The Impacts of Immigration Actions on Students and Schools

BY STEVE NUZUM

According to the most recent data from the South Carolina Department of Education, during the 2025-26 school year, 115,320 Hispanic or Latino students regularly attended public schools in South Carolina. During the previous year, according to Department data, 117,140 Hispanic or Latino students attended school regularly. 

Without further research, it’s impossible to know for sure what happened to nearly 2,000 students from one year to the next, although it’s important to note that during the previous several years, this population had increased significantly in public schools. 

With that said, the 2025-26 school year started off with concerns that a promised federal crackdown on “illegal immigration” could frighten immigrant families, with both documented and undocumented members, and others, from sending children to schools. 

And arguably the school year that followed has seen much more extreme enforcement actions than even critics of the federal policy predicted, resulting in widespread criticism and protest, and a promised end to the “ICE surge” in Minnesota that, as of this writing, hasn’t happened yet. 

During the 2025 legislative session, South Carolina Freedom Caucus members Jordan Pace and Stephen Frank filed House Bill 3866, which would require families to submit proof of residency when enrolling students. (Both, incidentally, are recent persons of interest in an Ethics Commission investigation involving an ongoing fraud investigation into former Freedom Caucus chair RJ May. I bring this up because one of the arguments often made by proponents of residency requirements is that they are designed to protect public funds.)

The Freedom Caucus has supported broad “school choice” (aka school voucher) bills and “parental rights” legislation, often premised on the idea that parents should have essentially unchecked freedom to decide where and how their children are educated, and that they should be able to take public tax dollars with them wherever they go do to do it. So it’s tough to believe that members are supporting proof of residency requirements because they are interested in making sure state education dollars are spent more accountably or transparently. 

And given that many proponents of these moves have also supported new bills like S. 199, an anti-trans “bathroom bill” sponsored by Senators Wes Climer and Josh Kimbrell, an early proponent of sweeping book bans, it is hard to believe there is a sincere interest here in making students feel safe in school, in general. 

Freedom Caucus members, as well as many others supporting proof of residency for schools, are obviously more interested in making it harder for students who may have undocumented family members to attend school, than in actually ensuring that local resources are only spent on residents of public school districts. Such requirements also potentially make it harder for students experiencing homelessness, whatever the citizenship status of the students or or their families, to attend school. 

Making it harder for children to go to school harms both the state-- because the state has a profound interest in promoting an educated citizenry-- and the children caught in the middle of debates and conflict over immigration policy. 

As South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center attorney Jennifer Rainville told the Post and Courier at the beginning of the school year,  "My fear is that we're going to just see a whole bunch of kids left behind because they're too afraid to attend, and that's not going to be good for either the kids or the community at large”. 

School districts with large Hispanic and Latino populations struggled with how to respond, and some tried to offer legal advice to administrators and teachers about what to do if Department of Homeland Security or ICE agents arrived at the school to arrest or question students.

Subsequent events showed how hard it was to offer good advice. 

Although federal officials initially promised not to conduct raids and enforcement actions at schools, across the country repeated raids proved these promises false.

In August, ICE agents detained a parent during student drop-off at a California elementary school. 

In Tennessee last month, ICE agents allegedly “camped out” in a preschool parking lot to survey a nearby construction site, before conducting a raid. 

And in Minnesota, where ICE/ DHS agents committed two high-profile killings of people protesting the federal actions,Minneapolis Schools were forced to cancel classes after ICE agents shoved teachers and students outside of a local high school during a clash with protesters. (This happened just hours after an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Good, a Minnesota resident.) 

Last month, the Trump administration formally revoked a decades-old DHS policy that technically prohibited enforcement activities on campuses. Minnesota educators have subsequently filed suit over that revocation. 

While all of this is sometimes framed as an immigration policy issue, from a kid-centered point of view that’s the wrong way to look at it. 

However you feel about the laws that govern the immigration process or American borders, current federal enforcement of a sweeping interpretation of these policies has, in practice, been chaotic, violent, and cruel. 

And it has clearly harmed children.

The federal administration is currently trying to expedite the deportation of a five-year-old child who officers detained as part of a strategy to capture his father. By most accounts, the child’s family legally entered the country from Ecuador to seek asylum under an established, legal process. 

Detaining children, putting children at risk, assaulting educators, detaining everyone from citizens to legal residents to asylum seekers to protesters: all of these come with the major and probably intended consequence of making it harder for families and children to trust that schools and other public institutions will keep them safe. (And although it’s true that a large number of children and families negatively impacted by these enforcement actions are citizens and lawful residents, there is also no scenario in which arresting, deporting, or harming children is acceptable, no matter their immigration or citizenship status.) 

It’s important that-- again, no matter our various positions on larger immigration policy-- Americans do not accept the disruption of school operations, the endangerment of children, the use of children as pawns to capture adults, or other chaotic enforcement strategies that make children afraid to come to school, or that make their families afraid to send them to school.