Immigration Enforcement Actions and Empty Desks: Persistent and Acute Attendance Effects

How do changes in immigration policy affect student attendance? We use student-by-day administrative records from a mid-sized school district to estimate the causal effect of heightened federal immigration enforcement following the January 2025 presidential inauguration on student attendance using a difference-in-differences design. We find that heightened enforcement and immigration enforcement actions (IEAs) cause a substantial and persistent increase in absences among foreign-born students, with the daily probability of absence rising by 2.2-2.4 percentage points (33-36%) relative to a pre-treatment mean of 6.7 percent. These effects reflect both a persistent elevation in absences spanning the full post-treatment period and acute, short-lived spikes on dates proximate to specific enforcement events. The persistent elevation accounts for most of the overall effect and shows little signs of attenuation during our study period. Effects increase nearly monotonically with grade level, consistent with older students exercising greater autonomy over their own attendance decisions. We find no evidence of spillover effects onto U.S.-born students, including those in mixed-nativity households, though limited statistical power cannot rule out spillovers up to roughly half the magnitude of the main effect. We also show that estimates using more common proxies for student vulnerability, such as MLL status, likely understate the effects experienced by the most directly affected students.