President Trump recently injected $170 billion into immigration enforcement funding amid the Southern California immigration raids that have made national headlines since June.
Federal immigration arrests continue to instill terror in the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD, community where I teach. Our community was quietly fearful long before it made headlines. Hypervigilance is now supercharged by a supercharged budget.
Seventy-four percent of teachers support the guaranteed right of undocumented students to attend public school — schools that provide physical and psychological safety and are well-resourced with academic and social-emotional supports. This is true across party lines: More than half of Republican teachers agree.
More than 40 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that children cannot be denied a free public education regardless of immigration status. But now, the Trump Administration seems hell-bent on depriving immigrant students of exactly this.
I’ve seen this firsthand. In April, I was approached by a colleague on my way to coach my after-school robotics club. He asked me whether a smiley and silly fourth-grader I’ll call Daniel was in the club. I confirmed, and he insisted — urgently, and more than once — that I ensure that when Daniel headed home, he did so with his dad. No one else, and not alone.
I stood by Daniel’s side at pick-up time at the school gates until he bounded off to his dad’s pickup truck as usual. I assumed I was playing a minor role in a run-of-the-mill divorce custody battle. It wasn’t until the next day that I learned I was actually shielding Daniel from a “welfare” check by Homeland Security Investigation, or HSI, agents seeking out immigrant children.
Daniel had been one of a handful of kids on a list of names HSI agents had brought to my school that afternoon. They arrived unannounced with no uniforms and no warrants, armed with a list not of criminals, but of children under the age of 9. I had no idea I was safekeeping Daniel, just a hallway away, from potentially being separated from his family without their knowledge or consent.
Though immigration raids like this have dominated the news, the Trump Administration has been simultaneously pursuing education policy changes that will negatively impact immigrant students — and all students — that have garnered less media attention but will be similarly devastating.
In April, the U.S. Department of Education canceled a billion dollars’ worth of school mental health grants that Educators for Excellence, a teacher-led nonprofit organization I’m a member of, traveled to Capitol Hill to advocate for in the wake of the horrific Uvalde school shooting, which killed 19 students and 2 teachers.
These grants were increasing the presence of diverse, highly qualified mental health professionals in schools, exactly the kind of expertise needed in instances of crisis like my school community experienced in April. The cancellation of this funding is a travesty for overwhelmed and anxious students and teachers in the LAUSD immigrant community and all teachers and students nationwide.
In May, President Trump released his proposed education budget for next fiscal year. In it, he recommends eliminating Title III, funding that supports English learners and immigrant students. He also rescinded guidance on the educational rights of students learning English. In 2024, California received over $150 million in Title III funds to support English learners. If Congress moves the recommended elimination forward, we will receive $0, risking English proficiency programming, dual-language immersion schools, bilingual educator positions, and more.
And in July, President Trump refused to give states nearly one billion in Title III funding that Congress had already approved, unilaterally and illegally advancing his budget priorities a year earlier. He also signed into law the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which, in addition to dramatically increasing funding for deportations, cuts SNAP benefits, Medicaid, and so much more from our nation’s most vulnerable families. The bill also creates a federal voucher program that will direct billions to create scholarships for private schools that can deny admission based on immigration status or other factors.
So while the cable news channels earlier this year trained their cameras on Waymos and smoke bombs in a small section of downtown Los Angeles, the truth is something less in-your-face, but equally violent and tragic: Children deprived of the right to learn who are terrified of what comes next.
Like most teachers, I used to eagerly await summer break, especially the sleep. But this past summer, sleep was elusive. I woke up wondering if my students were OK, if their families were intact, and if they would return to fifth grade in the fall and come visit me at lunchtime. I wondered if they or their caregivers had been detained or deported, or if they would be sent to a country where they do not even speak the language.
I implore the Trump Administration to change course. I implore them to give immigrant students the safe, engaging learning environments every child deserves and the vast majority of public school teachers desperately want for them this new school year.
Misti Kemmer is a fourth grade Los Angeles Unified School District teacher and member of Educators for Excellence.