When President Donald Trump promised mass deportations, educators warned that these actions could scare away the families of the school, and affect both immigrant students and those who are not immigrants.
Now, a new investigation provides evidence that migration raids did seem to reduce school attendance. A study by Stanford University revealed that the parents kept their children out of school more frequently after the raids that impacted the Central Valley of California during the winter.
The conclusions suggest that the raids can harm the performance of the students and alter the functioning of schools, even when they do not occur in the school or near it. The study, conducted by Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford University, detected that daily absences increased 22 percent on the dates on which the raids occurred.
This week, the government deployed soldiers in Los Angeles in response to protests against deportations. The absences increased, despite the fact that the district tried to reassure families by telling them that schools were safe.
The new study analyzed the assistance data of five school districts of the South of the Central Valley, which serve a total of more than one hundred thousand children. Public schools do not follow up on the immigration situation. But most students in the region are Latin, many of them children of agricultural workers with an uncertain legal situation. These workers help produce approximately a quarter of the country’s food: fruits, vegetables, cereals and nuts.
Dee examined the three -year assistance data. He discovered an unusual peak of absences in January and February, after the “Operation returned to the sender”, a series of migration raids made by the US Office and Border Protection of the United States.
Dozens of day laborers and field workers were arrested in an Home Depot, in parking lots and in gas stations.
The operation happened in the last days of President Joe Biden’s mandate. But he was seen as a sign of the enthusiasm of the Migration Control Agency for the agenda of President Donald Trump. Since then, immigration raids in California and throughout the country have been sporadic, although very publicized.
And on Friday, immigration officials stopped the raids directed against agricultural workers, among others, after the president recognized at the beginning of the week that the raids harmed the agricultural industry.
In the Central Valley, the migrant parents said that, after the raids of January, they were afraid to be arrested while their children were at school and being deported without them. Instead of risking separation, some parents made their children stay at home.
The increase in absences is equivalent to the average student missing about 15 days a year, compared to 12 days that had been registered before, according to Dee’s article.
Dee described the results as a warning for public education. If absences are still high, they could threaten the learning of students and the mental health of children.
The financing is also in danger because in California the centers are paid based on the assistance of the students.
It is possible that teachers have to adjust the curriculum to meet the needs of students who have lagged behind after missing classes. School counselors and social workers already spend more hours to locate missing children and to treat their anxiety about deportation, according to educators in the region.
The new study echoed previous investigations that discovered that, during the governments of Presidents Trump, Biden and Barack Obama, immigration rates caused a decrease in students’ assistance to nearby schools.
Many immigrants from the Central Valley said that, although the fear of deportation had always persecuted them, anxiety had never been so great. This is driven by the aggressive agenda and rhetoric of Trump, as well as by the stories of family separation and children located in host homes, often shared through social networks.
A Mexican Fresno father, with two school -age children, 14 and 6, said that deportation together with his wife and children would mean losing their possessions, their heritage and their work as a mechanic. In California, he and his wife, who is an agricultural worker, had built a life with a lot of effort.
The man said that, although losing that life would be difficult, deportation without his children was simply unthinkable.
Like other migrant parents, man asked to maintain his anonymity due to his uncertain legal situation.
He has suppressed many of his family’s non -essential trips away from home, but has continued sending his children to school.
Many others have not done so.
A Mexican mother from Fresno feared so much to be deported if she left home that she paid another person to take her daughter to school. He also asked that his name be used.
Over time he took his daughter again and noticed a change in the school gates. There were fewer children rowing to enter the building. Half dozen families that used to see at school they were no longer there.
In a written statement in response to the results of the investigation, Abigail Jackson, spokeswoman for the White House, said: “Illegal immigration is incredibly harmful to all Americans, including families, students and teachers. The Trump government will not apologize for enforcing the law and restoring order in US communities.”
The increase in school absenteeism occurs while educators continue to deal with a pre -existing crisis of chronic absenteeism, caused by the Covid pandemic.
In Fresno Unified, the largest school district in the region, the Superintendent Misty Her performs several home visits a week, and tries to talk to families whose children have stopped going to school.
He said that his goal is not to embarrass them, but to understand why children do not go to educational institutions and offer them help.
He said that, in the past, many seasonal agricultural workers moved to work in the field during crops and left their children in the city with family or friends, so that they could continue to attend school.
Now, parents take their young children with them, because they fear being deported without them.
Although they try to convince parents to send their children again to the classrooms, it also offers the option to enroll students in the Virtual Academy of the School District.
“We provided your laptop and an access point so they can continue online,” he said, and pointed out that, for some students, that routine worked well during the closure of schools through the pandemic.
He said that she and her staff had closely followed the increase in the absences indicated in Dee’s study. Younger children have been more likely to miss class than the elderly, according to the investigation, which fits with a pattern in which undocumented parents keep their children most vulnerable for fear of separation.
Before the January migration raids, school attendance in the Central Valley had improved, according to Dee’s analysis. But anxiety for deportation caused some migrant families to have an enclosed existence, similar to that of the pandemic.
Immigration rates “can essentially create what we discover in COVID: this generation of students who have a different experience with schooling,” said Jacob Kirksey, a professor of education at the Texas Technological University, who has studied how immigrant arrests increase absences and decrease students’ performance.
Kirksey argued that legislators should be cautious when guiding fearful families towards virtual learning.
“Children learn better in person,” he said, and warned about a greater relaxation of the expectations that students go to school every day.
Kirksey said the Dee study methodology was solid. He also suggested that he could encourage policy change.
As the application of immigration laws is outside the control of school systems, states could consider limiting the practice of linking school financing to assistance, he said, and could consider raids as events more similar to natural catastrophes, which arouse additional financing and support.
It is possible that some of the absent children never return to school, because their families may have voluntarily abandoned the country, which is the declared intention of the Trump immigration agenda.
Subscriber content
Nereida Galvez works in a non -profit organization in Fresno that supports immigrants from Mexican indigenous communities. He was in contact with a family that decided to leave the United States.
“They were afraid that their children would stay alone,” he said, “so they decided to take their children with them.”