When thousands of federal immigration enforcement agents descended on the Twin Cities last winter, the St. Paul school district had a plan.
The district has served a growing immigrant student population for years. When requests started flooding in for groceries and hygiene products in December, schools were quick to gather emergency goods and announce pickup locations online. But this time, they faced a logistical challenge.
“We could not have families come and pick [supplies] up. We actually had to drive them to the families because they didn’t want to leave their house,” said Megan Budke, the district’s coordinator for immersion, Indigenous, and world languages.
The threat of run-ins with federal agents, who were employing increasingly aggressive tactics, kept many students home and pushed some into temporary virtual learning, Budke said.
“We had trainings on know your rights and we very quickly learned that might not matter. What really matters right now is, do you have a network for grocery support?” Budke said.
In the past two school years, districts across the country have adapted to heightened immigration enforcement in multiple ways. They’ve hired more mental health counselors to address increased student anxiety and fear. They’ve partnered with community volunteers to safely transport students to and from school. They’ve updated school protocols for what to do if immigration officials arrive at a school requesting access to a building or student information.
Even as operations like those in Minneapolis earlier this year have largely waned, the pressure for schools to respond to families’ safety concerns remains.
On June 11, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a man and a woman at the drop-off line of a building currently being used for classes at the Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore.
The individuals resisted arrest, and ICE leadership “coordinated with school officials and the governor’s office to ensure the situation was resolved safely and with minimal disruption to the community,” according to a statement by Lauren Bis, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting assistant secretary.
In a statement, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said “Schools are places where children should feel safe, where parents should be able to drop off their kids without fear, and where educators should be able to focus on teaching—not where federal agents carry out immigration enforcement actions in front of children.”
Family and community engagement adapts to immigration context
Educators working with immigrant student populations said they have long been aware of the various ways immigration enforcement could affect some of their students’ lives, including immigrant parents being deported while their U.S.-born children get left behind.
But many now say the shifts in federal immigration policy since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, and the broader net immigration agents now cast in questioning and detaining individuals, have forced schools to adapt to a new sense of urgency.
For over a decade, educators could point to federal policy that largely shielded schools and other sensitive locations, such as hospitals and churches, from immigration agents’ presence. Trump rescinded that policy on Inauguration Day, prompting several school districts to review existing or create new ones to protect students and their information from federal agents on campus.
Even so, local news coverage from across the country suggests at least 17 cases of federal agents’ presence near or on school grounds since Jan. 21, 2025. As of June 22, 2026, there have not been any cases of immigration agents entering a public school building.
“ICE does not target schools, but we will not allow criminals to hide in our nation’s schools and put the safety of children at risk,” said Homeland Security’s Bis in a statement.
Several schools have now leaned on their family- and community-engagement work to address families’ concerns with federal agents’ presence at or near schools.
Family and community engagement, when done well, is always meant to be adaptive to a given context, said Reyna Hernandez, the chief executive officer of the Parent Institute for Quality Education and a former senior director of research and policy at the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement.
In California, where Trump deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles in response to protests of heightened immigration enforcement, schools reassessed how to expand safe transportation options for students to and from school, Hernandez said. In Chicago, where a large-scale immigration enforcement operation took place, community members and nonprofits partnered with schools to create rapid-response teams, which often entailed volunteers walking students to and from schools.
Schools in Chicago and Minneapolis not only adapted to new ways of serving families, such as relying on volunteers to deliver supplies to homes, but they also adjusted how they communicate.
When educators in St. Paul set up a grocery delivery system, they stopped posting about it online, Budke said, fearing agents could track locations.
Communication quickly shifted to word-of-mouth and messaging apps such as WhatsApp.
Thanks to the district’s long-standing family and community engagement, supplies for families were plentiful, with classrooms at times being converted into storage spaces, Budke added. Schools even worked with community partners to set up rental-assistance funds for families.
Experiencing all of this effort earlier this year left Budke feeling that it’s important for schools to think about how to establish such networks of support and contingency plans ahead of time, especially as heightened immigration enforcement actions continue across the country.
It’s why some districts in Maryland are already taking proactive steps.
Districts continue to respond to immigration enforcement
Thomas Taylor, the superintendent of the Montgomery County district in Maryland, took the partial federal government shutdown earlier this year as a temporary relief. It meant that large-scale immigration enforcement operations rumored to take place in the area were less likely to occur.
Even so, the district continues to brace itself.
“I think that we are still very much in harm’s way in terms of disrupting the school environment and [the] potential for there to be further disruptions,” Taylor said.
District families have already experienced one-off scenarios where family members, including breadwinners, have been detained by immigration agents away from schools.
The district’s Immigration Admissions and Enrollment welcome center, a hub of resources for immigrant families, has been connecting families to community partners who can help manage daily living expenses when breadwinners face deportation proceedings, said Margarita Borhorquez, the center’s director.
The center has also begun collecting standby guardianship information from families so that if parents or legal guardians are detained, another adult can temporarily care for their children.
It’s a Band-Aid solution, Borhorquez said, but it can help in the immediate scenario and it’s something staff at the welcome center are educating families to think about.
More broadly, the district has shared multiple online resources about protocols for keeping students safe in schools, and all staff have been trained on what to look for and how to respond when there’s immigration enforcement on school campuses or during a field trip, Taylor said.
School leaders are also carrying cards with important phone numbers and procedures to follow should they ever engage with immigration agents.
“Every kind of distraction that we accept and that we plan for is pulling resources away from teaching and learning,” Taylor said. “We give up time at faculty meetings and professional learning to carve out time to make sure that we handle this well, because this has to do with the safety of kids with our families.”
While Taylor’s schools have yet to experience ICE presence at or near campuses, the Baltimore district reported that when federal immigration enforcement action took place on the Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School campus, “some members of the school community were significantly impacted.”
Students in the St. Paul district fully returned from virtual learning options in March, with teachers having to reestablish rituals and routines, Budke said.
But some families moved out of state, even out of the country, causing the district to tighten its budget for the rest of the school year, which ended June 11.
School buildings still bear signs reminding federal officers they cannot enter without a judicial warrant. Homes in the community still display “ICE Out” signs, visual reminders of what happened earlier this year.
But other visual cues speak to what lies ahead.
For the first time, students who completed a Seal of Biliteracy got to wear special cords at graduation, Budke said, recognizing their achievements in multilingualism.
