Immigration enforcement won't just hurt immigrants--it will follow their classmates into public schools too
Blog • By Hilary Wething • June 30, 2026
Immigration enforcement hurts many aspects of public life, and public schools have not been spared. ICE enforcement campaigns in cities like Washington and Minneapolis have turned public schools into staging grounds for raids: ICE agents are arresting parents and students who are suspected to be undocumented, and spreading fear among immigrant children and their families and school officials. Additionally, anti-immigration advocates are making a play to overturn a landmark Supreme court ruling, Plyler v. Doe, which ruled that states cannot deny students a free public education based on their immigration status.
In the last two years, Republicans in Tennessee have attempted to push legislation that would violate Plyler to set the stage to challenge the court decision (although neither proposal passed). Last year, the state proposed charging undocumented students tuition for public schools, and this year, Tennessee attempted to pass legislation to track the immigration status of all public school students.
The 1982 ruling of Plyler v. Doe is notable because it stated that the harm of not educating undocumented children would be worse for society than providing a basic education to all children in the U.S. The ruling recognized the huge positive spillovers public education has on the U.S. labor market, public health, and civil society and that leaving immigrant children out of public education would create an “underclass” in U.S. society.
Moreover, if the move to deny public education to children in the U.S. is successful, particularly in pockets of the country where immigrant children are a substantial share of the student population, it will lead to an extraordinarily high cost for the students who remain in public school.
https://www.epi.org/blog/immigration-enforcement-wont-just-hurt-immigrants-it-will-follow-their-classmates-into-public-schools-too/