Editor’s Note: This story was reported and published before the presidential election. It has been updated to reflect that Donald Trump won a second term.
Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.
When immigration agents raided chicken processing plants in central Mississippi in 2019, they arrested nearly 700 undocumented workers — many of them parents of children enrolled in local schools.
Teens got frantic texts to leave class and find their younger siblings. Unfamiliar faces whose names weren’t on the pick-up list showed up to take children home. School staff scrambled to make sure no child went home to an empty house, while the owner of a local gym threw together a temporary shelter for kids with nowhere else to go.
In the Scott County School District, a quarter of the district’s Latino students, around 150 children, were absent from school the next day. When dozens of kids continued to miss school, staff packed onto school buses and went door to door with food, trying to reassure families that it was safe for their children to return. Academics were on hold for weeks, said Tony McGee, the district’s superintendent at the time.
“We went into kind of a Mom and Dad mode and just cared for kids,” McGee said. While some children bounced back quickly, others were shaken for months. “You could tell there was still some worry on kids’ hearts.”
Massive workplace raids have occurred in the past, with enforcement also targeting employers in an effort to deter unauthorized immigration. If President-elect Donald Trump enacts the hardline immigration policies he campaigned on, what happened in Mississippi could become a much more common occurrence affecting millions of children and their schools.
Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, tapping every resource at his disposal from local police to the National Guard and the military. Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, have repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether they would deport the parents of U.S. citizen children.
But any such plan inevitably would sweep up parents of school-age children, leaving educators with the responsibility of providing food, clothing, counseling, and more to affected students. Educators who have been through it before say schools that serve immigrant communities should prepare now. It’s estimated some 4.4 million U.S.-born children have at least one undocumented parent.
On top of that, it’s unclear if Trump would seek to undermine the “sanctuary school” policies that some districts enacted during his last presidency in an attempt to protect immigrant students and their families on school grounds.
Trump has shown willingness to target immigrant children
Trump frequently aims his rhetoric and policy proposals at the children of immigrants.
Last year, he said he would seek to end automatic citizenship rights for children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents, and he has defended his policy that separated immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. He has not ruled out deporting women and children as part of his mass deportation plan.
“We’re gonna look at it very closely,” he said in an interview earlier this fall, even as he acknowledged that images of families being loaded on buses would make it “a lot harder.”
Both Trump and Vance have characterized immigrant children as being burdens on schools who are overcrowding classrooms and taxing teachers with their language needs. Top aides to Trump tried for months during his first administration to give states the power to block undocumented children from attending public school, Bloomberg News reported, and an influential conservative think tank is seeking to revive that idea if Trump wins a second term.
RELATED: Think tank with ties to Trump lays out plan to deny free education to undocumented students
Immigrant rights advocates worry that Trump would seek to end a decades-old federal policy that has treated schools as “sensitive” or “protected” areas where immigration agents are not supposed to surveil families or make arrests, except in extraordinary circumstances, so as not to deter children from going to school.
“Enforcement actions undertaken in these locations have a ripple effect,” said Heidi Altman, the director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center. “It’s very frightening for communities when we think about the possibility of a Trump administration, both in terms of enforcement at and near protected areas, like schools, but also the impact on schools and access to education.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions sent in October about whether he would seek to carry out immigration enforcement activities at or near schools as part of his mass deportation plan. But Project 2025, a policy playbook written by several former Trump White House officials, calls for rescinding any memos that identify “sensitive zones” where immigration action should be limited.
And even when immigration enforcement happens off campus, it can still have far-reaching effects on children and schools.
Kheri Martinez was just 13 when her mother was swept up in the 2019 Mississippi raids. She was one of around 1,000 children whose parents were arrested that day. A family friend picked Martinez up early from school, and she later learned from her dad — who was working out of state on a construction job — that her mother had been detained.
The seventh grader bottled up her own fears and told her two little sisters, who were a toddler and early elementary schooler at the time, that their mom was working overtime. For dinner, they ate pizza dropped off by worried family friends. That night, Martinez climbed into her parents’ bed with her sisters, hoping the blankets that smelled like their mom would comfort her.
“Even though I don’t know if Mom is going to come home today,” she told herself, “at least I’d have something closer to me, I’ll feel like she’s here.”
Her mom came home crying at 4 in the morning — immigration officials had released some parents of small children on humanitarian grounds while their cases proceeded — and Martinez finally felt like she could breathe.
At school the next day, there were whispers that the school would be targeted for violence and that the government was going to come back and take kids away. It felt like everyone at school was “on alert.”
“The Hispanic kids, we were just kind of out of it,” Martinez said. “We weren’t us for a little bit.”
Immigration raids take heavy emotional toll on kids
What Martinez experienced is not uncommon among children whose parents have been caught up in immigration raids. Multiple studies have documented the sweeping psychological, emotional, and financial toll that such operations have on children and their families.
Researchers from the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy found that the Mississippi raids were especially traumatic for the children whose schools were located within sight of a poultry plant. Many saw their parents handcuffed and shoved into white vans on their way home from school, prompting screams and uncontrollable crying.
Children “continued to suffer emotionally” for weeks and months, the research team wrote, and even kids who’d been reunited with their parents showed signs of post-traumatic stress and separation anxiety. Some kindergartners started wetting the bed again, and toddlers regressed in their speech. It was common for kids to come home from school, drop their backpacks, and spend the rest of the day sleeping. Older kids often took on more housework, child care, and paying jobs so they could contribute to their households.
Similarly, researchers for The Urban Institute documented how earlier immigration raids in three states affected some 500 children whose parents were arrested.
Those children were most likely to experience emotional distress, but fear also spread to children who worried their parents would be “taken” next. Story time often turned to talk of the raids and got emotional, teachers said. Some kids internalized their parents’ disappearance as an abandonment. Some children ate less and lost weight, while others started acting out or had trouble sleeping.
“Some parents said that, months after the raids, their children still cried in the morning when getting dropped off at school or day care, something that they rarely used to do,” the report found. “Children were said to obsess over whether their parents were going to pick them up from school.”
RELATED: Many migrant students need mental health support. Here’s why this program is a go-to for schools.
With breadwinners in detention, many families fell behind on rent. Three-quarters of the parents said they struggled to buy enough food after the raids. Housing instability forced some kids to change schools multiple times. The experience “sapped the attention of some children and affected their academic performance,” researchers found.
For Martinez, it took a year for school to feel normal again. She often felt like she was on edge, “on the lookout” for another raid.
“It hurt me for a while,” Martinez said.
How schools and families can offer support to kids
School leaders say it’s difficult to plan for an immigration raid. Agents usually do not give schools any prior warning. But schools that serve immigrant communities can take certain steps in advance.
“We practice for fire drills and tornado drills, bus evacuations, and sad to say nowadays we practice for active shooters. There’s not many drills for ICE raids,” McGee, the former Scott County superintendent, said. When “families are separated, and you’re responsible for how do these kids get home and who takes care of them, it helps to have a little insight that: Hey, you need to be prepared.”
School staff who’ve experienced raids in their communities say it’s especially important to develop an emergency protocol for how children should be signed out at school if their approved caretaker is not available to pick them up. Identifying a potential temporary shelter for students — whether at a school, a local church, or a community center — is also helpful.
McGee and his team met daily with the principals of schools where many children were affected by the raids to ask how teachers and students were doing. The district also provided materials to help teachers talk about the raids in class and explain to kids who weren’t affected how their classmates may be feeling.
“We didn’t get into the political struggle of why this happened, or why that happened, should it happen, should it not happen?” McGee said. “Our job is to care for kids.”
For Martinez, the care two teachers showed her was especially helpful. They each pulled her aside to talk about what happened, and told her to let them know if she needed more time to complete assignments.
“I was very appreciative of that,” Martinez said. “It made me feel like: ‘Oh, they understood.’”
Her family also came up with a plan for exactly what they would do and where they would go if another immigration raid happened, which helped to ease some of the anxiety. Martinez knows, for example, that if her family has to sell their belongings and move back to Mexico that she would stay in the U.S. to finish her college degree.
“You’re going to carry something that is not yours, but we don’t have any option,” Gabriela Uribe Mejia said she told her daughter. “She said: ‘Don’t worry, I understand, I know what to do.’ But she’s a young girl.”
Still, immigrant rights advocates worry about the long-term effects on children and families.
Lorena Quiroz, who directs the Mississippi-based Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity, was among the community organizers who went door to door asking families if they needed food, legal assistance, or other support in the wake of the Mississippi raids.
Quiroz knows affected families who were torn apart by drinking and fighting, and teens who dropped out of school. Mothers still feel ashamed of the weeks they spent wearing an ankle monitor, visible for everyone to see under their traditional Maya skirts. Adults still tear up when they drive past the poultry plants.
People talk about it “like it’s yesterday,” Quiroz said. “Imagine that happening everywhere.”
Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.
