ICE deportations accelerate enrollment declines at US public schools

Enrollment projected to fall by at least 2 million more students by 2030

America’s public schools were already emptying because of a decadeslong drop in birth rates. Deportations under the Trump administration are now accelerating the losses, according to NPR reporting, and districts with large immigrant communities are seeing the steepest declines.

“Birth rates here in Los Angeles County have been declining for decades, which means fewer children enrolled in our schools,” said Kelly Gonez, a board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The district, the second largest in the country, has lost more than 300,000 students over the last two decades.

The demographic slide predates the deportation campaign. The number of children under 18 began falling nationwide after 2010 and had dropped by roughly 2.1 million through 2025, according to U.S. Census data. Public school enrollment peaked in 2019 and was down roughly 1.5 million students as of the 2024 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The Trump administration began detaining and expelling large numbers of foreign residents last year, deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many with school-age children. As part of that effort, federal officials weakened restrictions that had prevented ICE agents from operating near public schools. A study by the Migration Policy Institute found as many as 1.9 million people left the U.S. during the first 18 months of Trump’s second term. “Many of our families immediately went into hiding,” Gonez said. “We were predicting a 2% drop in enrollment. It was double that.”

Researchers who study education and population trends said the country has not seen birth rates and immigration levels this low at the same time in nearly a century, since the Great Depression era. Large-scale deportations, they said, mean even bigger and more rapid changes in areas with large immigrant communities. “The U.S. isn’t alone in facing the challenges of demographic decline,” said Thomas Dee, an economist who specializes in education policy at Stanford University. “To stop or slow immigration really exacerbates those problems. Communities are now confronting very painful decisions about closing schools.”

Federal researchers project enrollment will decline by at least another 2 million students by 2030, based on data gathered before the deportations began — a 7% national decline in roughly a decade.

A report published in June by the education think tanks Bellwether and WestEd warned that public schools have entered an era of “sustained” enrollment declines already reshaping districts in 40 states. The analysis found the “primary overall driver of declining enrollment is a sustained drop in birth rates,” followed by a “national slowdown in immigration,” and predicted a loss of $11 billion a year in public school funding. “At the local level, enrollment decline may permanently reduce available resources and will significantly reshape public education systems for years to come,” the study concluded.

Other forces have cut enrollment as well, including the COVID-19 pandemic and a shift of more students into private and homeschool learning. The Education Department projects private schools, too, will lose more than a million students by the end of the decade. How large or sustained the impact of the immigration policies will be remains unclear; Dee and other researchers say that depends on how long ICE enforcement operations and other restrictions remain in place.

The short-term effects can be sharp. When Dee studied public schools in communities hit by ICE raids in California’s Central Valley in 2025, he found student daily absences spiked more than 20%. Texas saw the number of children in classrooms fall statewide last year by more than 76,000 students, the vast majority of the drop among Hispanic kids and the children of immigrant families, according to a study by the Texas Education Agency. Florida, home to a large community of Haitian refugees the Trump administration stripped of temporary protected status in July, saw a big enrollment drop this year: the state’s two largest public school districts, Miami-Dade and Broward County, lost roughly 30,000 children combined in a single year. “It’s really the effect of both the exodus of the existing families and stopping the inflow [of foreign migrants and children] that normally would have occurred,” Dee said.

In Los Angeles, the losses run through individual campuses. “This street right here is actually where the ICE standoff happened. It was right before school,” said Guadalupe Cardona, a teacher who stood recently outside Santee Education Complex, a high school in South Los Angeles. An ICE agent opened fire on that street in October 2025; no children or school employees were injured, but a man from Mexico without legal status and an ICE agent were struck by bullets. Cardona believes fear following that clash and other raids caused enrollment to plummet.

“In my school alone, we had over 200 students that didn’t show up on the first day of school,” Cardona said. “We found that a lot of them were just [gone], no longer living where they had put their address down. We lost two teachers at the beginning of the school year because of it. It is something that hurts beyond just, like, putting your job at risk.”

Guadalupe Pineda, a parent who works in a shop just down the street from Santee High, said dread of ICE, combined with fewer students coming and going, have hurt her community. “There’s definitely less sales, less traffic, less everything,” she said. Pineda grew up in Los Angeles and attended public school there without legal status before securing U.S. citizenship a few years ago, she told NPR. She said she understands why people are pulling their kids out of school and in many cases leaving the U.S. altogether. “People are still scared, very much scared to go out to do everyday things,” she said. “I feel like if I didn’t have everything set [with my immigration status], I would probably leave. I would be afraid of being separated from my family.”

White House officials, asked by NPR about the impact of ICE enforcement and other federal immigration policies on public schools — including the revocation of temporary refugee status for hundreds of thousands of people living in the U.S. legally — sent a brief email response from spokeswoman Lauren Bis saying deportations “make American classrooms less crowded.” Bis pointed to a September post on the social media platform X in which administration officials celebrated the overall drop in the number of legal and undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. “The total foreign-born population declined 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026,” the statement said. “The huge recent decline in the foreign-born population indicates that net migration to the United States was negative in the last year and a half for the first time since the 1930s.”

Advocacy groups that support sharply reduced immigration view the trend as a necessary correction after years of what they describe as lax border security. Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform said he is not troubled by the prospect that many public school districts will have to downsize. “We don’t guarantee the school system X number of kids,” Mehlman said. “That is not the job of our immigration system, that you’re going to have X number of kids every single year and if you don’t, we’re going to go find some for you.”

The effects reach beyond foreign-born children. As many as 4.6 million school-age kids, including many U.S. citizens, live in homes with family members vulnerable to deportation, according to Brookings Institution estimates. Vanessa Salazar was one of them. She was 18 years old, a U.S.-born senior in LAUSD last year, when her mother was detained and deported to Mexico. “It really threw me off balance,” she said. “Coming home without my mother there to be my anchor, really affected my performance in school.” Salazar dropped out to cope with what she describes as her family’s trauma and now lives in Mexico with her mother. “It’s like, why am I going to be in this country that doesn’t really want my people, my community or my culture?” she said.

With birth rates hitting another record low last year and ICE now arresting as many as 50,000 people each month, future district losses could grow. A study released in August by California state officials predicted public schools in the state alone could lose another 710,000 students over the next decade “if current trends in fertility and migration hold.” Los Angeles Unified, now facing a second consecutive school year with 4% enrollment declines, announced a citywide effort in September aimed at identifying buildings and campuses that will close. Gonez told NPR she expects the cuts to be deep and painful. “When your district is roughly half the size of student population it was 20 years ago, it’s hard to find a sustainable path to keep campuses open,” she said.