How Fears of Deportation Harm Kids’ Education
The threat of raids could be preventing some undocumented immigrants from sending their children to school.
Alexa Narvaez, 9, along with other protesters, during a rally for deportees in downtown San Diego, California in 2014
For many, the New Year represents new beginnings, a chance to start fresh with a clean slate. But this was not the case for hundreds of undocumented adults and children swept up in deportation raids in the first days of 2016. Federal authorities, stepping up immigration enforcement, fanned out primarily into Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas to take unauthorized immigrants with deportation orders into custody. Immigration officers are focusing their efforts on some 100,000 families that flowed across the U.S. border in 2014, reportedly in an attempt to escape violence in their home countries like El Salvador, thecurrent murder capital of the world.
To casual observers, this might appear to be just another flare-up in the firestorm over national immigration policy. Yet a primary focus of the Obama administration’s latest action is on the most vulnerable of immigrant groups—mothers and children—at a time when Latinos, who make up the largest percentage of undocumented immigrants, represent the fastest-growing segmentof the U.S. public-school population. With raids and deportations aimed largely at Central American children, the debate is extending beyond the divisive issue of undocumented immigrants. Educators, advocates, and community and elected leaders are questioning the untold hardship on schoolchildren as America limps along with seemingly complex, confusing immigration laws and regulations.
About 50 million students were enrolled in U.S. public elementary and secondary schools in 2012. Of those, 7 percent (3.5 million children) had at least one undocumented parent, according to data from the Pew Research Center for Hispanic Trends. While most of the children with unauthorized immigrant parents were born in the U.S., the remainder, about 49,000, are undocumented themselves. This kind of data underscores the striking fact that immigration How Deportation Takes an Emotional and Educational Toll on Undocumented Immigrants' Kids - The Atlantic: