Immigration Enforcement and Children's Human Right to Education

• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Author: Martha F. Davis
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12343
• Date: 01 April 2018

COMMENTS

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND CHILDREN’S HUMAN

RIGHT TO EDUCATION

Martha F. Davis

In Plyler v. Doe,

1

the U.S. Supreme Court surprised many court-watchers by ruling that the state

of Texas could not deny public education to undocumented children. According to the Court, “denial

of education to some isolated group of children poses an affront to one of the goals of the Equal Pro-

tection Clause: the abolition of governmental barriers presenting unreasonable obstacles to advance-

ment on the basis of individual merit.”

2

While the Court stopped short of recognizing a

constitutional right to education, the result in Plyler certainly shored up the idea of education as a

basic human right for all—an idea that the United States subscribed to when it endorsed the Univer-

sal Declaration of Human Rights.

Nearly four decades after Plyler, immigrant children’s education rights are again under attack—

not only through targeted federal threats to deny legal status to “DREAMers” (i.e., undocumented

immigrants as described in the DREAM Act), but also more broadly through an insidious campaign

to spread fear in immigrant communities. The fear, deliberately instilled by the federal government

and some state and local governments, is that, as they go about their daily routines, children them-

selves or their parents will be arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and

deported. The government’s campaign lacks the explicit classifications struck down in Plyler, yet

immigrant children are effectively being denied access to education as a result of this campaign. As

one Oregon legislator reported, “I have heard from children who are afraid to go to school in the

morning, because they aren’t sure if their parents will be home at the end of the day.”

3

The trend toward more aggressive ICE enforcement began under President Obama but accelerated

under the Trump administration. In 2017, ICE has chipped away at previously safe spaces—courts,

schools, churches—deterring immigrant families (which include citizens and noncitizens alike) from

accessing the everyday rights such as access to education that should be protected through Plyler, the

Equal Protection Clause, and basic human rights norms. For example, in February 2017, ICE stopped

and arrested a father of four in a Los Angeles neighborhood while he was dropping his 12-year-old

citizen daughter off at school. His older daughter, a 13-year-old, was in the car and witnessed her

father’s arrest. Also in February, following a large ICE raid in Las Cruces, New Mexico, more than

2,000 students stayed home from school lest they be caught up in more ICE enforcement actions.

Local school officials made special efforts to reach out and regain the trust of families to secure the

children’s return to school. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, undocumented immigrant families took

their children out of the Head Start program, afraid that their families risk deportation simply by

sending their children to a childhood learning and literacy program.

Challenges to ICE’s aggressive tactics often focus on the way in which they undermine the trust

of local law enforcement in immigrant communities. That argument—while certainly sound—is pol-

icy based. There is little hard law to protect families vulnerable to deportation. Sanctuary cities in

which local governments attempt to reassure immigrant families by declining to share information

Corresponding: m.davis@northeastern.edu

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 56 No. 2, April 2018 344–345

V

C2018 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts