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A father arrested near his 6-year-old son’s bus stop in Connecticut. Four people detained near an elementary school in New Jersey. Parents arrested outside of an elementary school in San Diego.
With the school year well underway, reports of immigration enforcement around schools and bus stops have unsettled families and educators nationwide.
Democratic lawmakers are urging the Department of Homeland Security to revive a policy the agency rescinded in 2025 that limited operations in and around schools, as well as other sensitive locations such as churches.
Homeland Security officials have said they are not specifically targeting locations near schools, and instances where agents have entered school property are still relatively rare. But educators for over a year have shared several ways nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has disrupted schools, including increased chronic absenteeism, mental health struggles, and fears in the communities schools serve.
While reports of large-scale ICE operations have died down since raids in Minnesota and Chicago that garnered widespread attention, ICE arrests soared to record highs this summer, according to the New York Times, following Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin’s confirmation and his promise that he’d lead the agency with a lower profile than his predecessor, Kristi Noem.
Six Democratic lawmakers from California wrote to Mullin on Sept. 22, urging his department to “end all ICE activity in the immediate vicinity of schools and college campuses.”
“Parents should be able to drop their children off at school without fearing detention, and students should be able to attend class without encountering federal immigration enforcement around their campus,” they wrote.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security wrote in response to questions from Chalkbeat that “ICE is not going to schools to make arrests.”
“This is just another false narrative to try and demonize our brave ICE law enforcement,” the spokesperson added.
The California lawmakers in their letter cited an incident on Sept. 9 during which ICE agents detained two parents after they’d dropped their two children, ages 2 and 5, at an elementary school in the San Diego Unified School District. A family friend reportedly picked the children up from school.
The detained couple were Haitian and reportedly in the country through Temporary Protected Status, an immigration status revoked for Haitians at the end of July by the Trump administration following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Community members in places like Springfield, Ohio have said the end of TPS has ushered in a surge of enforcement.
Several incidents in which ICE agents have detained parents have marked this school year:
- On Sept. 14, residents said ICE agents detained four people in an area close to an elementary school in Montclair, N.J., during student drop-off.
- On Aug. 26, in Danbury, Conn., a father said moments after he dropped his son off at the school bus, he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson denied targeting a school bus stop.
- Dodge City Public Schools in Kansas told families the district may have students whose family members were detained during a recent sweep of ICE activity in the region. District officials urged community members to report to the district if they noticed any unattended children.
Educators and researchers have said such incidents like these ripple through public schools in a variety of ways, but one of the most evident has been in school attendance.
Officials from one Indianapolis school told a local radio station that recent ICE arrests this month have driven students to stay home — the school’s usual daily attendance rate is 95%, they said, but dropped below 40% around the time an ICE operation was underway in the area.
The destabilizing effects of seeing community and family members arrested and deported also creates anxiety for students, according to some research.
Two lawsuits in federal court — one brought by a group of school districts in Minnesota and another by the National Education Association — are challenging the end to the sensitive locations policy the Trump administration revoked. A judge in May delivered a setback to the suit brought by the districts, writing that they failed to prove the harms they identified were a direct result of the policy change. Both lawsuits are ongoing.
Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org. Lily is on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook.
