They’re Already Scared to Come to School. Republicans Want to Kick Them Out for Good.

Top White House advisor Stephen Miller, the longtime architect of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, asked Texas Republicans last week in a closed-door meeting to kick undocumented children out of public schools, according to reporting from the New York Times. 

It’s an escalation in the right’s push to restrict public education to children who can prove they are US citizens. Such a move could violate a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, Plyler v. Doe, which held that withholding funds to schools teaching undocumented children violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That case was a result of a class-action lawsuit in Texas in the 1970s. 

As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias reported back in 2022, this isn’t the first time that Miller has attempted this. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, he reportedly led a similar push. One that, according to TIME, he’d been driving at since 2017.

In the decades since Plyler, there have been several unsuccessful attempts to upend the highest court’s ruling. The current one is buoyed by the Trump administration’s multi-pronged anti-immigration campaign that has come to define his second term. 

Miller isn’t alone. Also this month, Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, led a House hearing to discuss how Plyler “was wrongly decided and how it harms America’s schools and students,” according to his press office. 

During the meeting, Roy said in his opening statement: “It’s time for it to go.” Roy went on to criticize programs in schools that taught English to language learners and refugees. Roy is currently vying for Attorney General of Texas in a runoff election. 

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, cited Roy’s hopes in his response: “Toying with children’s futures to win a primary election is the tactic of a small, sad man.”

This enlivened push to restrict access to public education comes as scores of immigrant children are already afraid to go to school across the country as Immigration and Customs Enforcement have repeatedly been seen near schools or bus stops. (The Department of Homeland Security has said they do “NOT raid or target schools” despite “media force-feeding the public stories about parents and children being scared to return to school.”)

In Texas’s largest public school district, in Houston, the immigrant student population plummeted by nearly 4,000 students, or a decrease of 22 percent, this school year. In Maine, absences at some schools hit 25 to 30 percent during a week of heavy ICE presence in January. In Minnesota, up to 40 percent of students stayed home during the agency’s violent operations in the Twin Cities.

As Justice William Brennan wrote in the Plyler majority opinion, “It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries.”

A lower court judge put it like this two years earlier: refusing to educate children based on of if their parents came to this country without certain documentation, or were in the process of obtaining that documentation, would create “a permanent underclass of persons who will live their lives in this country without being able to participate in our society.”