Schools Aren’t Off-Limits For ICE Raids, Trump DHS Says

The Trump administration on Tuesday said that schools were no longer off-limits for immigration enforcement agents, withdrawing a Biden administration guideline on “sensitive” areas.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman said in a Tuesday statement.

“This action empowers the brave men and women in CBP and ICE to enforce our immigration laws and catch criminal aliens—including murderers and rapists—who have illegally come into our country,” the statement continued. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

School systems immediately pledged to make ICE’s job as hard as possible, and an Obama-linked progressive group urged them to do so because the more illegal immigrants a school has, the more taxpayer money it gets.

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The Century Foundation, a progressive nonprofit that school systems lean on for policy advice, said that principals should meet federal law enforcement at the door and tell them that “district protocols” prohibited them from entering before the principal called the district’s lawyer. Then, the principal should call the child’s parents. Denver, whose enrollment has risen thanks to immigrant children after several years of declining enrollment, was one of several districts that said they would follow a similar procedure.

“The task is simple. Keep students in school, maintain enrollment and funding,” Century said in a social media thread drawing from a blog post it published in December.

The essay is a remarkable admission of how school systems and teachers’ unions often approach education — not as a service they provide, but as a jobs program where left-wing policies can help justify otherwise irrational funding.

Century said “financial logic” dictated that those who draw paychecks from public school systems should attempt to stop deportations:

Immigrant students have helped to keep public school district budgets from shrinking due to declining enrollment. Public schools in the United States lost more than 1 million students between 2019 and 2022. New York City schools have lost over 100,000 students in the past few years, and Chicago Public Schools saw eight years of enrollment dips before picking up slightly in 2023. These enrollment losses can lead to significant layoffs, school mergers, or closures. However, in both districts, English learner enrollment has grown significantly, making up for some losses and bringing enrollment-dependent funds back to public schools. Even former New York City Schools Chancellor Banks called the arrival of migrant students a “godsend” for public school budgets. Further financial hits to districts will occur if immigrant students stay home because they are afraid to come to school.

Parents pulled their children from public schools after teachers alienated many of them by refusing to work during COVID and injecting divisive political views into the curriculum. Fewer students in school means a school has fewer costs, and therefore doesn’t need to employ as many members of a teachers’ union.

But illegal immigrants can’t afford private school — and the government pays vastly more for “English language learners” than it does for Americans. As a result, New York and other localities didn’t lower taxes, despite the massive exodus from their schools. That’s because what amounts to “financial logic” for school systems comes at a massive cost to taxpayers.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, taxpayers spent $14,000 per student for Americans, and $22,000 per student for those the district said needed extra staffing because of lack of English proficiency. Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia spent $142 million on English as a Second Language in 2024, and the county now faces a $300 million budget shortfall that could force cuts to basic services. The ESL costs were up from $94 million in 2019. Educators claim that students still don’t know English after years, leaving them in the more lucrative status, even though children can learn languages quickly.

Century is a nonprofit helmed by Mark Zuckerman, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council under President Barack Obama. The post was written by Alejandra Vazquez Baur, a “fellow at The Century Foundation, where she manages the Bridges Collaborative and directs the National Newcomer Network,” and Claire E. Sylvan, “the founder and senior strategic advisor for Internationals Network for Public Schools” and “member of TCF’s National Newcomer Network leadership team.”

Bridges Collaborative pushes for race-based social engineering of public schools, mirroring 1970s forced-bussing policies. As the book Race to the Bottom reported, it claimed that minorities cannot learn unless taxpayers spend, in some cases, more than a typical household’s entire income on the education bureaucracy, and that to achieve “equity,” whites should have funding taken away from them so their test scores will be lower to make them more equal to minorities.

In a “study” that induced the Washington Post to write that “school districts with large numbers of black and Hispanic students need more money to help students succeed but get less,” Century said that, for example, Wagon Mound Public Schools in New Mexico underfunded its schools by $20,184 per pupil. In reality, the district spent $35,182 per student, but since there are many Hispanics there, Century thought they required $55,366 per student in order to learn.

At the same time, it said Los Alamos Public Schools spent too much — at $10,804. Students were the children of brilliant scientists at the national laboratory, but Century wanted its funding cut to $8,000 — seemingly to sabotage them to bring their results down closer to the Hispanics across the state.

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