A new Stanford University survey showed a 22% increase in absenteeism among students at Central Valley Schools in California in early 2025.
Trump removes immigration protections at schools and places of worship
Immigration authorities can arrest them in schools, health facilities and places of worship under the new homeland security policy.
No Brands – News Value
By fall 2024, attendees of students in the Fresno Unified School District had finally recovered from an increase in absences launched by pandemic-related school closures, district chief Carlos Castillo said.
President Donald Trump was then elected to his second presidential term, pledging to increase the deportation of undocumented immigrants.
The community in Fresno County, California is home to largely large Hispanic immigrants. Since Trump’s inauguration day on January 20th, students attending Fresno School continued to drop from the end of the 2024-2025 school year.
“Fundamentally, I’m afraid to come to school,” Castillo said. “There is a lot of fear for them, even if their children were born here in America, because one of the families wasn’t.
Schools in California’s Central Valley serve many immigrant students and immigrant children, many of whom work in the agricultural and construction industries.
A study by Professor Thomas Dee of Stanford University School of Education offers a quantitative glimpse into how the increased Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has helped increase student absenteeism across the region, as children from school stay home due to fears of deportation or family separation.
Student absences across five central California school districts, especially among younger students, increased by an average of 22% at the start of the January and February presidency in the same time frame for the 2023-2024 and 2022-2023 school year. The absenteeism rate was higher among elementary school students than in upper grades.
Over those months, Trump signed executive orders to increase immigration enforcement, revoking a law prohibiting immigration executives from enrolling in schools. The Trump administration has doubled the daily immigrant arrest rate compared to the past decade, according to an analysis of Reuters ice and White House data.
Immigrant students are more likely to hunt at home when immigration enforcement is active near school campuses, lacking important lessons to ensure families are not targeted, according to Dee’s study.
Over the past few months, U.S. immigration and customs enforcement agencies have arrested, detained and deported several immigrant students who attended schools across the country.
The decline attending Central Valley School in California is not isolated.
Students enrolled in other schools with large immigrant groups across the country have often missed schools, according to multiple accounts from school administrators, teachers and activists working with immigrant families since Trump entered the oval office.
Angel Garcia, principal of Detroit High School, told USA Today that the fear of deportation caused “a fair dip” when one of the community’s students was arrested and deported from campus. The Los Angeles Unified School of Unified School experienced DIP in student attendance in some communities where immigration enforcement was reported at the end of last year, said Britt Vaughn, a district spokesman. Trump sent the National Guard to the second largest city in the country and disbanded anti-immigration enforcement protests. Some New York City students missed schools due to the fear of immigration after Trump took office at the beginning of the year, Chalkbeat New York reported.
Federal law requires regular school attendance regardless of immigration status.
Tricia McLaughlin, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said the USA Today immigration enforcement has been falsely accused of increased school absenteeism.
“Those who criticize low school attendance create an environmental environment for fear and creasing law enforcement. These smears contribute to ICE law enforcement officials facing a 1,000% increase in assault on them,” McLaughlin said. “ICE is not engaged in school enforcement work or ‘raids’.
“If a dangerous, illegal alien felon could run to school or a child sex offender is working as an employee, there might be a status where he’s arrested to protect public safety. But this didn’t happen,” she said.
There have been no recent reports of immigrant arrests on school campus. Several school officials told USA Today that families fear safety on their way in and out of school given the growing enforcement in the community.
The White House and the U.S. Department of Education did not directly respond to a survey from USA Today regarding increased absenteeism in high-immigrant schools. “President Trump is committed to providing the highest quality education for American students,” said White House spokesman Liz Hurston.
Missing schools puts students at risk
Ahead of the new academic year, K-12 campus leaders, education experts studying attendance trends, and advocates working with immigrant families shared how Trump’s immigration crackdown will affect students and schools facing absentee spikes.
“Most obviously, it protects the kids from education time,” Dee said. “But I think that’s the cutting edge of why this is important. The prior evidence shows long-term, more traumatic outcomes for children, such as anxiety disorders and long-term effects on educational achievement.”
Younger children who have come to the US within the past few months are most likely to miss school by educators and are called newcomers, said Alejandra Vasquez Baur, founder and director of the National Newcomer Network, a coalition defending immigrant students.
The effect affects the school’s ability to remain in the classroom this year and teach children who appear in school, Dee said. Educators who teach classes with high student absences must adapt to change and work hard to catch these children.
Castillo said his district is offering an online learning platform, as well as some of the children who lost their schools due to fears of immigrant raids, as well as those used during Covid-19.
The absence could also have a negative financial impact on some schools in the state that fund schools based on student attendance, Dee said.
Chronic absences in the country
Students are considered chronically absent when they miss more than 10% of the academic year.
About 15% of students were chronically absent from school prior to the 2018-2019 school year pandemic, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education.
In March 2020, many schools across the country were closed, and the challenge was made to remote learning. Some students did not attend online classes, while some schools have dropped their expectations for attendance due to the upheaval, teachers and school leaders told USA Today.
Chronic absences rose sharply to 31% between 2021 and 2022, according to federal data. This trend has reversed, falling to 28% for the 2022-2023 academic year, but attendees have not returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Latest data from a survey of district leaders RAND companies shows that approximately 22% of the country’s kindergarten to high school students (of which 1.08 billion) were chronically present during the 2024-2025 academic year.
Analysis of post-pandemic absenteeism trends from Think Tank Rand Corporation’s researcher attributes focuses on the prolonged impact of the pandemic.
“The urgent need to recover from pandemic learning losses is seriously hampered by the current proportion of chronic vacancies, making it the most pressing post-pandemic problem in public schools,” reads an analysis of school attendance at another think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
Today, young people experience more mental health challenges and teachers are absent than before the pandemic.
Rand researchers also found that the attitudes of families attending school changed. Parents are more likely to keep their children home due to mild illnesses since the pandemic and allow their children to miss school.
It is also easier to pass the class without consistent participation, as teachers are more likely to allow students to simply make up for the academic they missed without penalty.
While attendees usually decrease the days surrounding immigrant raids, this does not mean that students must necessarily be “chronically nonexistent” if teachers and school staff can be taken to school after being worried about the attack. Students will have to miss about 18 days to fall into that category.
“Children and families during the ice raids are nervous, but if you really have strong family involvement and make the school feel safe for the kids and show them how valuable it is, they’ll have the chance to bring them to school every other day,” she said the school will do a big job this year to bring these kids to school.
Does the risks to immigrant students mean the meaning of the grade?
Some teachers are worried about protecting students from enforcement of immigrants heading into the new school year and are in place online learning arrangements to accommodate them, Castillo and other school leaders told USA Today.
In Fresno and other regions with a large immigrant population, school officials train teachers on how to speak to families and encourage them to come to school, as well as what to do if an immigrant attack occurs on campus.
“Teachers are very concerned and feel that administrators are the first line of defense,” he said. “Most site leaders are in tears and angry about what’s going on. There’s overall frustration and sadness.”
Stacey David Gates, a high school history teacher who leads the teachers’ union representing Chicago’s public school educators, said he’s navigating the way we did in 2016 when Trump was elected for his first presidential term by talking to his family to make sure Trump is dealing with his students,” he said, “it’s a safe passage between him and his school.”
“I’m worried about attendance. I’m worried about the social and emotional well-being of young people. I’m worried that school workers will be needed at this moment,” she said.
Back in Fresno, Castillo is preparing for the previous grade.
“We were approaching the regular attendance in several places,” he said. “Now we’re back to something that causes fear.”
Please contact Kayla Jimenez (kjimenez@usatoday.com). Follow her on the X on @kaylajjimenez.
