As students head back to school and prepare to take on a new school year, enrollment for Latino students in Maryland has dropped amid deportation fears as the Trump administration continues its crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration.
This comes after the Department of Homeland Security, under the instruction of President Trump, rescinded a law that protected spaces like churches, hospitals, and schools from being subject to search and immigration enforcement operations at the beginning of his second term.
Significance. For the first time in six years, enrollment of Latino students in Maryland has declined in public schools, despite the overall Latino population continuing to rise across the state, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education. Maryland Matters, the first to report on this matter, previously found that enrollment of Latino students has fallen 0.028% after growing at an average rate of 4.7% since the COVID-19 pandemic. The data looked at kindergarten through 12th grade public schools and found that the number of Latino students is now decreasing.
In Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, the two counties in Maryland that have the highest Latino populations, 15 of 20 schools that have high Latino student populations saw significant decreases in the number of Latino students enrolled this past school year, according to Maryland Matters.
Overlooked angle. Earlier this year, an essay by the Brookings Institute highlighted how heightened immigration enforcement is linked to “chronic absenteeism, poorer mental health, lower test scores, and reduced college enrollment.” Immigrant parents and families have been scared to send their children to school out of fears they or their kids will be taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents en route to school or on school grounds, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, an associate education professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote.
Reports from education systems across the nation in states like Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts show that Latino people across the country are also making similar decisions not to send their children to school out of fears that they will be deported.
The power structure. On Trump’s first day back in office for his second term, he removed legal protections from former President Biden’s presidency that labeled schools, hospitals, and churches “sensitive areas” and made it illegal for ICE operations to be conducted in those spaces.
What experts say. “When students are not in school, they miss important learning opportunities,” Sattin-Bajaj wrote. “But the benefits of attending school extend far beyond academic learning. When students are unable to go to school, they lose crucial socialization, community-building, and other enrichment experiences. They miss after-school clubs and activities, cutting them off from social connections that schools are designed to foster.”
