Immigration Enforcement and Empty Desks: Persistent and Acute Attendance Effects
Andrew M. Camp 
What We Studied and Why It Matters
How do immigration enforcement actions (IEAs) affect student attendance, and through what channels? We use student-by-day administrative records from a mid-size 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 IEAs cause a substantial and persistent increase in absences among foreign-born students, with the daily probability of absence rising by 2.2 percentage points (37%) relative to a pre-treatment mean of 5.9%. We decompose these effects into two distinct channels: 1. a sustained elevation in absences spanning the full post-treatment period and 2. acute, short-lived spikes on dates proximate to specific enforcement events. The sustained elevation in absences dominates and show no 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 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.
Links
Citation
@misc{camp2026,
author = {Camp, Andrew M. and Acosta, Jonathon and Haire, Janelle and
Tesfa, Edom},
title = {Immigration {Enforcement} and {Empty} {Desks:} {Persistent}
and {Acute} {Attendance} {Effects}},
date = {2026-04-15},
url = {https://edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1453},
langid = {en}
}