Latinx Education Under Attack: The Implications of Immigration Policy for Education

This conceptual article examines the intersection between immigration law enforcement and education. We explore the following questions: How have immigration and education policy intersected in the last decade, and particularly after the 2016 presidential election? To examine this question, we make use of the interdisciplinary nature of our own academic backgrounds as a political scientist and an education policy scholar to ground our article using sociologist Herbert Blumer’s sense of group position theory, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit). Guided by this theoretical frame, we discuss the notion of education being used as a bargaining tool and a weapon with implications for Latino communities given the current political and anti-immigrant context. We highlight examples that represent various levels of government and that on the surface have a target population of immigrant adults or young adults—however, we argue that regardless of the target population, if a policy has direct implications for adult immigrants and immigration, it will have direct implications for educational institutions and the children of immigrants.