Key points:
- Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda harms children in schools, causing fear and trauma.
- ICE activity near schools fuels absenteeism, psychological distress, and academic disengagement.
- School districts are adopting “safe zone” resolutions to protect immigrant students.
WASHINGTON, DC – Educators, child psychologists, and immigrant rights leaders warned this week that the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda is inflicting deep harm on children returning to school, creating fear, trauma, and disruption across classrooms nationwide.
At a virtual press conference hosted by America’s Voice, experts described how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity near schools has fueled absenteeism, psychological distress, and academic disengagement, while local educators scramble to implement “safe zone” protections and support traumatized families.
Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice and moderator of the discussion, said, “The usual first-day jitters of back to school this year have been replaced by fear. Kids are missing school, afraid to leave their homes. Parents are having to make plans in case they are disappeared. And teachers are having to be trained in safety protocols should they encounter ICE while schools are navigating these new realities. This is the hidden cost of Trump’s mass deportation agenda—not just economic devastation, but educational chaos and psychological scarring.”
Dr. Allison Bassett Ratto, a child clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C., said the current immigration enforcement climate is devastating children’s mental health. “This creates a toxic climate of fear and uncertainty for children and families, which in turn causes intense stress, anxiety, and even trauma,” she explained. Children witnessing ICE raids, she noted, are not seeing “violent criminals being apprehended by uniformed police officers who they’ve learned to know and trust as community helpers. Instead, what they see are their classmates, their family members, their neighbors often being apprehended in violent and confusing ways while going about their daily lives, doing things like picking up their children from the bus stop or going to their jobs.”
Ratto warned that children exposed to these events—whether directly in their neighborhoods or through media—often feel that “nowhere and no one is safe.” She added that stress and trauma “can truly become chronic, leading to both immediate and long-term damage to children’s mental and physical health.”
Educators across the country say they are being forced to confront not only the learning gap created by fear, but also the financial consequences tied to school funding formulas based on attendance.
Noel Candelaria, Secretary-Treasurer of the National Education Association, said, “Every student deserves to feel safe and welcome at school. Educators like me know that every student, regardless of their language, their ZIP code or immigration status, belongs in one of America’s public schools. See, this isn’t just a feeling, it’s a constitutionally protected right.”
“But Donald Trump is creating fear and uncertainty,” he continued. “He’s directing ICE to conduct raids, separating families, and turning our schools into places of anxiety for children of all backgrounds. Kids can’t learn if they have uncertainty of what’s going to happen at the end of their day or even on their way to school or not knowing who is not going to be there waiting for them when they come home.”
Candelaria described how educators are organizing with school boards, superintendents, and unions to implement safe zone resolutions, distribute “Know Your Rights” cards, and create family preparedness plans. “While this administration should never have put students, families, and educators in this position, we are coming together to keep each other safe. Every school leader, every educator has a responsibility to ensure that their school is a safe zone.”
Fedrick Ingram, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, echoed the urgency. “We are traumatizing students and then asking them to go to school and do work on top of that and then go back home and do homework in a traumatized situation,” he said. “They see police, they see masked assailants, they see kidnappings happening in front of them and they see people being disappeared on the street. These are kids, these are impressionable young people who will bring those traumas to school and then try to capitalize education and they will try to do the best that they can with the information that they have. And we’re forcing them to process these things faster than they should.”
Ingram said the AFT is organizing citizenship clinics and standing with immigrant families nationwide. “We will bring the full armor of the AFT 1.8 million members as the vanguard of justice and equality for all people in America,” he declared.
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent Alberto Carvalho brought both professional and personal experience to the panel. “As an immigrant once undocumented to this country, as someone who grew up in poverty and once slept under a bridge, I cannot speak without recognizing my own lived experience,” he said. “Over 40 years later, thousands of kids across the country are facing the same challenges, the same plight, and unfortunately the same insult and traumatic abuse that I felt when I was a teenager alone in this nation.”
Carvalho said LAUSD has implemented protection protocols to prevent ICE from disrupting schools. “We were successful in not allowing agents to enter two of our elementary schools as they wanted to have conversations with a first grader, a second grader. These agents were members of the Homeland Security team. What homeland threat does a first grader pose to anyone?” he said.
LAUSD has created a “family preparedness guide,” expanded bus routes to protect children traveling to and from school, and mobilized psychiatric social workers to call more than 14,000 homes. Carvalho said counselors and rapid response teams are working after school hours to stabilize families, while the district’s foundation has established a compassion fund for legal and financial assistance.
“Most adults are shocked by the visuals of armed federal agents jumping out of vehicles and apprehending adults,” he said. “Imagine the trauma, the mental health impact, the social-emotional impact that those same visuals have on the children we serve. Our children should not be pawns of political powers that undermine their rights, dehumanize who they are, and in the process terrorize families.”
Speakers also highlighted how the deportation agenda threatens to undermine education funding. Candelaria noted that absenteeism linked to ICE raids is already reducing school budgets. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, Ingram said 13,000 fewer students started the school year compared with the year before. “Every single student who does not show up is a dollar figure to that school system. Fewer students means fewer teachers, fewer programs, and less funding overall,” he said.
A recent analysis underscored the trade-offs. Instead of spending $170 billion on mass deportation, that same funding could support education nationwide by building more than 7,000 new elementary schools, funding Head Start for nearly 14 years, or providing 3 million teachers with annual classroom supply stipends.
School boards across the country are also moving to adopt formal safe zone resolutions. One model resolution affirms the constitutional right of every child to attend public school regardless of immigration status and directs ICE agents to seek review by a superintendent before attempting to enter school grounds. Districts are also creating rapid response teams in the event parents are detained, reviewing privacy policies to prevent collection of immigration-related data, and requiring vendors and contractors to honor protections.
The resolutions declare schools “safe zones” for students to learn and thrive, and mandate that all communications be translated into home languages spoken by students. They also affirm educators’ academic freedom to discuss the policies in age-appropriate ways and direct superintendents to reinforce anti-bullying protections.
Speakers concluded that the real stakes are not only educational but also moral. “Everybody walks the same sidewalk of hope and opportunity. We ought to protect our children, respect our children, and protect them all, immigrant or not,” Carvalho said.
Candelaria agreed, emphasizing that educators will not stand by while children are terrorized. “As educators, we will not stand as our children are traumatized, and we will continue to fight for a future where every single student, regardless of their background, can learn and thrive in a safe and welcoming environment.”
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