School districts could be forced to cut classroom instruction budgets in the coming years due to the Trump administration’s efforts to deport millions of undocumented immigrants—even if those efforts fall short of the sweeping scale the president has discussed.
President Donald Trump moved in the early days of his second administration to close the Mexican border, provoke a legal battle over birthright citizenship, cancel humanitarian relief programs for migrants, declare English the nation’s official language, and eliminate a longstanding immigration policy that kept officers from making arrests at schools, churches, playgrounds, and other public spaces.
Since then, the number of immigrants detained daily by federal officers has ramped up significantly, rumors of immigration enforcement activity have many communities on edge, and conservative lawmakers have pushed to crack down on undocumented immigrants in K-12 schools.
Policymakers in at least five states have introduced policies that aim—in defiance of federal rights guaranteed under a 1982 Supreme Court ruling—to restrict students with undocumented status from attending public schools, either by charging them tuition, requiring them to submit paperwork they don’t have, or barring them from enrolling altogether. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters have also called in recent years for the federal government to cover the costs of educating undocumented students; Walters sued the Biden administration to cover what he described as “skyrocketing” costs.
The federal government lacks the resources to fully execute a campaign of mass deportation on the scale Trump has promised. Even so, experts on school finance, immigration, and economics warn that the mere specter of a mass deportation agenda could depress tax revenue for schools, cause a spike in chronic absenteeism, and prompt state funding cuts that would be felt by all students, immigrant or not.
Systematically removing several million immigrants “would have such an unbelievably devastating impact on the country,” said Ilana Umansky, an associate professor of education at the University of Oregon who studies immigration.
Some early indicators of those effects are already emerging. Schools nationwide have reported reduced attendance, with a particularly notable spike in absences in many places during the Day Without Immigrants nationwide protest on Feb. 3. Fear and anxiety about immigration raids already have many communities on edge, and some districts are already seeing signs of fiscal trouble tied to anxieties around immigration.
Here’s a look at how the federal government’s crackdown on immigration could affect schools and the resources they use to educate the nation’s students.
Attendance and enrollment could take a hit as anxiety about deportations surges
The exact number of undocumented students in the United States is difficult to pin down. But out of roughly 50 million K-12 students nationwide, estimates suggest 3 million to 4 million have parents who are undocumented, and 700,000 to 850,000 have undocumented status themselves.
Widely circulated threats of mass deportation don’t actually have to come to fruition to affect school district budgets. That’s because a handful of states calculate funding allocations for schools using an attendance-based formula.
Most states have done away with this method and make calculations based on enrollment, but there are six exceptions, including the two largest states, California and Texas. Incidentally, those two states also have larger populations of undocumented immigrants than any other.
Parents at risk of deportation may keep their children home due to fear of getting stopped by agents. In more than 30 states, undocumented parents are legally barred from having a driver’s license, making it even harder for them to transport their children to school.
So far, the most pronounced effect of the nation’s new immigration policies on school attendance came on A Day Without Immigrants, an organized nationwide protest over the new administration’s immigration crackdown. School districts as far-flung as Houston; Little Rock, Ark.; Lynn, Mass.; Mattawa, Wash.; Port Salerno, Fla., Richmond, Va., and Winston-Salem, N.C. saw significantly higher rates of absenteeism.
The spike was particularly pronounced in some majority-Hispanic districts like Turlock, Calif., which reported a quarter of its students were absent that day, and schools with dual language immersion programs like Academy of the Americas at Logan in Detroit, where only 7 percent of students showed up that day.
Those absences have already threatened to take a financial toll on schools in states with attendance-based funding.
Texas uses average daily attendance as the basis for its district-by-district funding calculations. Districts throughout the year can request to have individual days removed from the count.
As of March 24, three districts cited widespread absences on A Day Without Immigrants in requests for the state to waive Feb. 3 from their attendance calculations. The state denied all of those requests.
A similar story has played out in Idaho. Four districts requested waivers from the state for A Day Without Immigrants, including the Caldwell district, where 2,000 of 5,500 students were absent. The state rejected all of them.
“The statute does not account for the type of event that occurred on Feb. 3,” said Maggie Reynolds, spokesperson for the Idaho department of education.
Attendance fluctuations haven’t been limited to that one-day protest. The Chelsea school district in Massachusetts, where roughly 9 in 10 students are Hispanic, reported more than 1,000 of its 6,100 students were absent around the time reports began circulating in late January of ICE activity at a local grocery store.
Even among the small number of states that use attendance to calculate funding, the costs of dramatic single-day declines in absences vary significantly.
In California, lawmakers next month will consider a bill that aims to “preserve schools’ attendance-based revenue” as immigration enforcement takes its toll. But the bill doesn’t yet specify how that would work, and many districts are already bracing for funding losses from recent absences tied to fears of immigration enforcement.
In other states with attendance-based funding, the Day Without Immigrants alone won’t be enough to substantially affect school funding. Kentucky drops the school year’s four lowest attendance days when calculating each school district’s average daily attendance after the school year is over. Missouri uses the highest of the preceding three years’ attendance figures in calculating funding for schools.
Meanwhile, in the 40-plus states where state school funding is primarily based on enrollment, surging immigration enforcement could cause some districts with large concentrations of migrant students to see smaller student counts in the coming years. When ICE forms partnerships with local police to arrest undocumented residents, Hispanic student enrollment in those communities’ K-12 schools drops by 10 percent within two years, according to a 2019 study.
Tax revenue could drop as undocumented immigrants leave the workforce and shop less
Undocumented immigrants annually pay billions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes—even when they can’t participate in the programs they’re helping to subsidize.
More than $25 billion of annual revenue for Social Security, for instance, comes from undocumented immigrants, according to a 2024 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
In fact, undocumented immigrants often face higher tax rates than the wealthiest citizens, and often don’t qualify for tax credits that help reduce burdens for other taxpayers, according to ITEP’s research.
If undocumented immigrants fear getting arrested while patronizing local businesses, communities with large populations of undocumented immigrants could see their tax bases shrink, said Oscar Jiménez-Castellanos, a professor of education finance at the University of Georgia. That would put more pressure on states, many of which are already cash-strapped, to invest in equalizing school funding.
Cities and states where undocumented immigrants typically congregate may lose those residents to other states or less densely populated areas, Jiménez-Castellanos said.
“If that community gets a sense of insecurity, the first action that they do is limit their mobility,” he said.
An analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that the U.S. GDP, adjusted for typical growth, would stay roughly level over the next four years if mass deportations played out as proposed—“meaning no economic growth over the second Trump administration from this policy alone.” That would mean American governments could expect revenues that are stable at best.
Other research shows that the presence of immigrants in the United States contributes to long-term economic growth. The presence of immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, means that “from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise,” according to a 2024 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“You can’t have a bigger economy without adding more people as a general rule,” said Conor Williams, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, who writes often about immigrant students. “The more people you have, the more stuff you need, the more stuff you make, the more stuff you sell.”
Investments in education for undocumented students can’t be separated from broader school spending
Public investment in education for undocumented students can’t easily be separated from the broader costs of providing a free, public education to K-12 students nationwide. Funding programs that serve undocumented immigrant students also serve broader groups of English learners, students with disabilities, and students from low-income families, among other groups.
Roughly 4 out of 5 dollars in every school district’s budget go toward salaries and benefits for staff—including those who provide instruction, services, and support to undocumented immigrant students.
But there are virtually no funding programs for schools that solely serve undocumented immigrants—in large part because schools are legally prohibited from collecting identifying information about students’ immigration status.
The most common services that undocumented immigrants require in schools, experts say, are for English language instruction. The federal government in recent years has allocated roughly $750 million in Title III funds school districts must use to support multilingual students, including both legal and undocumented immigrants. That sum is a tiny fraction of, for instance, the $16 billion invested annually in Title I for low-income students.
Those Title III dollars, distributed to states largely based on their share of the English-learner population, often fall well short of covering the costs of those services, leaving states and school districts to make up the difference.
In the Akron, Ohio, school district, nearly 2,400 students from 87 countries attend the English as a Second Language program. Thirty-two interpreters across the district educate students in nearly 50 different languages.
The program’s total cost this school year, according to a school board presentation reported by Signal Akron, was $5 million, or slightly more than $2,093 per student. Federal funds cover only $340,000 of those costs, and the state pays $2 million.
Most states’ school funding formulas provide additional per-pupil aid for English learners—anywhere from 10 to 70 additional cents per dollar depending on the state and the type of services.
Some states in recent years have invested to help districts with an influx of new migrants.
Lawmakers in Utah, for instance, this month approved allocating $500,000 in emergency funding districts can apply to receive if they experienced a jump in English learner enrollment of at least 75 percent over the last three years. Thirteen of the state’s 41 districts, along with one charter school, qualify. The proposal was awaiting the governor’s signature as of March 24.
Investments in English learners fund a wide range of services—including staffing of tough-to-fill positions, professional development for meeting immigrant students’ complex needs, and mental health programs.
Services like these in districts nationwide couldn’t simply go away if undocumented immigrants were no longer allowed in school or in the country. The law mandating services for English learners, for instance, would still be in effect. And even in schools where the population of English learners is dramatically diminished, some students would still need those services.
Eliminating Title III, for instance, would barely make a ripple in the annual federal budget of $7 trillion. “In what universe do we think that targeting a particular group of students is an appropriate way to reduce our funding and even improve our schools?” Williams said.
Instead, if mass deportation plays out as Trump’s team has proposed, more schools might end up in the situation many rural schools currently find themselves in—investing a large amount of money for legally mandated staff members serving a very small number of students.
“When you have a higher critical mass of a similar student, you can actually make things more cost-effective, because you have more students not only receiving the service, but generating the revenue for the schools to provide that service,” Jiménez-Castellanos said.
Stepped-up immigration enforcement has wide-ranging ripple effects in schools
Research has shown that heightened immigration enforcement has a measurable, negative effect on Hispanic students’ academic achievement, regardless of immigration status. Those students could then become more costly to educate as a result.
If immigrant students are more reticent to attend school, districts could struggle to identify students who qualify for English-learner services, Umansky said. Districts would then lose out on weighted funding meant to serve those students, even as their educational needs remain significant.
Communities where students are in school less tend to experience higher crime rates, higher costs for social services, and smaller long-term economic growth due to a less-educated workforce, Umansky said.
Periods of heightened immigration enforcement activity can be stressful and traumatic not only for immigrants who feel targeted, but for their friends, neighbors, and fellow community members.
Researchers have found that schools in communities where immigration raids have taken place tend to see a significant spike in absences among Hispanic students in the weeks following the incident, and long-term trends of increased instances of drug abuse, violence, self-harm, and suicidal ideation among students in the years following.
“Students who feel vulnerable have less concentration in school, they’re more on edge, they’re more fearful,” Umansky said. “Those things have academic costs, which in turn have financial costs.”
Experts also emphasized that removing undocumented immigrants wouldn’t just cause negative effects in schools. It would also rob schools of the many benefits these students bring, including academically outperforming their peers and even boosting their U.S.-born classmates’ performance.
In other words, Williams said, “most of the data suggests that these kids do really well because our schools work pretty well to support them.”
Research has shown that bilingual students, in comparison to peers who speak a single language, have stronger test scores, higher lifetime earnings, and fewer health problems. All of those translate to reducing long-term costs for education and other public services.
“These kids are kids with immense, immense strengths,” Umansky said. “And they are strengths that the country needs.”
