ICE at the Door, Tests on the Floor - Student Achievement and Local Immigration Enforcement

Oct 15, 2026

The article examines how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spillovers influence local human capital by linking ten years of ICE individual-arrest records from New Orleans with district-level elementary and middle school achievement scores. Using GPS-coded non-border apprehension data and a difference-in-differences framework, it finds large, sharp declines in achievement responses to enforcement, with scores dropping about 0.27 to 0.52 standard deviations. The analysis focuses on the Hispanic-White test score gap to capture racialized consequences and differential exposure.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Understanding the Data and Enforcement Spillovers

Matching ICE Arrest Records to School Achievement

Methodology and Identification Strategy

GPS-Coded Apprehension Data

Difference-in-Differences on Hispanic-White Achievement Gaps

Empirical Findings and Interpretation

ICE atthe Door, Tests on the Floor: Student Achievement and Local Immigration Enforcement cora bennett, virGinia Graves, and benJamin meadows Federal immigration statutes are enforced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, ICE enforcement does not occur in a vacuum; it has a well-documented legacy of spillovers. Understanding the actual behaviors of immigration enforcement is exceedingly difficult owing to opaque or unavailable data. In this article, we are able to match the level of local immigration enforcement in local areas to schooldistrict-level elementary and middle school achievement scores. Specifically, we merge ten years of individual-arrest ICE records from the New Orleans district field office obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request to district-level achievement scores to understand how immigration enforcement affects the human capital of children. We find that overall responses to enforcement as measured by district-level achievement scores are sharp and large, with achievement scores dropping anywhere between 0.27 and 0.52 of a standard deviation. Keywords: immigration, economics of education, economics of immigration, immigration enforcement In recent years, the documented effects of im- to report crime (Jacome 2022) . Within the migration enforcement on vulnerable popula- United States, scarce resources must be detions have increased tremendously. For exam- voted toward immigration enforcement, and ple, Secure Communities, a Department of therefore, the efficacy and spillovers of those Homeland enforcement program, directly re- resources should be justly scrutinized, as docuduced Hispanic citizen participation in Federal mented by Caitlin Patler and Bradford Jones safety net programs (Alsan and Yang 2024) and (2025, this issue) . The tremendous scale at both citizen and noncitizen labor hours (East which enforcement has grown in the past et al. 2023) . Opposing policies that reduce im- twenty years makes this a highly pertinent migration enforcement have been shown to po- question. Yet, most studies that document the tentially increase an immigrant’s willingness actions of immigrants and immigration en Cora Bennett is assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, United States. Virginia Graves earned a BS in economics, summa cum laude, from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, United States. Benjamin Meadows is assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, United States. © 2025 Russell Sage Foundation. Bennett, Cora, Virginia Graves, and Benjamin Meadows. 2025.“ICE at the Door, Tests on the Floor: Student Achievement and Local Immigration Enforcement.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 11(4): 104–22. [https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2025.11.4.05. Direct](https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2025.11.4.05. Direct) correspondence to: Benjamin Meadows, [at bgmeadow@uab.edu](at bgmeadow@uab.edu), 710 13th Street S, Birmingham, AL 35233, United States. Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. i c e at t h e d o o r , t e st s on t h e f l o o r 10 5 forcement either use rough proxies to identify the immigration status of an individual, such as race, or use broad immigration policy changes, such as the county-wide Secure Communities program. While using these broad individual characteristics or changes in immigration policy offers insight into how immigration policies affect individuals, it narrows the precision of research on such a significant topic. In this study, we use GPS-coded or landmarklocation, individual arrest, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data. This data focuses on non-border apprehensions, which is a growing segment of ICE activity. With this data, we can gain a bette

FAQs

What core question does the article address about ICE enforcement?

How local immigration enforcement spillovers affect schoolchildren’s human capital, measured through district-level achievement scores.

How does the study measure immigration enforcement in local areas?

By merging ten years of individual-arrest ICE records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, using GPS-coded or landmark-location data for non-border apprehensions.

What analytical approach does the study use to estimate effects?

A difference-in-differences model, comparing districts with high immigration enforcement activity to those without, focusing on the Hispanic-White test score gap.

Oct 15, 2026

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