From Court to Classroom: Deportation Proceedings and Reading and Math Achievement for Elementary Students from 1998 to 2016

With rising numbers of deportations over the last two decades, there has been a particular concern among educators and researchers that immigrant-origin students and their peers are experiencing educational consequences due to increased stress, anxiety, and fear of the unknown. This study examined the relationship between immigration enforcement and student achievement in counties across the U.S. This study used data from two nationally representative samples of kindergarteners, The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Classes of 1998-99 and 2010, and the number of deportations ordered from each immigration court provided by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. When combining the ten years of data, the overall analytic sample is n=114,990 child by year observations, with deportations varying in 79 counties from 1998-2016. Employing a cross-sectional, longitudinal design, a student, school, and year fixed effects model was employed to examine the association between deportations and achievement in elementary grades, exploiting variation of deportations between counties and across years. The results of the analyses indicated that increases in deportations coincided with declines in Latinx student achievement in math. Differences emerged based on student-level characteristics and across presidential administrations. Policy implications are discussed.