Immigration enforcement actions can lead to sustained increases in absenteeism among immigrant students, according to a new working paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second administration, educators and researchers have raised concerns about the widespread effects of heightened immigration enforcement activity, a cornerstone of the administration’s national agenda.
Recent studies have found that such activity can lead to lower test scores and lower student attendance.
Researchers at the Annenberg Institute, focusing on a midsized northeastern district with a large immigrant student population, found that daily absence rates among foreign-born students increased by approximately two percentage points from President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 through June 2025. The increase persisted over time and was not limited to specific immigration enforcement events, according to the working paper published in April.
“This federal immigration policy is having real consequences on our society, our education systems,” said Andrew Camp, a senior research associate at the Annenberg Institute and lead author of the study.
Immigration policy changes led to a sustained effect
The Annenberg Institute researchers acknowledged that immigration enforcement actions—ranging from individual arrests to large-scale raids—have been a reality across multiple administrations.
But current immigration enforcement tactics, including how federal agents broadcast arrests, may have created a different sense of fear among immigrant families, said Edom Tesfa, a postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute and co-author of the study.
One high-profile immigration arrest near the district at the center of the Annenberg study shortly after the inauguration sent ripples through the community, leading the researchers to see if any effects would last long after the incident.
The researchers found both acute and sustained increases in the probability of immigrant students being absent because of immigration enforcement actions in the area. Prior to 2025, these same students had reported better attendance than those born in the U.S., and the district had made gains in general in boosting attendance after the pandemic. That progress was lost following the inauguration, Edom said.
The effect persisted even without large-scale raids like those seen in Minneapolis earlier this year, aligning with similar findings reported in other parts of the country where immigration enforcement activity has slowly grown over the last two years.
Katie Crook leads the South Carolina Multilingual Learner Educator Network, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on teachers of English learners, also known as multilingual learners.
Crook said that following educators’ concerns over the Trump administration rescinding a federal policy that shielded schools from immigration enforcement, the organization surveyed members in February 2025 and again this March to collect data on any effects from federal policy changes on multilingual students.
In the latest survey, 78% of respondents said they’ve noticed a change in the emotional well-being of their multilingual learners because of increased immigration enforcement in the state. Twenty-two percent said these changes in emotional well-being were significant or extreme.
Forty-nine percent of respondents said they saw a moderate, significant, or extreme change in student attendance.
“Multilingual learners are bringing significant amounts of stress and uncertainty into schools, and teachers are feeling underprepared to support them,” Crook said. “They’re struggling to stay focused, they’re missing a lot of assignments due to absences.”
Schools can get ahead of rumors
While educators have little control over federal immigration policy, researchers and advocates say there are steps schools can take to address families’ immigration-related concerns.
The South Carolina network drafted an open letter last year that encouraged districts to clarify their immigration-related policies and procedures, to provide training for their staff on those policies and procedures, and to try to reduce uncertainty for teachers and families, Crook said.
Only some districts publicly shared and discussed their efforts, Crook added.
Researchers at the Annenberg Institute spoke of the importance of the districts’ longstanding investment in family and community engagement that likely helped minimize the effect of absences they found.
“The data would likely look a lot worse in the study if we had conducted it in a district with less family engagement, fewer multilingual staff, and higher levels of distrust,” Edom said.
Proactive communication, working with trusted messengers from local immigrant communities, and maintaining strong partnerships with community organizations are key for districts seeking to get ahead of worsening attendance rates.
Though researchers acknowledged that even then, rumors of possible immigration enforcement activity in the area can spread faster than districts can dispel them, as they found in some instances in the study, said Jonathon Acosta, a co-author of the study and a Rhode Island state senator who is a Democrat.
Acosta added that continued research into the effects of immigration enforcement on schools, including absences and academic impacts, is necessary to determine whether changes in federal immigration policy are infringing on students’ right to free, public education regardless of their immigration status as enshrined in the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v Doe.
