Immigration enforcement has been a central priority for the Trump Administration. As immigration arrests have surged, both test scores and disciplinary incidents have declined for U.S.-born and foreign-born Spanish-speaking students, according to a new study by David Figlio of the University of Rochester and Umut Özek, an independent researcher. The impacts are more pronounced for lower-performing students, female students, and students in middle and high school.
The authors focus on a large urban school district in Florida (LUSD), one of the ten largest school districts in the country. Roughly 30 percent of LUSD students are Spanish-speaking, and 15 percent are foreign born, representing 27 different countries of origin. Using data from the 2022-23 through 2024-25 school years, Figlio and Özek link student administrative data—including demographics, birth country, home language, attendance, enrollment, test scores, and disciplinary records—with an estimated school-level measure of immigration enforcement intensity. This measure is constructed using each school’s student birth-country composition and the annual number of immigration arrests in Florida by birth country.
Because Florida administers its state assessment multiple times per year, the authors are able to compare test scores in May 2025 as immigration arrests swelled with those just prior to Trump’s inauguration in December 2024, along with scores from the same time periods in preceding academic years. Disciplinary incidents, meanwhile, are observed continuously throughout the year.
Among all Spanish-speaking students in LUSD, a one-point increase in implied school-level immigration enforcement intensity reduces test scores by 0.71 percentiles. U.S.-born Spanish-speakers experience slightly larger declines than their foreign-born peers: 0.75 versus 0.7 percentiles, respectively. While these effects are statistically significant, they are relatively modest compared to already-existing achievement gaps. The rise in immigration arrests explains roughly 10 percent of the achievement gap between English- and Spanish-speaking students.
The effects are larger for certain subgroups. Test scores decrease by 1.04 percentiles for lower-performing Spanish-speakers, compared to 0.6 percentiles for higher performers. Female Spanish-speakers experience larger declines than males (0.83 versus 0.6 percentiles), and impacts are substantially greater for middle and high school students (1.3 percentiles) than for elementary students (0.1 percentiles).
In addition to test scores, increased enforcement is associated with fewer disciplinary incidents. A one-point increase in implied school-level immigration enforcement intensity reduces disciplinary incidents by 0.8 percentage points among Spanish-speaking students overall, with larger declines for U.S.-born students (1 percentage point) than for foreign-born students (0.6 percentage points). The authors suggest two potential explanations for this trend: students may be altering their behavior to avoid drawing attention amid heightened enforcement, and teachers and administrators may be more lenient with students they believe are experiencing immigration-related hardships.
Because U.S.-born and foreign-born Spanish-speaking students experience similar reductions in test scores and disciplinary incidents, Figlio and Özek argue that the effects of increased immigration enforcement appear to work through broader school and community climate factors, and/or through students’ fears of parental deportation rather than concerns about their own immigration status. As immigration policy remains a cornerstone of the Trump Administration’s agenda, the authors highlight the value of their findings and approach for identifying how enforcement actions reverberate through schools and communities, affecting both U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike.