In January, Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, began hearing anecdotal accounts of a major immigration raid in California’s Central Valley region that may have kept students from attending school.
That same month, the Trump administration revoked a U.S. Department of Homeland Security policy memo that identified K-12 schools and related locations as “protected areas” from immigration enforcement. While the administration replaced that memo with language advising discretion and “a healthy dose of common sense,” the change left school leaders across the country scrambling to reassure families worried about the mass deportation efforts championed by the administration.
In collaboration with Stanford’s Big Local News data journalism unit, Dee gathered and analyzed daily data of student absences from five districts in California’s Central Valley for the 2024-25 school year and the two prior school years to identify any impact from immigration raids. The districts varied in size and, while some were predominantly Hispanic, the districts covered a substantial share of the overall student population in the region, which serves about 537,000 students overall.
Dee found something consistent with prior research: When local raids started in January, student absences rose by 22% compared to expected levels based on the previous two school years. He also found higher rates of absences among younger students, including those in PreK.
“The first and most obvious implication of my study is that the kids who are staying out of school are losing instruction,” Dee said. “I want to underscore that’s happening in the middle of our lingering post-pandemic chronic absenteeism crisis, so it’s adding to that burden.”
Since January, accounts of immigration arrests and raids across the country have only grown, leading researchers to call for more analysis on both the immediate and long-term effects these activities have on students’ academic achievement and well-being.
“There’s a real need to study [the increase in enforcement activity] and understand its effects in the hope that citizens will be better informed about the implications of these policies, and educators will be better prepared to anticipate and respond to their consequences,” Dee said.
Past, present research finds causal link between raids and absences
Back in 2020, Jacob Kirksey, an associate professor of education policy at Texas Tech University, heard from a predominantly Hispanic, agricultural school district in California’s Central Valley whose leaders had noticed spikes in absenteeism at the height of the Trump administration’s first term.
Leaders reported families didn’t feel safe sending children to school whenever local immigration raids made headlines.
To better assess any immediate and long-term effects of raids on school attendance, Kirksey reviewed the district’s weekly attendance data from school years 2014-15 through 2017-18, when average enrollment each year was more than 7,600, and collected news clips and broadcasts of immigration enforcement activity in the area, including high-profile raids and arrests.
His analysis found an immediate effect of growing absences concentrated around larger enforcement incidents. In the longer term, the district saw a two-percentage-point drop in overall attendance as a result of the raids occurring in the study’s time frame.
“If you think about COVID, we have seen a sustained decline in attendance, meaning that students in general are just coming to school less after COVID. That finding is similar here,” Kirksey said.
While school districts do not collect specific immigration status information of students and their families, the district’s overall sustained decline applied to the whole student body with pronounced absences from English learners, students from lower-income families, and students with disabilities, Kirksey added. (Most English learners are U.S.-born citizens.)
Dee’s study findings are similar to those of Kirksey’s, though both researchers noted the need to continue to analyze the causal link between immigration enforcement and school attendance across the country, especially in light of ramped-up enforcement efforts in recent months.
“From a state level, we really have to start thinking about immigration enforcement events as parallel to natural disasters or acts of community violence, because that’s what it’s doing to kids,” Kirksey said.
School finance, student well-being at risk due to raids
In California, as in a handful of other states, school funding is tied to daily attendance, meaning increased immigration raids and arrests could affect schools’ bottom line, Dee said.
Immigration officers have targeted California for enforcement most recently, and clashes between protesters and law enforcement have drawn national attention, especially after President Donald Trump activated National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles.
Student well-being may also be at risk as a result of ramped-up immigration enforcement. There’s evidence that more cases of immigration raids can increase the prevalence of anxiety disorders in students and have longer-run implications for educational attainment and other long-term academic outcomes, Dee said.
Teachers also face more challenges when a growing number of students are absent, both in terms of meeting the differentiated needs of their students, and in how they manage the instructional pacing within their classrooms, Dee added. Longer-term data analysis may also look into cases of disenrollment tied to increased immigration enforcement.
“We have much more to learn about the developmental implications of this type of [enforcement] activity for kids,” Dee said.
For now, Kirksey advises districts to promote cohesion around communication and protocols for when students are absent from school and focus on re-engagement through cultivating a sense of belonging and investing in family engagement.
Dee also encourages districts to hear directly from families as to what may help bring students back to school, whether it’s mental health supports or even offering virtual schooling options.
