Los Angeles Unified's enrollment dropped from 392,654 students to 375,661 — roughly 17,000 fewer kids in one year, on top of a 4% year-over-year decline that was already underway. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho is direct about the cause: the decline is "deeply connected to the realities our immigrant families are facing," following a January policy change that opened the door to immigration enforcement at schools. Fox News reported kids simply not showing up to class, out of fear, not truancy. Chicago and Miami-Dade are seeing the same pattern.
I want to be careful here about what I'm and am not saying. I'm not arguing immigration status should shield anyone from lawful enforcement, and I've been consistent all week that I want real enforcement against real violations. What I am saying is that a policy allowing raids at or near schools produces a cost that shows up nowhere in any enforcement statistic DHS publishes: American-born and immigrant children alike missing school, not because they did anything, but because they're scared. Some of these 17,000 missing students are almost certainly U.S. citizens with an undocumented parent, kept home out of a fear that has nothing to do with their own legal status.
This is where enforcement policy runs into something that should matter to conservatives specifically: a child not in school today is a worse-off adult a decade from now — worse educated, worse positioned for the workforce, more likely to need public support rather than contribute to it. If the actual goal is a stronger American labor force in twenty years, an enforcement posture that empties classrooms today is working directly against that goal, regardless of how it scores on this month's deportation count.
Schools should not be enforcement zones. That's not an immigration position, it's a child-welfare one, and it's one I'd expect people across the political spectrum to actually agree on if the discussion weren't so thoroughly captured by the broader fight over enforcement writ large. DHS can pursue interior enforcement without campuses being part of the theater. Nothing about targeting violent offenders requires making a first-grader afraid to go to class.