An empty chair in a kindergarten classroom has a subtly depressing quality. Not the typical absence on a Monday morning—a cold, a dentist appointment, a leisurely morning. This type of emptiness is distinct. thoughtful. motivated by fear. And in the Central Valley of California, those vacant chairs began to proliferate in quantities that scientists could measure at the beginning of 2025.
Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford, did just that. Dee discovered that student absences in January and February 2025 were 22% higher than the same months in previous years after gathering three years’ worth of daily attendance data from five school districts in the Central Valley, a region of expansive farmland and close-knit Latino communities stretching down the spine of California. Almost exactly on January 7th, when federal immigration enforcement operations in the area increased, the spike started.
Depending on your political stance, this type of finding can have different implications. But when the politics are taken out of the picture, what’s left is more difficult to dispute: children weren’t attending school, and it seems that fear was the cause. Not sickness, not the weather. Fear of being separated from family.
The districts that Dee examined were not picked at random; rather, they are located in areas with sizable Latin American immigrant populations, where an early-morning raid at a church or warehouse can have a profound impact on the entire neighborhood before the school buses even begin to run. For months, there had been anecdotal reports from principals and teachers about parents who just stopped sending their children to school. Dee’s study quantified the difficulties faced by educators.
The data’s age breakdown is what stands out the most. The number of absences among Pre-K students increased by about 30%. The percentage for kindergarten through fifth grade was roughly 27%. 17% are in middle school. 8% of high school students. The youngest kids were skipping school at the highest rates; they were the least able to comprehend what immigration enforcement entails, but they might be the most sensitive to their parents’ anxiety. Dee identifies two plausible explanations: younger children are more likely to reside in homes with undocumented parents, and those parents might be especially anxious to keep their five-year-old.
Reading the research gives the impression that the raids had a significant impact on schools without having to specifically target them. A sweep through a neighborhood at dawn or a factory raid two miles away can have a cascading effect that reaches classrooms by eight in the morning. The school itself turns into a risk assessment. Will I be able to reach my child if something goes wrong while they are there? For thousands of families, that question—which is impossible to definitively answer—seems to have been sufficient.
Dee presents the academic ramifications with caution. Over the course of the first half of the school year, each student effectively missed an extra 1.4 days of instruction. This may not seem like much, but when you consider that it happened to entire classrooms, teachers were forced to slow down, repeat material, and manage a room full of kids who were processing stress that they were unable to fully express. Students who are absent are not the only ones who suffer from learning loss. Everyone seated in those classrooms receives it.
Increased immigration enforcement has been linked by research from Brookings and other institutions to more general outcomes, such as lower test scores over time, worse mental health indicators among children in immigrant households, and eventually lower college enrollment. In that broader pattern, Dee’s study is a more immediate and accurate data point—a real-time before-and-after image rather than one that was recreated years later.
It’s difficult to ignore how infrequently this discussion is presented as a matter of education policy. Immigration enforcement is discussed as a matter of law enforcement, border policy, and occasionally civil liberties. Rarely as a query about what transpires in a Fresno second-grade classroom when federal agents arrive in the area the previous evening. For anyone who is paying attention to where the data actually points, Dee’s research makes that connection impossible to overlook.
It is still genuinely unclear whether policymakers will take this into account when making enforcement decisions.
