When there was a lot of immigration enforcement in California’s Central Valley at the beginning of January 2025, something subtle but telling happened in schools all over the area. During the fall semester, classrooms were slowly filling up. By the spring semester, they looked a little less full. The teachers saw. Principals took notice. Now, researchers at Stanford have given numbers to what a lot of teachers already knew.
A new study from the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that in January and February 2025, there were 22% more absences among students in five Central Valley school districts than in the same months the two previous school years. The districts serve areas with a lot of Latin American immigrant families. These areas were already feeling a lot of anxiety before federal agents showed up.
What’s most interesting about the results is how clean the data looks. In the months before January, attendance patterns for this school year were mostly the same as those from previous years. But after the raids on January 7, the numbers changed. It’s hard to ignore the link. Thomas Dee, the education professor at Stanford who did the study, was careful about how he put it together.
All grade levels felt the effects, but the youngest kids had to deal with them the most. The number of students missing pre-K days went up by about 30%, and the number of students missing kindergarten through fifth grade days went up by about 27%. For high school students, the rise was more like 8%. There’s a pretty clear reason for this gap. Children younger than five are more likely to live with undocumented family members. Parents who could be deported may not want to separate from a five-year-old during a raid, even if it means keeping that child at home.
Even from far away, you can feel something reading those numbers. There are more than five million children under 18 living in the United States with at least one parent who is here illegally. Almost all of these children are American citizens. They have the right to go to school. They’re not going anywhere. But fear doesn’t follow the rules set by the law.
Dee made sure to say that the harms are more than just what is written down in attendance books. Researchers have found a link between immigration enforcement activities and higher rates of anxiety and depression in children who are affected. These effects don’t go away when the child goes back to school. If a student stayed home for two weeks because they knew something scary was going on in their neighborhood, they don’t just walk back into school and start where they left off. Teachers are often the ones who have to handle that re-entry on their own, without much help from the school.
In addition, there are real-world effects on schools. A lot of students missing class means that teachers have to go over old material again to help those students catch up. This slows down the learning process for everyone. A new wave of chronic absenteeism makes things even harder for districts that are already having a hard time with money because enrollment has dropped since the pandemic. The problems get worse.
The study, which used three years of daily attendance data, was released as a working paper in the middle of June. This level of detail allowed Dee to account for seasonal absence patterns like breaks before and during holidays. That care with the methods matters. There is less room for the January spike to be a coincidence.
To be honest, this information doesn’t give teachers a lot to work with, but it’s not nothing either. Dee said that virtual instruction and teaching methods that take trauma into account could help students who have been affected. Those aren’t really solutions, but rather ways to make things easier. But being aware is important in some way. A teacher who knows why a student was absent and what they might have with them when they return is better able to help than one who doesn’t.
We still don’t know how long these effects will last. Based on data from February, it looks like the absences weren’t just a short-term reaction that went away quickly. Going to these communities has become more normalized since then. It will take more time and more data to answer the question of whether fear-based absences have become more common or not.
