t all officially documented, from him.

Macaulay Morrison is assistant director of a at the University of South Carolina Law School who represents special education families in their legal battles with schools.

“It’s just reflective of the state of public education of South Carolina as a whole,” Morrison said of the IDEA suspension data. “Sometimes it’s easier for schools to exclude these students than it is for them to figure out how to support them.”

In response to ����Ӱ��’s findings, a South Carolina Department of Education official said they remain “committed to ensuring that all students, including those receiving special education services, are supported in safe and positive learning environments.”

The department has established a goal of working with districts to reduce suspension rates for students with disabilities to 9% or less — significantly lower than its current rate, but still higher than the national average — by working with advocacy and support groups, like the Behavior Alliance of South Carolina, to provide conferences, institutes and training opportunities.

And the department will continue to “closely monitor student discipline data to track progress toward this target … including assisting with district reviews of disciplinary referral data, revision of policies and procedures, and the development of targeted improvement plans at both the school and district levels.”

South Carolina was the only state whose numbers were not broken down by race after state officials notified the U.S. Department of Education of data quality concerns, according to federal Education Department staff. The South Carolina state education department official told ����Ӱ�� that they provided corrected data once they were made aware of the issue, but that update was not reflected in the final federal dataset. 

The federal Department of Education did not respond to repeated requests for comment from ����Ӱ��.

The IDEA dataset is particularly significant because it’s the first to document disciplinary rates among students with disabilities at the national level post-pandemic, a time when . The U.S. Department of Education’s more frequently scrutinized has long shown disparities in discipline between students with disabilities and their general education peers but the most current available complete numbers are from the 2021-22 school year — when most kids were back to in-person learning but some districts were still offering a hybrid model and still others were allowing kids to

����Ӱ��’s analysis of the more recent IDEA data of some 7.5 million students with disabilities across three suspension categories reveals the differences experienced within this vulnerable student group. For example, in addition to South Carolina, special education students living in North Carolina, Delaware and Nevada are far more likely to be excluded from school than students with similar disabilities living in Vermont, Utah and New York.  

The IDEA data, which is released annually, shows that race — also a well-established to suspensions — plays a role among students who are already facing disproportionate discipline. While Black students made up 16% of all students with disabilities nationally, they accounted for nearly a third (31%) of all those students suspended out of school for 10 days or less. 

In some cases, race and geography combined in striking ways in the IDEA data, such as in Nebraska, where almost 1-in-10 Black students with disabilities were removed from school for more than 10 days (a figure which includes in-school and out-of-school disciplinary removals) in 2022-23 — more than any other group in any other state.

Other key findings of the ����Ӱ��’s analysis include:

• Nationally, boys are more likely than girls to be identified as having a disability, and — even when that’s considered — are disproportionately removed from classrooms: While about two-thirds of students with disabilities are male, they account for about 75% of special education students removed from school for any duration of time.

• On average nationally, just over 7% of all students with disabilities received at least one out-of-school suspension for 10 days or fewer.

• Black students with disabilities are disproportionately suspended out of school for 10 days or less in every state, to varying degrees. In Georgia, for example, they make up 39% of those with disabilities, but 59% of those who were suspended. In Delaware, Black students make up just over a third of those with disabilities, but over half of those suspended.  In five states (Indiana, Nevada, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin), at least 20% of Black students were suspended out of school for 10 days or fewer. 

• In both West Virginia and Pennsylvania, almost 1-in-10 Hispanic children with disabilities were suspended for 10 days or less outside of school — more than any other state for this group, though closely followed by Nevada, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

• In South Dakota, 17% of students with disabilities who identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander were suspended for 10 days or less in school — a greater share than in any other state.

• California suspends students with disabilities for 10 days or fewer in school at the lowest rate (0.8%), and Vermont suspends them out of school at the lowest rate (3%).
  
• No state removes students for more than 10 days at a higher rate than Missouri (4%), 2.5 times the national average.

While supporters of stricter school discipline argue suspensions and expulsions are necessary to keep schools safe, research also shows that these measures are associated with a host of negative outcomes, including , and a lower likelihood of and greater involvement with the

exclusionary discipline, which children with disabilities are more frequently subjected to, does not seem to positively impact students’ future behavior and, for younger students, may even exacerbate it. 

For students with disabilities, the loss of instruction time can be particularly devastating, said Amy Holbert, CEO of , a training and information center for families whose children have disabilities. And especially when students receive out-of-school suspensions, it can put a strain on working families who suddenly have to scramble to find child care, she added.

These challenges have only worsened since the pandemic, according to Holbert, who said referrals to her organization for educational concerns have increased 128% since 2020.

����Ӱ��’s data analysis confirms “what advocates across the country have been saying over and over again about the students most likely to experience school pushout and get deprived of access to instructional time,” said Jennifer Coco, interim executive director of .��

It holds up an “important mirror” she added, “on who is getting appropriate interventions and who are the students that we still collectively need to do better by.”

‘The Wild Wild West of civil rights enforcement’

Keisha Sims-Williams’ son, Savion, was just 2 years old when she began to suspect he might have a disability. He was hyperactive and impulsive. Sometimes she’d call his name and he wouldn’t respond. And he would often walk on the tips of his toes — a characteristic more common in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Some of these behaviors made starting school particularly challenging. 

Sims-Williams said she told Savion’s Columbia, South Carolina, school as early as pre-K that he would need extra help. But instead of having him evaluated for an IEP they repeatedly removed him from school — both formally and informally — and ultimately relocated him to a transitional program, though not one for students with disabilities, she said. 

“His pre-K year it got so bad, he was out of school more than he was in,” she said, estimating Savion was suspended for at least 30 days that year. 

Ultimately, Savion was diagnosed with ADHD and autism by clinicians outside of school, but still he wasn’t evaluated for an IEP, which meant he went through his kindergarten year without the same protections around school removals as other students with disabilities. 

As a kid with a suspected disability, though, he should have still had access to at least some of those guardrails, according to Morrison, the South Carolina attorney, who later filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Sims-Williams family.

And so, Savion had another year filled with so many removals his mom lost count. 

“At some point it was like they were on a mission to get rid of him,” she said.

In November of his kindergarten year, Sims-Williams filed a formal written request for an in-school evaluation, but his IEP wasn’t developed until May or implemented until the following August.

“It took two years of me fighting and pleading in order for him to finally get an IEP and be heard and seen as he should,” Sims-Williams said. She believes if that IEP had come along sooner, her son’s early years in school could have looked a lot different.

“No child’s experiences in their education should have been as bad as my son’s,” she added. “They ruined his good years of school. They ruined it.”

Much of this was confirmed by the state’s response to the family’s lawsuit. The South Carolina Department of Education found that the district had violated a number of Savion’s rights as a student with a suspected disability — including by not evaluating him for an IEP in a timely manner and not officially recording removals or creating a behavior plan once he hit 10 days of removals. These failures ultimately led to even more suspensions, according to court records shared with ����Ӱ��.

Since extra supports were implemented, school has been significantly better for Savion. He’s been on honor roll, won awards and no longer cries when she drops him off each morning.

Still, “he’s had some bumps here and there,” she said, noting the now-7-year-old was suspended out of school for about eight days throughout first grade, but “compared to 20 or 30, that’s progress to me.”

“I’m hoping next year we’re down to five. Or none.”

Savion’s race, gender and disability status all make him particularly likely to be suspended, as does the fact that his family also lives in South Carolina. The Palmetto State leads the nation in , as well.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides protections to students who have been removed from school for more than 10 days, but much of the enforcement is left up to schools, districts and states, leading to a patchwork landscape, according to interviews with over two dozen advocates, experts, parents and attorneys. 

“Schools don’t seem to have any incentive to improve their processes and procedures because there isn’t anybody holding them to task,” said Mike Mathison, a juvenile justice resource attorney at the Children’s Law Center at the University of South Carolina Law School.

And in certain cases — like Savion’s — even if a student has a documented disability, it can be challenging to get schools to provide an IEP in a timely manner, leaving vulnerable kids unprotected. 

The disproportionate removal of students with disabilities — especially for boys and those who are Black — experts told ����Ӱ�� is the result of a confluence of systemic issues including discrimination, teacher and school counselor shortages and a dearth of training in positive behavior management techniques, like establishing strong relationships with students and clear routines. Added to that are administrators not understanding or enforcing students’ IEPs or the law, parents not knowing their kids’ rights, a return to top-down “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies and a lack of federal accountability.

This trend of disproportionality is well established: In the 2017-18 school year, 9% of students with disabilities were suspended, compared to 4% of their general education peers, according to a 2022 from the Learning Policy Institute — largely based on analyses of four years of Civil Rights Data Collection. For Black students with disabilities, that figure was even higher: 20% were suspended. 

Students with disabilities are also more likely than their peers to be punished for “broad and subjective categories” of behavior like defiance, according to a 2024 investigation by  .

“There’s disadvantages of being Black when it comes to disciplinary outcomes, and there’s a disadvantage of being a student with a disability as well,” said Richard Welsh, associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University and author of “You can times that together … and that’s the definition of intersectionality.”

While disparities are cause for closer inspection — and can be evidence of discrimination — they alone are not proof of bias, cautioned Paul Morgan, director of the at the University of Albany. That being said, he added, even when controlling for differences in behaviors, Black students appear to be more frequently suspended than their peers. And a recent GAO report determined that Black girls are more likely to be removed from class than their white female peers for similar behaviors in the same schools.

Regardless of whether or not active discrimination is at play, the disparities are at least “a sign of weak systemic practices” and “a call to action,” said Coco, from The Center for Learner Equity.

Despite this, in April, President Donald Trump released an saying he intended to roll back Biden administration discipline guidance, which encouraged school districts to collect, analyze and adjust their policies in light of disproportionate racial outcomes. Trump argued that approach actually weaponized federal civil rights laws in ways that discriminated against white students.

Critics have the executive order, titled Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline, will only further widen disparities for students of color and students with disabilities, especially as  more than consider a return to stricter student discipline policies, including four that have already done so. 

“Common sense is students in school every day learning, and students can’t learn if they’re not in school,” Coco said. “I recognize we need to keep schools safe, so to me a common sense investment is saying, ‘How do we ensure that schools are a place where students are getting access to what they need to thrive and be successful, both in terms of education and wraparound supports?’”

Trump has also been systematically working to dismantle the Education Department, which could mean even less federal accountability and data collection moving forward, said Dan Losen, senior director of education at the National Center for Youth Law.

“We’re in the Wild Wild West of civil rights enforcement,” he said.

A ‘huge oversight’ in IDEA enforcement

The federal law defining the rights of students with disabilities was first passed in 1975 and then updated and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990. IDEA mandates a “free appropriate public school education” for eligible students ages 3-21. In the 2022-23 school year that included or 15% of all those attending public schools — a two percentage-point increase from the 6.4 million students covered under IDEA a decade ago. The federal guidelines provide baseline regulations that states must follow, but some — like New Jersey — have implemented stronger protections as well. 

Under IDEA, states must submit annual data about students who receive special education and related services to the Education Department, including the data analyzed by ����Ӱ��.

And the law provides certain protections around disciplinary removals: If a student with a disability is removed from their classroom for more than 10 days, IDEA mandates a process called a Manifestation Determination Review, a hearing during which a group — including the parents and the student’s  IEP team — meets to determine if the child’s behaviors were either related to their disability or the result of a failure to implement their IEP. 

If the answer to either of these questions is “yes,” the school can’t move forward with the removal and has to instead make a plan to provide updated support.

Experts and parents told ����Ӱ�� that once a student is diagnosed with a disability, schools tend to become particularly cautious about hitting that 10-day mark and triggering the legal review process. In some cases, that means educators pay closer attention to implementing a student’s IEP. But, in others, schools attempt to skirt the system by suspending students “off-the-books.” 

And when schools do implement the hearing process, they don’t always do so thoroughly or with intention, sometimes just “doing [it] to check the box,” said Morrison, the South Carolina attorney.

A recent , for example, found that New York City’s public schools routinely flout these federal guidelines by not properly considering a student’s disability during hearings. 

It can be challenging to hold schools and districts accountable for faithfully implementing these hearings, since the federal government isn’t collecting data around them, according to Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law.

“For monitoring the enforcement of these supposedly important protections, we don’t get to see any of that data,” he said. “Nothing. And I think that’s a huge oversight.” 

Carter, the South Carolina student suspended multiple times throughout his school career, is now leading his own IEP meetings and learning to control his behaviors, his mother told ����Ӱ��. 

Tissot said he made it through the past school year without any suspensions — a first for him — and this fall he’ll start high school. His mom describes the teenager as a sweet, talkative kid who loves to try new foods — “He’s a little foodie!” — play video games and make people laugh.

While Tissot is proud of Carter’s progress, she also worries he’s still not where he needs to be academically, and his history of repeated suspensions has heightened his anxiety at school. 

“He has told me that he tries so hard to control himself that he’s unable to concentrate,” she said.

And she worries for other students with disabilities who don’t have the same resources Carter has — like a mom who’s an advocate in the field — a fear that’s only intensified under the Trump administration.

“The future is not looking good for kids with disabilities who require IEPs,” she said. “It’s very scary because they’re taking away the federal oversight right now so really relying on parents to enforce it. And, I mean, that’s not going to work at all.”

Speaking at a press conference at LAUSD headquarters, Carvalho also said the district would offer transportation to graduation events, shorten lines outside venues, and provide temporary shelter for attendees in case of immigration action by ICE at or near graduation venues.

The district was examining steps it could take to ensure immigrant students can participate in summer school classes that start next week without threat of arrest, including expanded busing and more virtual classes, Carvalho said.

“Our schools are places of education and inspiration, not fear and intimidation,” Carvalho said. “Many of us here are immigrants or children of immigrants.”   

The actions come as the Trump administration has ramped up actions against immigrant students across the country. 

More than 100 graduation-related events are scheduled across L.A. schools on Monday and Tuesday, which is the last day of class before LAUSD lets out for summer break.

Carvalho, who is a Portuguese immigrant and outspoken critic of the immigration policies of President Donald Trump, said some L.A. families were afraid to attend graduation ceremonies, fearful they could be targeted by federal immigration agents. 

He said schools and families remain on high alert after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in L.A. last week arrested in raids across the city.

The federal immigration enforcement actions in Los Angeles last week included arrests at local businesses, but not at schools, and prompted widespread and sometimes violent protests that began on Friday and continued through Monday, with dozens of arrests.

LAUSD does not track students’ immigration status. According to the city’s teachers’ union the district immigrant students, and a quarter of those students are undocumented. 

LA Immigrant families have grown more concerned as the Trump administration has stepped up immigration crackdowns in L.A. and beyond.  

In April, federal immigration agents were denied access to two LAUSD elementary schools after the agents sought to contact five students at those schools, who were identified by federal authorities as minors who arrived unaccompanied at the border.

Carvalho said he has instructed LAUSD school police to “intervene” against any ICE agents who may be attempting immigration enforcement at school graduation events, but he declined to provide additional details.

“Every single graduation site is a protected site,” Carvalho said. “I have directed our own police force to redouble their efforts and establish perimeters of safety around graduation sites, [and] to interfere, intervene and interfere with any federal agency who may want to take action.”

He said he had spoken with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom about the actions he was taking. Reps for Bass and Newsom didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.   

The LAUSD school board, Newsom and Bass have all backed Carvalho in standing against federal immigration enforcement. The LAUSD school board has issued a series of resolutions stating that for immigrant students.

Carvalho said on Monday that last week two ICE vehicles were spotted near two LAUSD elementary schools. The ICE agents didn’t visit the schools, Carcalho said, but they did frighten the children inside. 

“No action has been taken, but we interpret those actions as actions of intimidation, instilling fear that may lead to self deportation,” said Carvalho. “That is not the community we want to be. That is not the state or the nation that we ought to be.”

And yet, we have reached what is perhaps a zenith in Trump-era politics of . The administration’s response to America’s youth crisis has been stunningly consistent: again and again, it has balanced occasional, to do something to address or on the one hand with real and stunningly on the other.��

Perhaps the most direct and comprehensive assault on children is coming through the administration’s war on Head Start. , it’s the federal government’s largest-single investment in early learning, and it . Over its 60 years, Head Start has provided high-quality early learning as well as connecting around and their families to health and dental care, nutrition and housing assistance. 

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump echoed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook in . This was hardly novel: though Head Start has long enjoyed bipartisan support, a subset of , and have spent decades attacking the program. 

While the administration’s chaotic first 100 days of the federal supporting health and well-being, its attacks on Head Start have been uniquely unpredictable. , as Elon Musk and his underlings at the Department of Government Efficiency hacked away at the federal civil service, Head Start providers across the country reported that they were unable to access their normally scheduled federal payments. This posed a particular challenge for Head Start center directors navigating the tight margins that define the early education market; hundreds of early care and learning centers warned that they were at risk of closure. 

Later in the spring, the administration abruptly that offer resources, support and oversight for Head Start providers. 

Several weeks ago, it appeared that the administration was preparing to act more decisively to abandon U.S. kids and families who depend on Head Start. On April 17, the indicating that the Trump administration would erase Head Start funding in its forthcoming budget proposal. Once this hit the news, Head Start supporters to save the program, and the administration . 

While it appears that the administration isn’t (yet) ready to deliver on this promised assault on children’s well-being, it’s worth reminding ourselves just what a stunning mistake it would be to reduce this particular investment in U.S. kids and families. 

Head Start has been studied many times, and the results are broadly positive. Research on it — and other early education programs — finds a relatively consistent pattern:

• Early education programs are reliably good for families and at preparing kids for kindergarten
  
• There’s some waning of positive academic impacts as kids go through K-12
  
• But the long-term impacts of early ed investments are generally positive.��

First, at helping children from historically marginalized communities. Perhaps most importantly in the present political context, early education programs tend to promote better child development outcomes that create cost savings for school budgets. This mostly results from pre-K programs like the likelihood that children will later require special education services or need to repeat a grade. 

For instance, economist Tim Bartik notes that studies show possible of “23 to 86 percent.”   Meanwhile, if a child repeats second (or any) grade, the public pays an additional year of per-pupil funding, and it also delays their entry into the workforce. As such, and keep students on track for college and career is a efficient . Finally, early education programs like Head Start are a boon for working families because get after having a child. 

Most encouraging of all, Head Start appears to create some long-term positive effects. In 2022, the children of Head Start participants garnered benefits like higher high school graduation and college attainment rates, lower rates of teen pregnancy and reduced rates of interaction with the criminal justice system.

For instance, often point to the federal , which gathered data on programs in the early 2000s. It largely found that Head Start had positive initial effects on children’s development, but that these effects “faded out” as kids worked their way into the K–12 education system. But prompted a field of its findings in the 2010s, with concluding that it meaningfully Head Start’s to . 

This begs some critical questions about how the public should measure “success” for Head Start. Begin here: nearly every study of nearly every early education investment shows that these programs are effective at getting kids ready for K–12 schooling. Put simply, pre-K appears to be good at getting kids “pre”-pared for K(indergarten). 

The trouble is, political rhetoric about early education investments has sometimes presented them as an invulnerable “” against all challenges that children may face later in life. This is the wrong way to think about whether early education investments “work,” because it sets an impossible bar for success. Head Start — or pre-K programs more generally — cannot wholly blunt poverty, poor health or the impacts of low-quality K–12 classrooms.

Indeed, even , like those in a recent study of Tennessee’s public pre-K program, indicate a positive path forward for public early education investments. Initial studies of the program garnered headlines. While Tennessee pre-K attendees were than their peers who did not attend the program, pre-K attendees scored worse on a range of metrics by the end of elementary school. 

This is concerning! But a pre-K’s benefits were “most likely to persist until 3rd grade among those students who went on to attend high quality schooling environments and were taught by highly effective teachers.” That is, Tennessee’s pre-K programs succeeded at preparing children for kindergarten, and kids who went from those programs into higher-quality elementary classrooms continued to do better.��

In other words, if Head Start and other pre-K programs are measured as a one-time public investment that will solve all systemic inequities in American schools and society, they will inevitably appear to fail. But if they are measured against their ability to prepare children for elementary schools, it is clear that they are a success. 

Furthermore, this fairer definition of Head Start’s effectiveness would allow policymakers to focus their attention on the necessary work of investing and improving K–12 schools so that they bolster children and families beyond the early years. 

News of agents showing up at Lillian Street Elementary School and Russell Elementary School in South Los Angeles’ Florence-Graham neighborhood was . A spokesperson said the agents were turned away by school administrators at both schools.��

The federal agents’ appearances — with as many as four showing up at one time looking for information on children in grades one through six — were believed to be the first reported cases of Homeland Security authorities attempting to enter a U.S. school.��

Carvalho said in both cases the federal agents falsely told school officials they were given authorization by the caretakers of the children to visit their schools and get ”access” to the students. 

“The agents represented in both instances to the principals that they wanted access to the students to determine their well being,” said Carvalho at a press conference Thursday morning “It is disturbing that during that conversation, they conveyed to both principals that the parents or the legal guardians… provided them authorization for access to these kids in school. That is absolutely, blatantly untrue.”

Carvalho said he believes the visits were related to federal immigration enforcement actions. Representatives for DHS did not immediately respond to a request for information. 

“The children are okay, but the communities are feeling fear, and that is a shame,” said Carvalho, a Portuguese immigrant and critic of President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. 

“I am still mystified as to how a first, second, third, fourth or sixth grader, would pose any type of risk to the national security of our nation, that would require Homeland Security to deploy its agents to two elementary schools,” he said. 

The news comes as families and educators in the nation’s second-largest school district prepare for federal crackdowns amid among the many immigrant families in Los Angeles. 

On Monday, four officers who identified themselves as Homeland Security agents turned up at Russell Elementary’s front office asking questions about four students enrolled in grades 1-4 at the school, Carvalho said.

The school’s administration turned the agents away after determining they did not have a warrant, Carvalho said.

Hours later, he said, another group of agents visited Lillian Street Elementary in search of information regarding a student enrolled in the sixth grade. Those agents, too, were turned away by school officials after it was determined they didn’t have a warrant.

The groups of officers from the federal agency showed up at the two schools in plain clothes, Carvalho said.

Immigration agents may not be given access to schools unless they.

President Trump has vowed to deport record numbers of undocumented immigrants in his second term, but enforcement actions around public schools have so far been limited.

LAUSD appears to be the only school district that has seen federal agents turn up at the schoolhouse door. A visit by federal agents to a Chicago school earlier this year  members of the Secret Service pursuing an investigation. More recently, what were believed to be federal agents parked outside a school in Seattle turned out to actually .

Carvalho said it didn’t matter that the agents were affiliated with DHS, as opposed to the U.S.��Immigration and Customs Enforcement, because the agencies collaborate on enforcement.

Carvalho said the district’s legal department has been informed of the federal visits.

In standing against federal immigration enforcement, Carvalho has the backing of his board, which has passed a series of resolutions stating that for immigrant students.

But even with the actions by the school board, immigrant families fear they could be swept up and arrested or deported in a federal immigration roundup, said Evelyn Aleman, founder of Our Voice, a parents’ group which advocates for LA Unified’s low-income and Spanish-speaking families.

“Our families are in distress over being separated and deported,” said Aleman.

Colorado school districts should revise their school attendance zones at least every four years with a “civil rights focus.” State lawmakers should increase funding to transport students to and from school. And attorneys, advocates, and community organizations should embrace the right to sue over school assignments that increase racial segregation.

Those are among the recommendations in a new report from the Colorado Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “” concludes that the way Colorado draws school attendance boundaries and assigns students to schools mirrors segregated housing patterns and results in low-income families having less access to high-quality schools.

“This segregation fuels a widespread belief that schools serving predominantly white and affluent students are inherently better than those serving predominantly students of color or low-income families,” said.

from local and national and have . While some local school officials, such as the Denver school board, , the federal Trump administration that could trigger civil rights investigations.

The Colorado Advisory Committee is a 10-person group of bipartisan appointed volunteers. Each state has an advisory committee that produces reports on civil rights issues ranging from housing discrimination to voting rights to the use of excessive force by police officers.

In its latest report, the Colorado committee found that “thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of Colorado students are likely to be assigned to schools in violation” of a federal law that says assigning a student to a school outside their neighborhood is unlawful “if it has segregating effects.”

The committee’s recommended solutions attempt to balance strong support for neighborhood schools with allowing families to choose the best school for their child. School choice, or the ability for a student to apply to attend any public school, .

The committee advocated for what it called “controlled choice,” which it said could mean that popular schools reserve seats for students who live outside the neighborhood or that schools give priority admission to non-neighborhood students who live the closest.

To produce its report, the committee held hearings in 2023 to gather input from national experts including university professors, the author of a book on school attendance zones, and representatives from think tanks across the political spectrum.

The committee also convened a group of 10 local experts including Brenda Dickhoner from the conservative advocacy organization Ready Colorado; Kathy Gebhardt, who was then a member of the Boulder Valley school board and now sits on the State Board of Education; former Aurora Public Schools superintendent Rico Munn; and Nicholas Martinez, a former teacher who heads the education reform organization Transform Education Now.

The committee’s other recommendations include:

• The civil rights divisions of the federal education and justice departments should review options for enforcing “the permissible and impermissible use of race in drawing attendance boundaries and setting school assignment policies.”
• Colorado lawmakers should correct “the systemic racial and ethnic disparities” caused by the state’s school transportation system, which does not require school districts to provide transportation to students who use school choice.
• State lawmakers should improve Colorado’s school choice system, including by adopting a uniform school enrollment window statewide and providing families with more information about schools’ discipline policies, class sizes, and other factors.
• Colorado school districts should revise their school attendance zones and student assignment policies at least every four years and “consider racial and ethnic integration as part of the rezoning process.”

“Redrawing school boundaries every few years can help prevent segregation from becoming entrenched while still allowing students to maintain a sense of stability in their educational environment,” the committee’s policy brief said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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.”

The , signed by 65 organizations, was spearheaded by the Medicaid in the Schools Coalition, which advocates to protect and improve school-based Medicaid programs, which primarily serve students with disabilities and those living in poverty.

“Any cuts to Medicaid would reduce care for children with disabilities, undermine efforts to address the mental health crisis and exacerbate workforce shortages of school health providers,” said Jessie Mandle, the national program director at the and coalition co-chair. “Strong school-based Medicaid programs … rely on a strong Medicaid program overall, and so cutting Medicaid is equivalent to cutting school district budgets.”

Schools receive about $7.5 billion annually from , a popular joint federal and state health program that insures nearly 70 million Americans, most of whom are low-income. For more than 30 years, it’s paid for services in schools for students with disabilities as well as low-income students.

While President Trump said this week that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would in the GOP’s quest to deliver $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and beefed-up border security, in Medicaid funding decreases are being eyed in the House.

School-based Medicaid makes up less than 1% of the overall program’s budget, but is still the fourth-largest funding stream for districts and allows them to pay for a swath of resources, including therapies for students with disabilities, school nurses, mental health care and specialized equipment, such as wheelchairs. 

of districts use Medicaid funding to pay for the salaries of health professionals, according to 2017 data. New data forthcoming from The Healthy Schools Campaign suggests that the number is now even higher, Mandle told ����Ӱ��. 

And — 40 million — are now insured through Medicaid or the , which provides low-cost health coverage to children in families that earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Previous that improving children’s health improves their classroom performance.

Meanwhile, the political confusion over whether Medicaid will be protected has done little to quell anxiety that the funding might be in jeopardy. 

A Feb. 19 statement to from White House spokesperson Kush Desai attempted to reconcile Trump’s comments shielding Medicaid with his support for the proposed House budget that targets it: “The Trump administration is committed to protecting Medicare and Medicaid while slashing the waste, fraud, and abuse within those programs — reforms that will increase efficiency and improve care for beneficiaries.”

Any spending caps or reductions to the federal match would shift the bulk of the mandated costs of providing health care coverage to states, according to the coalition’s letter. This could have “devastating” effects, leading to a cut in services for all students — not just those with disabilities — or increased local taxes.��

On the ground, this could result in fewer social workers or school-based psychologists, decreased access to health care — especially in rural and urban communities, a loss of critical supplies that allow children with disabilities to access the same curricular as their peers and noncompliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the coalition states.

“We have a very underfunded special education system,” said Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy at and coalition co-chair, “and this Medicaid reimbursement is a critical source of funding.”

“Trying to find the money within our local education budget to fill in gaps where Medicaid currently reimburses districts would be — in this funding environment in particular — an enormous challenge,” she continued.

Silvia Yee, policy director at the , which co-signed the letter, said it’s particularly important that many of these health-related services are available in schools because they are widely trusted community hubs and family touchpoints. 

The burden of cuts would be felt particularly by vulnerable families, she added: “The more you reduce the available resources to a lower-income family, the more you’re potentially digging a pit for that family, and it’s very hard to dig out of.”

Yee also noted that a rollback in federal funding could make it more challenging for students with disabilities to learn in an integrated setting with their peers, setting them up for “segregation for the rest of their lives.”

“All of these services can and should work together to help us achieve integration that’s not a burden on teachers [and] not a burden on schools,” she said. “Helping take care of children’s medical needs in school is a step forward. Taking that away is such a step backward.”

The world is a messy place. Most of us figure this out by the time we hit adulthood: However compelling our convictions, however good our intentions, humans are constantly tripping into one another. What looks like virtuous, upstanding behavior through our eyes — always looks different to others. Worse yet, sometimes the Good Thing to Do in a moment can be all but impossible to discern. Do you tell the truth now, even if that causes your friend pain? Do you tell them later, even if your delay hurts many more people? Do you turn to violence to stop the violence of others — and if so, how much? 

Pretty much every moral tradition is clear that harm to children is among the gravest misdeeds. This isn’t complicated. Children merit unique protective cushions because of their enormous potential. How they develop now will shape their — and our — future. Further, children cannot deserve harm. They’re morally blameless — . As messy as the world is, it’s obvious that adults shouldn’t hurt children. Further, systems that are somehow violating this — bombing them, shooting them, starving them, injuring them — are also fundamentally wrong. There are no legitimate excuses. End of discussion. 

Hold that close to your heart as you reflect on the Trump administration’s recent decision to open K–12 campuses to armed enforcement actions. For 14 years, the U.S. federal government had recommended that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should steer clear of “” like schools, but also churches, hospitals and other community centers. Immediately after taking power, , opening schools across the country to immigration raids. 

To understand the behind this change, it’s worth understanding why officials ever avoided conducting enforcement at these locations. It’s not that federal leaders were reluctant to carry out U.S. laws, rather, it’s that they wanted to separate the potentially dangerous, complex work of immigration enforcement activity from disrupting children’s daily lives. 

As , “We can accomplish our law enforcement mission without denying individuals access to needed medical care, children access to their schools, the displaced access to food and shelter, people of faith access to their places of worship, and more. Adherence to this principle is a bedrock of our stature as public servants.”

Again: Protecting kids is a paramount moral concern. And in 2025, it’s clear that U.S. adults have collectively failed in that task. Today’s K–12 students have weathered the academic and social strains of a deadly global pandemic. They attend school in an era when campus shootings are regularly in the news and natural disasters amplified by climate change have decimated their communities and shuttered their classrooms in places like , and . They’ve watched violent assaults on representative government being not just normalized as part of U.S. politics — but excused and even celebrated by the leaders of one of our major political parties. Is it any wonder that children’s mental health ?

The kids are not all right. This is a terrible moment to introduce more uncertainty and instability into their lives. At least one major district is pushing back. Denver Public Schools this week to keep ICE agents out of schools, with the school board president noting, “Scared children can’t learn.”

Obviously, the Trump administration’s new ICE-in-Your- Classrooms policy could be stressful for children of immigrants, who are uniquely sensitive to the possible consequences of these raids. Research has that increased immigration enforcement activity around children of immigrants . In the weeks since Trump’s order, , regardless of the specific state of their family’s documentation, . 

And yet, this new policy affects all children. , “This administration is breaking with the idea that schools should be an accepting and reassuring space for young people.” Children don’t have to have an immigrant parent to struggle with this moment. It’s hard to imagine how armed law enforcement activity on campus could help them feel safer or help them learn more, especially as the most recent round of math and reading scores have confirmed that the country’s students are falling further off pace, academically speaking. 

Of course, that’s perhaps the point. The new administration’s K–12 education plans are thin (at best) when it comes to proposals for improving how schools support children’s academic achievement. , Trump and his deputies are and . 

This won’t make communities safer or improve kids’ academic performance. Research , shows that are major to their . It also has found that culturally and linguistically diverse kids are some of U.S. schools’ best students, whose presence appears to academic achievement . 

If this debate still seems complicated: remember that the world’s messy. U.S. immigration laws, , should be enforced. Meanwhile, our kids — currently overcoming generationally awful obstacles — deserve to feel safe and secure enough to focus on learning. 

But anyone who reflects on those two public priorities and concludes that children’s well-being is of secondary importance is betraying the depravity of their moral compass. They are showing that they do not, however much they protest, understand what it means to put students first. 

Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a Founding Partner at the Children’s Equity Project, and a father to three public school students. These views are his alone and do not reflect his employers or any organizations with which he may be affiliated. 

Denver resident Leslie Williams’ daughter, who is transgender, turned 18 in December, something she had been looking forward to given the lessened restrictions on access to gender-affirming care for adults.

Williams and her family moved to Denver from Kentucky in 2023 so her daughter could access hormone replacement therapy, and they’ve gone to Children’s Hospital Colorado since she was 16 years old. She takes estrogen tablets and gets regular lab testing to ensure proper levels.

“It took a while for us to get in, but since then everything’s gone very smoothly,” Williams said. “The physicians have been wonderful. Everybody was wonderful. We had a really good experience there every time we’ve been.”

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Williams said she received a message from the hospital this week notifying her they can no longer provide gender-affirming care to anyone under 19 years old.

“She’s really been struggling a lot lately,” Williams said. “The last two weeks have been really rough, and then getting the notification that her care is going to be possibly suspended or delayed has been a really big blow to her.”

Colorado Newsline, confirming the message Williams received, that Children’s Hospital Colorado sent to staffers telling them that the hospital had stopped offering all gender-affirming medical treatment to patients 18 years old and younger.

President Donald Trump issued an on Jan. 28 that prohibits the federal government from funding gender-affirming care for anyone under 19 and threatens to pull other funding from any entity that offers such care. It also removes Medicare and Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, among other changes.

Gender-affirming care, endorsed by both the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, can range from non-medical interventions like haircuts and name changes to services like hormone therapy and surgery to support the patient’s gender identity.

Access to gender-affirming care has made a “big difference” for her daughter’s self esteem and the way she perceives herself, Williams said. She said she’s scrambling now to find another solution since other clinics are also shutting down access for anyone under 19, and anyone that does offer care has long wait times.

“It’s just really sad to see,” Williams said. “Trans kids already have to go through a lot and they already have higher than normal suicide rates, and so it’s just a really scary time for trans people.”

Children’s Hospital Colorado said in a statement it will continue to provide “behavioral health and supportive care services once approved prescriptions for current patients expire.” The hospital never offered gender-affirming surgical care to patients under 18.

“Like other hospitals across the country, we will continue to assess the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape,” the hospital statement said. “We care deeply about our gender-diverse patients and their families, and we will carefully and responsibly support them as we evolve the model of care we offer.”

Colorado saw an increased need for service following the election. The Trevor Project, a crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ youth, on Nov. 6, the day after the election, than in the weeks prior. In 2023, the organization that 90% of LGBTQ+ youth felt that the current political environment negatively affects their well-being.

Broomfield resident Jessica Broadbent’s 15-year-old son is transgender and has gone to Denver Health for gender-affirming care since he was 12. The first step in his transition was changing his name, a decision Broadbent said he came to all on his own.

“This has been all him making these decisions and me just kind of helping support him along the way and getting all the professional help that we can,” Broadbent said. “It’s been some time, and he’s made these decisions slowly, surely and with informed and professional input. So it’s really frustrating on all levels.”

Her son started taking puberty blockers, and switched to weekly testosterone shots once he turned 14. He recently switched to a daily testosterone cream instead, because he has a fear of needles.

Broadbent said she’s scared for how her son will be affected should he lose access to his medications, as gender-affirming care has been “life changing” for him. She has had “some very disheartening conversations” with her son in recent weeks, and she’s worried more about the mental and emotional consequences than the physical effects if he loses access to his medication.

“It’s frustrating having my kid feeling like he has to suppress who he is, what he believes in, hide to be safe,” Broadbent said.

Denver Health stopped providing some gender-affirming care this week, the reported. The health system said in a Jan. 30 that the Trump order “includes criminal and financial consequences for those who do not comply” and puts at risk its ability to participate in federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which represents “a significant portion of Denver Health’s funding.”

“Denver Health is committed to and deeply concerned for the health and safety of our gender diverse patients under the age of 19 in light of the executive order regarding youth gender-affirming care,” the statement says. “We recognize this order will impact gender-diverse youth, including increased risk of depression, anxiety and suicidality.”

Existing patients should continue with any scheduled appointments, and Denver Health will work privately with its patients to determine the best changes to their medical care, the statement said.

Shelby Wieman, a spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, said the governor wants to ensure “every Coloradan can access the healthcare they need, no matter who they are or how they identify.”

“We are continuing to evaluate Trump’s executive order, which blatantly attacks members of the LGBTQ community, to understand its impact in Colorado and how people can continue to get access to needed care,” Wieman said in a statement.

Williams said she’s seen the governor talk about “protecting trans kids and protecting trans folks in Colorado, and I don’t know how much they can really do when it’s federal funding that’s being cut.” But she wants to see elected officials talk more about how they can actually make a difference.

UCHealth spokesperson Kelli Christensen said the system has only offered gender-affirming care to patients 18 and older, but after the executive order, it will only offer services to patients 19 and older. That includes gender-affirming surgeries as well as medical therapies listed in the executive order.

“We know these changes may be challenging, especially for 18-year-old patients previously approved for gender affirming care, and behavioral health services will be available to help support our patients as they navigate these changes,” Christensen said in a statement.

A spokesperson for AdventHealth said it does not offer gender-affirming care to anyone under 18. HCA HealthONE hospitals also do not offer gender-affirming care. Spokesperson Stephanie Sullivan said its physicians would consult with patients, but they don’t offer any treatments.

‘It’s supposed to be safe’

Broadbent said she plans to talk to her son’s doctor about getting a three-month supply of his medication before the end of the month. She is also looking for other providers that might be able to prescribe his testosterone cream without putting access to federal funding at risk.

“It’s kind of putting us all up against the wall,” Broadbent said. “I didn’t expect it so soon.”

Being in Colorado where “it’s supposed to be safe,” Broadbent said she thought the state would be “somewhat insulated,” though not immune to pressure from the federal government. She and her family moved to Colorado from Florida eight years ago.

“Part of the appeal of being here is the access to care. It’s part of why we paid more to live here,” she said.

Broadbent and her husband are ready to pack up everything they have and leave the country if that’s ultimately what will be best for their children. But her son is a freshman in high school, and he wants to finish school, where he’s already established roots.

Colorado officials need to acknowledge what is happening and to work actively to protect their constituents, Broadbent said. She called the office of U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette’s, a Denver Democrat, and the office shared information on efforts to fight the executive order, a conversation Broadbent said gave her “a little bit of hope.”

In a statement to Newsline, DeGette described the executive order as “cruel” and said it “ignores the fact that this kind of care is supported by every major medical association.” She said executive actions like the ones Trump has taken do not have the authority to override the U.S. Constitution, legal precedent, or federal statute.

“Trump’s actions, which are not based on science or accepted medical practice, are demonizing an already vulnerable group of Americans and denying them the care they need to live as their true selves,” DeGette said.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat who is running for governor in 2026, joined a group of other attorneys general in Wednesday. An executive order from the president cannot make gender-affirming care illegal, because there is no federal law that does, Weiser said in a statement.

The statement said a U.S. Justice Department order last week stated that federal agencies cannot pause financial awards or obligations on the basis of an executive order, meaning “federal funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care continues to be available, irrespective of the recent executive order.”

“As state attorneys general, we stand firmly in support of health care policies that respect the dignity and rights of all people,” the statement says. “Health care decisions should be made by patients, families, and doctors, not by politicians trying to use their power to restrict freedoms. Gender-affirming care is essential, life-saving medical treatment that supports individuals in living as their authentic selves.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.

Students, educators and advocates gathered at a library in Meriden Tuesday to call on state and local leaders to expand protections for immigrant students, as well as those in the LGBTQ+ community, and to fully fund Connecticut’s public schools.

The call to action came just two weeks into Donald J. Trump’s second presidential term, during which he has signed a slew of executive orders that have revoked previous limits on at schools and other sensitive locations, for transgender youth and pledged to  for “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”

“We will not tolerate these unprecedented attacks on public schools, which are the foundation of our democracy, and we will not tolerate these attacks on our students, who are the leaders who will sustain our democracy in the future,” said Leslie Blatteau, the president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers.

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Speaking at a press conference at Meriden Public Library, Blatteau was joined by a half dozen other community advocates who are part of Connecticut For All, a statewide coalition that says its goal is to “reduce and eliminate systemic racial, economic, and gender inequities in Connecticut.” The group called for Gov. Ned Lamont and state lawmakers to commit to protecting students’ safety, providing support and ensuring “they’re able to succeed in their learning environment.”

One proposal put forth Tuesday was to strengthen the state’s , a 2013 law that limits state and local law enforcement cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“We call on state leaders and community members to work together in ensuring that all students, regardless of their background, receive the education they deserve — that ICE does not rip their families apart, and that they honor sensitive locations,” said Tabitha Sookdeo, the executive director for Connecticut Students For A Dream.

“Education is a right. Safety is the right. Dignity is a right,” Sookdeo went on. “The classroom should be a place of learning and growth, not a place of fear and uncertainty. Ensuring protections and resources for these students allows them to focus on their education, just like any other kid, and contribute to their communities.”

Last week, state education officials on how local district leaders should respond to “immigration activities,” including in cases where federal immigration officers request student information or come onto school property.

The  addressed common questions the Education Department has received from school districts about changes in U.S. Homeland Security policy guidance, and it stressed that both state and federal law “protect a student’s right to attend public schools, regardless of their immigration status.”

Sookdeo said the memo was “good start,” but it fell “short of giving guidance to teachers if a school district does not put appropriate protocols into place.”

“What happens if a school allows an ICE officer to come in and take a student? What’s the protocol for that?” Sookdeo said.

Another growing concern is with students who identify as transgender or part of the LGBTQ+ community. One of Trump’s executive orders signed last Tuesday would, if enacted, withhold federal funding from institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, that provide gender-affirming care to youth under the age of 19. The directive also seeks to restrict coverage of those services from federally-run insurance programs, like Medicaid.

Connecticut Children’s CEO Jim Shmerling raised concerns about a cut to gender-affirming services last week, saying that he expects a “significant rise in suicide ideation and potential attempts in suicide.”

Advocates at the news conference echoed Shemerling’s concerns.

“We cannot expect a student to give 100% to their studies if they cannot be 100% of who they are,” said Tony Ferraiolo, of Healthcare Advocates International & Equality Now. “We are setting them up for failure when we take away a child’s ability to be seen,” Ferraiolo said. “What we’re telling them is that they don’t belong.”

Last year, Connecticut reaffirmed Title IX protections after the Biden administration issued new rules expanding protections for transgender students and a to block the rules. The Connecticut Department of Education directing Connecticut schools to recognize and respect a student’s preferences. Refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns or call the student by a particular name may “constitute gender-based discrimination” and be “deemed discriminatory under Title IX,” the guidance stated.

The state also defined gender dysphoria and said it could qualify students for specialized instruction. It allowed school boards to develop policies regarding what information may be shared with parents. And it permitted districts to provide single-sex bathrooms and access to facilities that correspond with a students’ gender identity, granting “equal opportunity” in participation of both curricular and extracurricular activities.

The Biden administration’s 2024 guidance was  by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights which stated it will only enforce Title IX provisions from 2020, which were written under Trump in his first presidency.

“No portion of the 2024 Title IX Rule is now in effect in any jurisdiction,” wrote Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for Civil Rights for the federal Department of Education. Trainor also wrote that under one of Trump’s recent executive orders, which called for the acknowledgment of just two genders, that the education department “must enforce Title IX consistent with President Trump’s Order.”

Trump has also threatened that federal funding could be rescinded “,” from schools that provide direct or indirect support toward the social transition of a transgender student.”

A spokesperson for the Connecticut Department of Education said the agency planned to review its Guidance on Civil Rights Protections and Supports for Transgender or Gender-Diverse Students “to determine whether revisions are required in light of” the Trump administration’s reinstatement of 2020 regulations.

While the Trump administration has threatened funding cuts to K-12 schools, it has also reaffirmed its commitment to through federal funding. School choice — the ability to seek education outside of an assigned, traditional public school — has been a . Proponents say it gives families autonomy to find the education model that works best for their kids, and opponents say it takes funding away from traditional public schools, segregates children and privatizes education.

“Every single child deserves to go to a public school that prepares them for life beyond the classroom, no matter where they live or the economic conditions they face,” Chad Cardillo, a Meriden City Council member, high school teacher and union vice president, said at Tuesday’s event. “Make no mistake that providing taxpayer dollars to private entities under the guise of choice provides one true choice — that of those private entities to exclude students who do not fit their mold.”

Unlike other areas of the country, Connecticut has not seen a serious push to expand school choice through voucher programs, to send their children to private or religious schools. But the approval of charter schools .

Five charter schools received by the state Board of Education and must now go before the state legislature for a final step in the process before they can open their doors and begin enrolling students. At that meeting, Elizabeth Sked, a union member part of the Connecticut Education Association objected to the opening of the schools, saying they “result in inequity, diminished diversity and concentrations of students with the greatest resource needs,” and that the state should instead focus on “sufficiently funding its existing public schools before expanding a parallel system of charter schools.”

Similar sentiments were also shared Tuesday, as Blatteau said “new charter schools and proposed voucher programs undermine the tenets of true public education.”

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A federal judge in Washington state today President Donald J. Trump’s three-day-old executive order to end birthright citizenship. U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, called the order .” He agreed with the four state plaintiffs that it would cause irreparable harm to those denied their right to citizenship, subjected to the risk of deportation and family separation and deprived of federally funded medical care and public benefits that “prevent child poverty and promote child health,” also impacting their education. A separate federal lawsuit is pending in Massachusetts.

— plus San Francisco and Washington, D.C. — and several civil rights groups are suing to block President Donald J. Trump’s move to undo birthright citizenship through executive order, a constitutional challenge education leaders say could transform public schools.��

Trump, who rode a to a second term, argues that to any child whose mother is unlawfully present in the United States or lawfully present on a temporary basis — such as foreign students — and whose father is neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident. 

The move garnered immediate backlash: Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. It states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” 

“If you lose the protections of birthright citizenship and is overturned or somehow ignored, then I think a lot of families would withdraw their children from school out of fear of deportation,” said immigration advocate and policy expert Timothy Boals, referring to the 1982 Supreme Court case which forbids schools from denying enrollment based on a child’s or their parents’ immigration status. 

Conservative forces aligned with the Trump administration have been strategizing an end to Plyler . That potential threat is now being amplified with the affront on birthright citizenship and Tuesday’s announcement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are now free to , churches and other once-protected areas. The president has already pledged and a return to .

“What that means is more children are denied an education and that’s not good for our society if they end up staying,” said Boals, “and it’s certainly not good for the students wherever they end up going.”

Speaking specifically about the ICE enforcement change, Laura Gardner, who founded Immigrant Connections, a consulting group that works with educators, said the policy will create “intense fear” and could negatively impact student attendance and family engagement. It will also be difficult for teachers, whom she said can’t do their job when children aren’t in school. 

“As educators, we always remind students and families that schools are a safe space and now we can’t really guarantee that,” she told ����Ӱ��. “Ultimately, all this is going to do is hurt innocent children.”

About lived with an unauthorized immigrant parent in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. About 250,000 babies were born to unauthorized immigrant parents in the United States in 2016, the latest year for which information is available, according to . This represents a 36% decrease from a peak of about 390,000 in 2007.

The president also seeks to prohibit government agencies from issuing documents recognizing an infant’s citizenship if born under the circumstances he outlined — or from accepting documents issued by state, local or other authorities acknowledging their citizenship. 

The controversial order could go into effect Feb. 19, leaving children born on U.S. soil to non-citizen parents, from that date on, without any legal status. “They will all be deportable and many will be stateless,” according to . 

It said Trump has no right to rewrite or nullify a constitutional amendment, “Nor is he empowered by any other source of law to limit who receives United States citizenship at birth.”

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups fighting the move, called it a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values.

“Birthright citizenship is part of what makes the United States the strong and dynamic nation that it is,” he said. “This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans.”

Romero’s remarks harken back to one of the Supreme Court’s most reviled rulings: . In that 1857 case, the court ruled that enslaved people, including Dred Scott, were not citizens of the United States and, as a result, could not expect any protection from the federal government or courts, according to the . 

The ruling, which pushed the nation toward civil war, was essentially undone by the 13th and 14th amendments. 

New York Attorney General Letitia James lambasted Trump for trying to reverse what has been a hallmark of the nation for more than 150 years.

“This executive order is nothing but an attempt to sow division and fear, but we are prepared to fight back with the full force of the law to uphold the integrity of our Constitution,” she said. “As Attorney General, I will always protect the legal rights of immigrants and their families and communities.”

If Trump’s order is implemented, the U.S. would join other nations that do not allow birthright citizenship — or greatly restrict such protections — including and Australia. 

As of 2022, reported that unauthorized immigrants represented 3.3% of the total U.S. population and 23% of the foreign-born population: Immigrants as a whole comprised 14.3% of the nation’s population that year, below the record high of 14.8% reached in 1890.

At an inaugural prayer service Tuesday, an Episcopal bishop made to reconsider his views on immigrants and their kids. 

“… they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors,” the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde said. “… I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear their parents will be taken away …”

The next day Trumpand described Edgar Budde as a “so-called Bishop” and a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” who was not compelling or smart.

In this politically charged era, there’s one thing both parties agree on: the benefits of high school career pathways. 

With strong bipartisan support, career and technical education programs are poised to be a centerpiece of education policy over the next few years — both federally and in California. That’s good news for students taking agriscience, cabinetry, game design and other hands-on courses that may lead to high-paying careers.

Education advocates hail this as a boon for high schools. Students enrolled in career training courses tend to have . And business leaders say that strong career education can boost a local economy.

But there are still many unknowns, and some education experts worry that an expansion of career education will come at the expense of college-preparation programs, or lead to a return to “tracking,” in which schools steer certain students — often low-income students — toward careers that tend to pay less than those that require college degrees.

“This could be a great opportunity for career and technical education, but we have to do it right,” said Andy Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether, a nonprofit educational consulting organization. “There’s a lot at stake.”

Funding is a primary question mark. While Republicans strongly support career education, it’s unclear if that enthusiasm will translate to more money — especially if Congress eliminates the Department of Education, as President-elect Trump has vowed to do. 

Career education classes can be some of the most expensive programs in a school district. Supplies, up-to-date equipment, teacher training, smaller class sizes, operation costs and students’ certification exams can cost millions, and the costs only increase over time. Schools spend 20%-40% more to educate students in career programs than they spend on those who aren’t, .

Most federal funding for career education comes from a 1960s law meant to improve career education. But that funding has not kept up with the escalating costs. Last year Congress allotted $1.4 billion, which was distributed to states through grants. California received $142 million, and supplemented that with an additional $1 billion.

“It’s wonderful to see this bipartisan support, but we’d like it to lead to continued investment,” said Alisha Hyslop, chief policy, research and content officer at the Association for Career and Technical Education, an advocacy group. 

Career education and tracking

Career and technical education has waxed and waned since its inception in the early 20th century as a way to prepare students, usually from working-class or immigrant families, for jobs in skilled trades.

For decades, most high schools in the U.S. had some form of vocational education. Those programs came under scrutiny in the 1980s and ’90s as some complained about tracking practices that left many students without the option to attend a 4-year college because they hadn’t taken the required coursework.

Partly in response to that criticism, former President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act in the early 2000s encouraged schools to promote college for all students. As a result, many schools cut back their career education offerings and added more advanced academic classes.

Then the 2008 financial crisis hit. High unemployment coupled with the soaring cost of college led schools to revive their career training programs, but with less tracking. Schools started encouraging all students to take career education classes, and the classes themselves were updated. Welding and auto shop were joined by computer science, graphic design, environmental studies, health care and other fields. In California, students are encouraged to take a career pathway as well as the required classes for admission to public 4-year colleges, although last year only about 11% of students completed both, according to .

Welders vs. philosophers

Career and technical education is a focal point of , the conservative policy roadmap written by the Heritage Foundation as well as the Republican party education platform and President-elect Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon. McMahon headed a pro-Trump political action group called America First Action, whose policies include an  in K-12 schools. The Republican platform reads, “(We) will emphasize education to prepare students for great jobs and careers, supporting … schools that offer meaningful work experience.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, put it more succinctly: “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers,” .

Career education has also been a priority for Democrats. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and the Legislature have all promoted career education. In 2022 Newsom created the Golden State Pathways program, a $470 million investment in high school career education, and followed up a year later with the , outlining a long-term vision. Newsom described it as “a game changer for thousands of students.”

In California, the goal is to , and tie pathways — sequences of two or three classes — to the local job market. For example, a  at a high school near the Port of Long Beach includes classes in global logistics and international business. A pathway at Hollywood High trains students for jobs in the entertainment industry. 

More ties to business?

But some educators worry about the fate of career education if the Department of Education, which administers the Perkins Act, is eliminated. Project 2025 suggests moving it to the Department of Labor, where it would likely have stronger ties to business and fewer ties to education organizations. That could impact whether pathway programs continue to have academic components, or include college preparation classes.

“Businesses love CTE because it socializes one of their big costs. Taxpayers are paying to train their workers,” said David Stern, education professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who’s an expert on career education. 

Hyslop shares that concern. 

“Certainly CTE has connections to the economy, but at its heart it’s an education program. It’s about preparing students for their future, whatever that future may be,” she said.

A broader question may be whether the push for career education is part of a backlash against college generally. College enrollment  for a decade, coinciding with a .

Meanwhile, Trump has proposed big cuts to higher education, and has often expressed disdain for what he described as colleges’ leftward tilt. Project 2025 calls for the government to place trade schools on equal footing with 4-year colleges.

“This new interest in CTE captures the anti-elitist sentiment of the time,” Stern said. He added that preparation for college does not have to conflict with preparation for careers, and some programs, such as the , prepare students for both. 

Rotherham agreed. “On the right, there’s definitely antagonism toward college,” he said.

But they both said regardless of the politics behind it, a national focus on career education could be transformative — if it doesn’t railroad students away from college opportunities. Ideally, students can gain career experience in high school, while also learning poetry and civics and other important academic subjects, Rotherham said.

“Power is having choices,” Rotherham said. “That’s what we want for kids. The option to change their mind if they want.”

This was originally published on .