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Undocumented students in California navigate uncertainty and fear under Trump

Although attending and graduating from an American university is a great milestone for many undocumented students, it doesn’t eliminate their immigration status or fear for their livelihoods.

Mitzli Pavia Garcia, a 2024 San Diego State University graduate, remembers being 12 years old and running out of food and water on a three-day trek through the Arizona desert. Garcia and eight others attempted to cross the Mexico border into the United States for a month, turning back due to extreme weather or arrests.

Garcia and the group broke open cactuses to sip and prayed when they found a farm, taking gulps of water from the same trough as the cattle.

Today, Garcia is a 28-year-old undocumented resident of the United States.

Born in Cuautla, Mexico, Garcia was 6 years old when they first entered the United States. According to Garcia, their mom wanted to give them a life better than her own. Garcia’s mother never finished middle school, and their father did not complete elementary school.

Garcia said they always navigate life aware of their immigration status. Struggling to keep up in high school while thinking about higher education, they recalled how colleges and financial aid programs required Social Security numbers to apply. And they worried about the record number of deportations during the Obama administration, which instilled fear in the undocumented community.

“When I was in school, I knew that I was safe from immigration, so I loved learning,” Garcia said. “I was top of the class for some things, and it was really hard for me to push myself to do the best when I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to access higher education.”

Garcia applied for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, hoping to receive security from the government as a student. Because Garcia and their mom had returned to Mexico to care for their grandmother before high school, their application was instantly rejected.

The lack of security from DACA didn’t deter Garcia.

Garcia was accepted to San Diego State University in 2022 after attending San Diego Mesa and San Diego Miramar community colleges.

Garcia said undocumented students severely lacked support at SDSU.

“We have an undocumented resource center at San Diego State. It’s a great thing, but it’s the bare minimum,” Garcia said. “It’s a great space for undocumented students to go and sit, but it was hard for me to ask them for help because they don’t even have the resources.”

Garcia found more support from Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán, or MEChA, on campus. According to its website, MEChA is a national organization with local chapters that focus on Chicanx issues, including U.S. immigration and Central and South American political struggles.

Garcia felt pressure even after graduating from a four-year university. They have been trying to achieve American citizenship, but have grown frustrated and worried about the lengthy process.

“A lot of us still can’t legally work in the spaces that we worked so hard for four years because again, they require Social Security or legal status,” they said. “I submitted legal paperwork in 2020, then Covid hit. At the time, it was a five-year wait for the legal route that I was pursuing. It is now doubled, and now it’s a 10-year-plus wait. Trump keeps telling us, ‘Hey, do it the legal way,’ and then the legal way takes a quarter of your life.”

Based on the legal proceedings he has completed, Garcia said, “I am not supposed to be deportable.” But they know, ICE “can hold me in a detention center if they want to, because they’re doing that now. They’re arresting citizens just because they’re brown, putting them in detention centers, and then not believing that they’re citizens, even with the paperwork. I don’t even feel safe to travel outside of San Diego, and when everything started happening a few weeks ago, I was afraid to leave my house.”

Garcia finds strength in their undocumented identity, however.

“We’ve feared this already before,” they said. “While they may be able to instill this fear in my community, I’m not going to let them instill that fear in me. I’m still here, I still made it out. We can still achieve our dreams.”

By Roman Fong

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07/07/2025
Proactive campus policies, communication with students critical under ‘antagonistic’ federal actions, panel says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUqMDwwZbO8

How might federal funding to colleges change under the current federal administration? What to tell students who are worried their financial aid packages might be impacted by proposed changes to federal education funding? Is it possible to find common ground with President Donald Trump?

A panel of education experts on Tuesday provided few definitive answers to those questions, leaving several unanswered, reflecting the uncertainty facing many in education today as they examine how the Trump administration’s approach to higher education may impact them.

The panelists on an EdSource roundtable, “The future of California higher education under Trump,” described a barrage of executive actions — banning diversity efforts, withdrawing already budgeted funds, blacklisting colleges, canceling visas of international students and threatening college leaders — actions that Dominique J. Baker, associate professor at the University of Delaware, described as “antagonistic.”

Baker stated that while many of the funding threats and proposed changes to education come from the executive branch of government, it’s important to consider the role of “the entirety of our federal apparatus” when discussing the future of higher education in this country, including Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Panelists agreed that proposed changes to student loan repayment options and to the federal Pell Grants, which are awarded to students with exceptional financial need, would be detrimental to many students.

“If all of these policies went into place the way that they are currently written out, we would expect to see a stark drop in low-income students enrolling in higher education, whether that’s for the first time or students who had previously enrolled leaving higher education before they can earn any sort of credential or degree,” said Baker, in a blunt assessment of what could occur if the proposed changes to those programs are approved.

Panelist Cristian Ulisses Reyes, a master’s candidate in higher education counseling and student affairs at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who received the Pell Grant, said that threats to such funding are instilling fear in his peers.

“Students aren’t just numbers and policy debates,” Reyes said. “We’re the ones that are being directly impacted.”

Potential scenarios in case of cuts

Gregory A. Smith, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, said that of around $64 million in annual federal funds, about $43 million goes toward financial aid for students, much in the form of Pell Grants.

The rest of the funds go to programming — about $3.5 million in yearly Title III grants from the federal Department of Education are geared toward the enrollment and retention of Hispanic students in STEM fields; the community college district is a Hispanic-serving institution.

If threats to funding continue, Smith said the San Diego Community College District needs to be prepared for these scenarios:
- The funding could be withheld altogether.
- The funding may remain intact, but the staff who process the payments may have been laid off during recent staff terminations at the federal Department of Education, which could lead to funding delays.
- “The most catastrophic version” of events, he said, would be if Congress amended Title III of the Higher Education Act, which would eliminate the Hispanic-serving institution’s STEM program.
And if any of these scenarios were to occur, “[the program] may need to look different, it may need to be funded differently, but we’re certainly committed to continuing the work in any of those three scenarios,” Smith said.

“Especially for a lot of the populations that we’ve listed — like low-income students, first-generation students — the administration’s attacks on student protections feel personal for many of us,” said Reyes, the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo master’s student.

Reyes urged colleges and universities to be more transparent with their students about discussions and involve them in decisions being made. “Institutions shouldn’t be making decisions about us, without us,” he said.

Relying on long-standing California policies

California has decades of practice in implementing anti-affirmative action policies after approving Proposition 209 in 1996, the panelists noted, as a reminder that the state is protected from some of the changes being made at the federal level.

“Legally, we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what that looks like to not consider race in hiring, race in admissions, while still being equity-minded,” said Gina Ann Garcia, professor in the School of Education at UC Berkeley.

Affinity graduation ceremonies, for example, have been criticized by the federal administration as part of its attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Garcia, however, not only recently attended a cultural graduation, but said she feels supported by her university to say such graduations will not be canceled.

“We’re talking about a state that’s been anti-affirmative action for 30 years, so we’ve had 30 years to get in compliance,” she said. “We’re not really the state you want to come for, if they’re smart.”

Smith, from San Diego community colleges, echoed Garcia’s sentiments about feeling no fear when the federal Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in February, threatening cuts in federal funding if schools did not eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The letter has not changed their DEI programming, Smith said, but it has led to fear in their school community, and they are afraid about the security of these programs.

Smith also shared strategies his district has implemented to keep their students and staff informed, including:
- Discussions on what DEI activities are offered and why.
- Communicating that campus policies on civility, academic freedom, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech remain intact.
- Proactive action by their board in adopting resolutions related to institutional protection from certain government threats.
“It is really important in this moment that we say these are lines around which there is no negotiation, they are fundamental to higher education in America, they’re at the core of a free democratic society, and so there is no negotiation,” Smith said, echoing what Baker and others noted during their discussion. “We can’t give up any margin on it whatsoever at all without crumbling the entire foundation of our institutions.”

While the panelists agreed on this point, they also warned of a future in which the state’s present-day policies on education may change. Upcoming state elections, they said, will determine the direction California heads in regardless of who is in power at the federal level.

“We could swing in a few years … there are many red districts in California,” said Garcia. “It changes what happens as far as funding and commitments to education when we change political leanings.”
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21/05/2025
Parents of truant students won’t face jail, sanctions under new bill
California showed progress in some areas, such as health insurance, school discipline and absenteeism.

Allison Yin/EdSource
Top takeaways

Bill seeks to repeal criminal misdemeanor offense of state’s truancy law

CalWORKs sanctions over student truancy would be replaced by screenings for resources and access to work program

Districts in recent years appear less likely to lean on punitive measure to address unexcused student absences
In 2011, when criminal penalties were first tied to truancy, five parents in Orange County were arrested for their children’s truancy. Other counties similarly chose the punitive approach over the years, with Merced County initiating an anti-truancy push in 2017 that included the arrest of 10 parents. Those parents were charged with misdemeanors, contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

If a proposed bill is passed this legislative session, jail time and fines of up to $2,000 for parents of truant students could soon be eliminated in California.

Assembly Bill 461, introduced by Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, D-Silicon Valley, would repeal the criminal misdemeanor offense of the existing truancy law, meaning that parents of truant students, 6 years of age or older, in grades 1-8, would no longer be punished by fines or up to a year in county jail.

The bill proposes an additional change: families receiving cash assistance via the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids program, known as CalWORKs, would no longer be penalized if a student aged 16 years or older is chronically truant. The current penalty requires that a truant child is removed from the calculation of the family’s monthly cash assistance.

“Criminalizing parents for their children’s truancy ignores the root causes of absenteeism and only deepens family hardships,” said Ahrens in his author’s statement.

Under the state’s truancy law, parents of habitually absent students were previously arrested, but it remains unclear how many cases resulted in criminal charges in the nearly 15 years since it went into effect.

State law dictates that a district can declare a student truant and refer them to the district attorney after three unexcused absences of more than 30 minutes during one school year.

Once a student’s case is referred to the district attorney, prosecutors have wide discretion over how to charge parents for their child’s truancy, from an infraction – akin to a traffic violation, to a misdemeanor – contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

In California, the percentage of chronically absent students catapulted from the pre-pandemic rate of 12.1% in 2018-19 to 30% in 2021-22, as schools reopened for in-person instruction. The percentage has since dropped to about 20% in 2023-24, according to state data, though rates range widely across student groups.

State education law lists over a dozen reasons for excusing students from school, but most excused absences are related to illness and mental health. Unexcused absences often mean that students lacked documentation such as a note from a doctor, or that they provided no reason for their absence, or that the reason they provided does not qualify as an excusable absence, school officials say.

Districts often try to avoid punitive measures

There is no central repository tracking truancy cases, but EdSource found last year that school districts have increasingly gone to great lengths to avoid referring chronically truant students to the local district attorney. Instead, they opt for alternatives such as sending more notifications to parents after a student’s absence than what’s required by law, or scheduling multiple meetings between parents and school staff to better understand and address the underlying reasons for frequent absences.

The decision by districts to lean into alternatives rather than available punitive measures is partly why Ahrens and AB 461’s supporters are pushing to change the law.

“If we’re not prosecuting these cases…then why should we have this in the books? We don’t need the stick if everything else is already working to the benefit of our families,” said Yesenia Jimenez, senior policy associate at End Child Poverty CA, an advocacy organization that co-sponsored the bill.

Eleven organizations have expressed support for the bill, with three of them co-sponsoring, and there is no listed opposition as of Monday.

Early conversations about Assembly Bill 461 focused solely on the link between public benefits and chronic truancy, Jimenez said.

CalWORKS provides cash assistance to families with unmet basic needs, such as housing, food, or medical care. Monthly grants range in amounts dependent on region, income, and the number of eligible family members, with the average monthly grant being about $1,000 during the 2024-25 fiscal year, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Provisions of the proposed law

AB 461 also proposes changes to the CalWORKS program, including:
- Entirely eliminating the financial sanction on families if students are deemed truant
- Making a family with a truant child eligible for family stabilization services and allowing a student 16 years or older to voluntarily participate in CalWORKS’ welfare-to-work program, so long as their participation supports and does not interfere with school attendance
- Qualifying families for stabilization services if they’re undergoing homelessness, undertreated behavioral needs, and including individual or group therapy, temporary housing assistance and parenting education among the services they receive
- Granting access to resources such as substance abuse services, vocational education, and mental health services to a truant student aged 16 years or older who opts into the welfare-to-work program
Jimenez, whose team researched the sharp rise in chronic absenteeism at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, said they knew the rates were steadily decreasing each school year.

While AB 461 began as a way to reform public benefits programs, the team behind the bill began to more heavily consider the criminal penalties families might face as a result of truancy once the Trump administration ramped up actions targeting immigrants, Jimenez shared.

“Now we’re just facing a completely other beast in the sense that our families are afraid to go to school because we’re seeing (the Department of Homeland Security) show up at elementary schools attempting to deport families, and families have already been subject to deportation,” she said, referring to a case early this month when immigration officials seeking information about five students in first through sixth grades were denied entry at two Los Angeles Unified elementary schools.

With the provisions of the proposed bill, supporters are looking to circumvent immigrant families from being penalized for school absences due to fear of immigration officials.

In Southern California this month, an undocumented father was arrested while leaving home to drive his teenage daughter to school. Some advocates have compared the ordeal to the 2017 arrest of an undocumented father who similarly was detained by ICE during a morning school drop-off.

“We don’t want (truancy) to be the reason why our families, who we’re trying to protect, could be essentially pipelined not only into the carceral system but certainly into the deportation system at this point in time,” said Jimenez.

Some families opted to keep their children home from school early this year in Kern County after the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol arrested 78 people. At least 40 have been deported, according to a lawsuit filed in February.

A bill signed into law last year requires changes to the truancy notifications sent to families by removing threatening language about punitive measures they might be subject to and instead opting for sharing resources about supportive services, including mental health resources.

Advocates for AB 461 agree with the premise of the bill, said Jimenez, but they wish to go further in removing the potential for arrest.

AB 461 most recently passed through the Committee on Human Services and on Tuesday will be heard by the Committee on Public Safety.
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29/04/2025
UC, CSU face cuts under Newsom’s proposed budget
Students walking on the campus of California State University, Dominguez Hills on Nov. 19., 2024.

Amy DiPierro

The University of California and California State University are facing nearly an 8% reduction to their state funding for 2025-26 under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal unveiled Friday, raising concerns about the impact on their campuses.

Top officials at both of the state’s public university systems immediately warned that the cuts, which were telegraphed in last year’s budget agreement, would result in larger class sizes and fewer available courses. They hope the Legislature will restore some of those funds before the budget is finalized this summer.

UC, which has 10 campuses, would see a decline of $396.6 million in funding while the 23-campus CSU would lose $375.2 million under the governor’s proposal for next year.

Newsom also plans to defer previously promised budget increases of 5% — part of his multiyear compact agreements with the systems — until 2027-28.

CSU Chancellor Mildred García expressed disappointment that the governor’s budget maintains cuts even in light of a rosier state budget outlook than previously projected — and said she hopes that funding will be restored if state revenues improve. The CSU enrolls more than 460,000 students, the great majority of them undergraduates.

“The impact of such deep funding cuts will have significant real-world consequences, both in and out of the classroom,” García said in a statement. “Larger class sizes, fewer course offerings and a reduced workforce will hinder students’ ability to graduate on time and weaken California’s ability to meet its increasing demands for a diverse and highly educated workforce.”

UC President Michael Drake offered fewer specifics but said he is concerned over how the cuts might affect “our students and campus services.” UC enrolls just shy of 300,000 students.

Newsom’s proposal is only the start of the budget process. He and lawmakers will negotiate over the next several months as updated revenue projections become periodically available before the budget is finalized in the summer.

The state’s system of 116 community colleges fared better and would receive $230.4 million in new general funding as part of a small cost-of-living increase under Proposition 98, the voter-approved formula that determines how much money K-12 schools and community colleges receive from California’s general fund. The system enrolled more than 1.4 million students as of fall 2023.

Community college leaders responded favorably to the proposed budget’s support for career education and workforce development. “The governor’s emphasis on career education and recognition of prior learning aligns with our colleges’ mission to assist 6.8 million adults in advancing their career paths through their local community colleges,” Nan Gomez-Heitzeberg, a member of the California Community College trustees, said in a statement.

State funding is only one source of revenue for the two university systems, which also get money from student tuition and fees as well as federal support.

In total, the governor’s budget proposes $45.1 billion for the state’s three higher education segments – UC, CSU and California Community Colleges — plus the California Student Aid Commission, which administers the enormous Cal Grant aid programs and others.

Under Newsom’s multiyear compact agreements, first announced in 2022, UC and CSU were due to receive 5% annual budget increases in exchange for making progress toward goals like increasing graduation rates, eliminating equity gaps in college completion and enrolling more California residents. With Newsom planning to cut funding and defer those increases, achieving the goals could prove challenging.

“In the absence of that incentive, I think we in the equity community and students are going to have to really ensure that we are demanding that our CSU and UC leaders continue to hold the line and honor their commitment to students even in leaner fiscal times,” said Jessie Ryan, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit organization that advocates for expanding college access in California.

Cal State’s 2025-26 budget request pleaded for the state not to cut its base funding and not to defer the money promised in the system’s previous agreement with the Newsom administration. CSU officials estimated that a 7.95% cut was tantamount to what’s needed to serve more than 36,000 full-time students.

The CSU system sought an operating budget of $9.2 billion, $593 million more than in 2024-25. That includes money for line items CSU officials say they can’t avoid, like increases to liability and property insurance and health care premiums. The budget request argues that a funding cut “would severely constrain” CSU’s ability to deliver on other top priorities, like programming for students’ basic needs and mental health.

In contrast, Newsom’s budget proposal was met with a warmer response from the chancellor of the state’s community college system, Sonya Christian, who said it “supports the priorities” of the system. In addition to the cost-of-living increases, Newsom’s budget includes several new funding proposals for the community colleges. They include:
- $168 million in one-time funding for a “statewide technology transformation” project that will streamline data collection across the system, including automating credit transfers between colleges
- $100 million to expand “credit for prior learning,” under which colleges award credit for skills learned outside the classroom, such as in a job or by volunteering
- $30 million in ongoing funding to expand the Rising Scholars Network, programs that provide services for current and formerly incarcerated students
Friday’s proposal also includes a nearly 8% cut for the California Student Aid Commission, but its programs would still receive a hefty $3.1 billion. Most of that money — $2.6 billion — would go toward the Cal Grant program, which provides aid awards for roughly 417,000 students. The remainder would fund the Middle Class Scholarship and the Golden State Teacher Grant Program, which aids students studying to become teachers who commit to working in high-need schools.

“The governor’s proposed budget recognizes the role of financial aid in students accessing the life-changing opportunities of California’s higher education institutions,” Daisy Gonzales, executive director of the commission, said in a statement.

Christopher J. Nellum, the executive director of EdTrust-West, said the January budget maintains the state’s commitment to educational equity. But he said the state should “aggressively invest more in education and keep California focused on ensuring any new resources advance racial equity” in anticipation of the incoming Trump administration, which has signaled its opposition to diversity programs.

Emmanuel Rodriguez, the senior director of policy and advocacy for California at The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS), said in a statement that the state must also ensure the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education is adequately equipped “to shield Californians from anticipated federal regulatory changes that will leave students more vulnerable than ever to predatory, low-quality colleges.” The bureau has the authority to discipline postsecondary institutions if they don’t provide the promised education or prove to be fraudulent.
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26/04/2025