Immigration agents can now more easily make arrests and carry out raids on school property, after the Trump administration overturned a 13-year-old policy aimed at preventing immigration enforcement from getting in the way of people accessing essential services.
Under a directive announced Tuesday night, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents no longer have to honor “sensitive locations” when conducting enforcement activities.
For more than a decade, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has had an internal policy that has generally prevented agents from making arrests at schools, places of worship, and hospitals without permission from agency headquarters.
The move to revoke that policy, issued by Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman on Monday, Jan. 20, comes on the heels of several other actions President Donald Trump took in the opening hours of his second term—including orders that seek to end birthright citizenship and suspend the refugee admissions program—laying the groundwork for the mass deportation he consistently promised on the campaign trail last year.
“The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense,” a spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department said in a prepared statement.
An immigration policy expert raised concerns about ramped-up immigration enforcement having a “chilling effect” that could leave families fearful about sending their children to school.
“With each new raid or series of high-profile arrests...school districts are really bracing for what the impacts might be on parents’ willingness or fears about even driving their children to school, fears about enforcement on school grounds,” said Margie McHugh, director of the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on immigration policy.
In light of the policy change, legal experts and immigration advocates urged schools to act on their legal responsibilities to safeguard and educate all children, regardless of immigration status.
The 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe guaranteed undocumented students the constitutional right to a free, public education.
“If administrators were to willy nilly open their campuses up to ICE enforcement action, that would be a Plyler violation, because you would chill the exercise of the right [to a free, public education],” said Hector Villagra, the vice president of policy advocacy and community education at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, whose attorneys represented plaintiffs in the landmark 1982 case.
Experts advise school leaders to set up protocols for what to do if ICE officials arrive on school campuses or request student information. Another federal law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, keeps most student information confidential without parents’ permission to release it.
Roughly 4.4 million children in the United States live with undocumented parents, and about 850,000 children were undocumented themselves in 2022, according to Pew Research Center data.
Trump’s approach to immigration has been a fear for educators since the election, after Project 2025—a conservative policy agenda developed by a number of Trump allies and former officials from Trump’s first administration—called for rescinding policies like one on sensitive locations.
Changing this policy was fully within the Trump administration’s purview, as it existed only as an internal department policy, instructing agents to seek approval from agency headquarters before carrying out any enforcement activities in or near protected areas.
The policy has been in place since 2011, during the Obama administration—initially listing schools, churches, hospitals, religious ceremonies, and public demonstrations as “sensitive locations.” It remained in place during Trump’s first administration, and former President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, expanded the list of protected areas in 2021 to also include places where children gather—playgrounds, school bus stops, child care centers, and after-school programs—and disaster relief distribution spots.
In anticipation of the policy change under Trump, some districts have already outlined what their staff should do if immigration agents come calling, including that they should refer all inquiries from ICE to school attorneys.
State and school leaders in California rebuked the federal policy change on Jan. 22. Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, pointed schools to an updated guide his office released in December outlining how school staff should handle requests from ICE, according to EdSource.
That guide tells schools that they aren’t compelled to provide ICE agents with access to student records if they only have an administrative warrant as opposed to a warrant signed by a judge. The guide also reminds schools of their obligations under federal law not to release private student information without their parents’ consent.
Newly arrived migrants have been the target of Trump’s unceasing barbs. During the 2024 campaign, he called them “dangerous,” said they were from “mental institutions,” and claimed that they would “prey on our people.”
The harmful language seeped into schools around Trump’s first election in 2016; educators were prepared for the same in November as racist texts and rhetoric circulated.
The Homeland Security Department’s statement on Tuesday night declared that, “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.”
Recent polls have generally found high levels of support for Trump’s immigration agenda, though it’s not unqualified.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found in an early January poll that many U.S. adults support increased security at the southern border and some deportations, but Trump’s executive actions on immigration go beyond what people are comfortable with.
Allowing the arrest of people in the country illegally at places like churches and schools was highly unpopular in the survey. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults somewhat or strongly favor arresting children who are in the country illegally while they are at school. A majority, about 6 in 10, oppose these kinds of arrests. Even Republicans aren’t fully on board—less than half favor arrests of children in schools or people at church, according to the AP poll.
Tighter immigration enforcement during Trump’s first term reverberated in schools. In 2018, nearly 80 percent of educators reported having students who experienced emotional or behavioral problems because they were concerned about immigration enforcement. A portion of those educators said that students felt “nearly overwhelmed by fear and worry.”
Opponents of Trump’s sweeping actions fear the ripple effects they could have on schools—including the possibility that they could keep students from attending.
“If a whole bunch of kids—where their only chance in life is to get a great education—if somehow, because of the fear and the hatred, their parents decide to keep them safe and not send them to school? Devastating consequences,” Arne Duncan, who served as Democratic President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education, said during a panel discussion with other former education secretaries on Tuesday.
