With the upcoming inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, following his campaign promises of mass deportation, immigrant communities and those who serve them across the country are concerned. That, of course, includes K-12 schools.

The most recent data from the Migration Policy Institute estimated more than 600,000 undocumented children were in the U.S. public school system in 2021. Every state has at least 1,000 students, according to MPI, with some having many more than that. Those numbers are estimates, because immigration status is not asked when enrolling a child in school. It is not relevant to the education of that student. It is also against the law to ask.

Nicholas Espiritu

“One of the whole points of developing our system of free public education in the first place was to ensure that newly arriving students could learn how to read and write and do math and could prepare themselves to go into jobs and colleges and learn all the necessary skills to kind of participate in our society and our democracy and to be full members of our communities,” says Nicholas Espiritu, deputy legal director at National Immigration Law Center (NILC). “It continued to serve that goal for newly arriving students and non-citizen students for the entirety of its existence.”

The constitutional right to be treated equally in the public school system was established in Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe. The June 1982 finding read, “A state cannot prevent children of undocumented immigrants from attending public school unless a substantial state interest is involved.” In the decision, the Court also ruled that schools cannot ask immigration status when enrolling a student.

“We know from those decades of millions of students going through our public education systems as a result of this decision, that this has had tremendously good effects for this country,” says Espiritu. “We have had many of these individuals go on to be able to become citizens or legal permanent residents. We have had these individuals make tremendous contributions to this country. We have teachers, we have doctors, we have nurses, we have firefighters, we have police officers. We have integral members of our community that have been able to achieve their dreams and build real, meaningful lives for themselves and their families as a result of access to education. It's for that reason we need to ensure that all students continue to be able to access education into the future.”

As it did during the previous Trump administration, NILC is encouraging schools to pass welcoming or safe school policies that make clear that immigration officials do not have free access to campus and to establish policies so that students and parents know that immigration enforcement won’t be allowed on campus absent a judicial warrant. The NILC website offers guidance and language for such a policy.

From that practice advisory, “The Legal Authority for ’Sanctuary‘ School Policies,” comes this advice for teachers and school employees who want to protect students in the event of immigration enforcement activity on a school campus and support students living under these threats each day.

• Post a sign on your office or classroom door that signals that it is a safe space and that students can come to you for support.
• Host or facilitate know-your-rights trainings for your students or their families on campus. Knowing one’s rights can go a long way in protecting oneself from entering the prison or deportation pipeline.
• Be active in the push for your school to pass a safe zone or sanctuary resolution, and be active in the implementation of that plan once passed.
• Encourage your school to create a resource center for students, including students who may be at risk if there is immigration enforcement activity on campus.
• Create and practice classroom solidarity plans that would be triggered if an ICE or CBP raid should occur in your classroom. (For example, if an ICE agent entered the classroom and commanded students to separate into different groups by immigration status in order to arrest undocumented students, you could instruct the students to remain seated and let them know that the officer’s instructions are not mandatory. This is a tactic that can also be used in workplace or other group-based settings. ICE instructions to separate people based on their status are coercive but not mandatory, and everyone has the right not to “speak” by voluntarily separating themselves into different groups.)

Educators and administrators can also find resources from NILC’s “Education for All” campaign, which is a coalition of educators, immigrant rights organizations, and other civil rights groups “working to ensure that parents, teachers, and students are equipped to protect their right for an education for all,” Espiritu says.

After the November election, school boards in Los Angeles and Denver vowed to protect their students. There is concern not only of immigration officials attempting to access campuses, but also of families keeping their children home in fear or parents being taken to a detention facility by immigration officials while the children are at school.

“We don't want to have to have parents face that kind of Hobson's choice of keeping them and their children safe or providing their child with an education,” says Espiritu. “That's why we've created our model school guidance, and we are letting folks know about their existing federal constitutional rights so that they can understand what their rights are, feel as safe as possible, and their kids can continue to get an education and continue to thrive.”

NILC also advises families to develop a plan for what happens in an emergency—who is next in line to pick up kids at school, etc. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center has guides for such plans, as well as other resources to help families, educators, and administrators understand rights and prepare for any encounter with immigration officials. In addition, the ACLU and National Lawyers Guild provide resources and information to help people understand their legal rights.

During the campaign and since the election, Trump and future members of the administration have also floated the idea of deporting U.S. citizen children who were born in the United States to undocumented parents. While a clear violation of the 14th Amendment, the possibility of the administration attempting it has created an added level of fear and uncertainty in immigrant communities.

“When we talk about a lot of these immigration debates, we're often talking about mixed-status families, where one child in the family might be a U.S. citizen, their sibling might not be, or one parent might not be,” says Espiritu. “It's not just going to be on one individual that might be caught up in a raid. It's going to be on their family members, their children and those children's friends at school, their teachers, their churches, the groups they may volunteer with, the work environment of the remaining family members. … So when we talk about the impact of immigration enforcement, especially calls for mass deportations, we really have to understand the extent of the communities that this will affect and the trickledown effect of this terror.”