Oregon students missed classes, left school and struggled to learn as the fear of ICE undermined the school year. Washington County saw Oregon’s highest number of recorded immigration arrests from July to December. In all, Operation Black Rose led to the detention of more than 1,400 people statewide. That number includes some of the 39 kids who were arrested in Oregon between January 2025 and this February, according to the Deportation Data Project.
OPB reporters Holly Bartholomew and Elizabeth Miller join us to talk about what they’ve learned in terms of how immigration enforcement has impacted Oregon students.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Missed school days, isolation, heightened anxiety, and lost participation in extracurriculars and sports. These are just some of the impacts that the increase in federal immigration enforcement had on Oregon students in the last school year. That’s according to new reporting by a team of OPB journalists. Elizabeth Miller covers K-12 education for OPB. Holly Bartholomew covers Portland’s suburban communities as a Report for America Corps Member. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you back on the show.
Holly Bartholomew: Thanks for having us.
Elizabeth Miller: Hey, thanks, Dave.
Miller: Holly, before we get to the education impacts of federal immigration enforcement, I thought it’d be good to get a reminder of the scale of that enforcement. Can you just give us a sense for how many Oregonians were detained through what was called Operation Black Rose?
Holly Bartholomew: Yeah, so according to the Department of Homeland Security, they made 1,400 arrests in Oregon during Operation Black Rose, which is the name that they gave to their big immigration crackdown that took place last year, and technically DHS says that the operation lasted from October to March, but I think most people will remember when it was at its height, which was more like October through December.
Miller: What did you hear about what happened to kids whose parents were detained?
Bartholomew: One thing this story made me think about was that life doesn’t just stop because your family member is detained. Your obligations like school and homework and helping out around the house don’t stop. So a lot of what we saw was kids kept going to school even after their parent was detained, but a lot of them who were in that situation really struggled with the trauma and emotion of their parent being in detention. So they had a tough time focusing and learning.
But on the other hand, we also know that some kids had a harder time getting to school after their parent was detained, or some who stopped going to school altogether, and that was especially true for older, like high school age students. We know that some of them had to skip school so they could stay home and help care for siblings, or some had to actually get a job to help support their family.
Miller: It wasn’t just students whose families were arrested. Many, many more people watched videos of community members being pulled over and taken into custody. Can you give us a sense for what people were seeing on their phones and computers?
Bartholomew: Yeah, I’m sure a lot of listeners will remember last fall when dozens of arrests were taking place daily. If you live somewhere like Hillsboro or Gresham, you probably saw a lot of people getting pulled over by ICE or detained in parking lots. But as you mentioned, a lot of these arrests were recorded on video and spread widely on social media. And a lot of them were pretty scary. One in particular that stood out took place in Gresham in October, and there was this video of a woman hiding in a corner in her bedroom holding her baby as several agents decked out in tactical gear busted open the door with guns drawn and it like looked like something out of a movie, almost.
But other than that, like we frequently saw videos of agents breaking out people’s car windows or making these aggressive arrests and it was just a really scary time for a lot of people like this crackdown and the aggression we saw from ICE agents was truly unprecedented.
Miller: The Trump administration overturned a previous DHS policy barring immigration officers from making arrests at various sensitive locations including schools. What has that meant in Oregon?
Bartholomew: So Trump overturned that long-standing policy during his first week back in office, and we saw some districts put out policies right after that talking about what they would do if immigration officials came to campus, but we didn’t actually hear of any arrests taking place at school until last summer, and that’s when immigration officers arrested that Iranian chiropractor who was dropping his son off at preschool in Beaverton.
And then in the fall we heard of the arrest of another dad just down the street from a Hillsboro elementary school after he dropped his kid off, and we just started hearing more and more reports of ICE agents being seen on or near school campuses, and we heard of a few schools who actually, like, went into lockdown or secure status because of ICE activity near those schools, and that’s when a lot of the schools really started putting out more information about what their protocols would be for this kind of situation, and all of those protocols emphasized that schools will not be cooperating with ICE.
E. Miller: And again, that’s something at the state level that the Oregon Department of Education has really made clear. According to the Oregon Department of Education, Oregon serves about 184,000 children from immigrant families. That’s about a third of the state students. So the state has shared guidance for school districts on how to support those students, but also just this year, the state legislature passed a bill that includes immigration status as a protected class for students in the K-12 system.
Miller: So Liz, let’s turn to the effects of all of this on education and educational outcomes, starting with attendance. What were the challenges in getting data about how immigration enforcement has been, or did, affect attendance?
E. Miller: So Oregon as a state does not publish attendance or chronic absenteeism data until after a school year is over. So we knew we weren’t going to get any state level data for this current school year. That will change starting this year, Oregon’s going to have to publish attendance and absenteeism data quarterly, but for this story to get this data, it meant going to each school district individually, and Holly and I could not reach out to each of Oregon’s 197 school districts. So we picked a select few based on, kind of what we were seeing with heightened immigration enforcement.
But one other thing is that because we were asking districts for data individually, we would get a lot of different types of data. So it was really hard to do that district-to-district comparison. And then again, it’s also important to say that data doesn’t tell the whole story. I mean, Oregon has this rule that after ten days of not attending school, a student gets dropped from the attendance roles. But if a student gets dropped and then comes back to school, and then gets dropped again, we don’t really see that in attendance data. We also don’t see if a student fails classes and doesn’t earn credits for a class because they can’t focus, like Holly was saying. So some of those things are harder to nail down with data points.
Miller: Right, OK, so how’d you get around that to do your best to paint a picture of what’s happening? I mean, what did you hear, for example, directly from teachers or school leaders around the state?
E. Miller: Well, one thing, once the Forest Grove superintendent spoke at a state legislature hearing, we asked for withdrawal data, so how many students had withdrawn from the school district, but we did ask for attendance data week to week. But then hearing directly from teachers and school leaders, I feel like that is where you really get the sense of what things are like day to day in school where students are fearful, nervous. There’s a lot of anxiety. There’s, you know, students who aren’t showing up. I mean, Holly, what did you hear?
Bartholomew: Yeah, I agree. Just because it was so hard to quantify the effects of this immigration crackdown on schools with the data, we felt it was really important to hear directly from teachers and schools and students. And what we heard from school officials over and over again was that absolutely the immigration crackdown impacted attendance, focus in class, and students’ overall ability to learn.
Miller: What did you hear from Hillsboro schools in particular?
Bartholomew: Yeah, Hillsboro shared with us some interesting data about their attendance disparities or the difference in average attendance rates between certain groups of students, and according to that data, over the past several years, the gap in attendance rates for Hispanic students and non-Hispanic students has steadily narrowed. So the average attendance rate for Hispanic students was getting higher and closer to the rate for non-Hispanic students, but then Operation Black Rose began and attendance really dropped for Hispanic students. So that gap went from less than one percentage point during the fall semester of the previous school year to nearly 8% at one point last fall. And then even as the crackdown slowed, the rates never quite returned to that steady positive trajectory we’d seen previously, and the numbers just kind of continued to go up and down throughout the year.
Miller: That’s a really important point because in the last, you know, maybe I guess the second half of the school year, the Trump administration seemed to be making less of a public effort to be seen as the really intense detainers, or arresting people who they said were here unlawfully. But even when there was less of a public display, the numbers didn’t change in terms of attendance in Hillsboro, for example. In that sense, the damage was already done.
Bartholomew: Mhm.
Miller: Liz, I want to turn to the online piece of this. What has been happening over this school year in terms of online school?
E. Miller: Yeah, so nationally, Education Week did a survey of education leaders across the country and found that 9% of them saw an increasing number of students choosing online learning or homeschooling to reduce risk of encountering immigration agents. But one of the districts we reached out to for this story, David Douglas, saw a 10 percentage point increase in students learning English attending the district’s online school. And this is a district where over 80 languages are spoken, where almost half the students are either current English learners or have exited the English language development program, so students learning English.
Miller: How much do we know about the outcomes at this point for kids in online learning? If the immigration crackdown seems to have led to more kids taking the online option, what might the outcomes be?
E. Miller: Yeah, that’s a good qualifier there, because generally what we’ve seen in Oregon is that there are lower academic outcomes for students who learn online, higher than average dropout rates with students often coming to online school already behind academically. It’s interesting because I haven’t seen much research-wise about how students learning English fare in that virtual setting. But one thing to just note is that when you’re learning online, especially as an older student, a lot of it is independent. Students are on their own. They can reach out to their teachers, but a lot of students don’t, and so that educational environment may be challenging for someone who’s still learning English.
Miller: How much is immigration enforcement making its way inside classrooms as a subject?
E. Miller: We’ve heard from a couple of teachers and students themselves about class assignments, talking about immigration and history or government classes, you know, connecting current events to history, what happened in the past, but students we’ve heard are also connecting what’s happening with whatever assignment they were working on. We talked to one student who asked to go by her first initial, A, she wrote about immigration for a speech and debate class at Centennial High School.
A: This one line that I specifically remember, “Does my brown skin scare you?” And it means a lot to me because why would they be doing this if they didn’t fear us in a way, you know, or like view us as like something scary, because they don’t know us, they don’t know our culture.
Miller: Holly, you asked students in a kind of informal survey about these broader questions. What stood out to you in the responses?
Bartholomew: A lot of the responses expressed frustration. These students who were angry about what the federal government was doing and specifically about how it was talking about immigrants. There was one student who mentioned frustration that the government was spending its time and resources, and this is a quote, “demonizing immigrants,” and another felt that the government was trying to, again, this is a quote, “brainwash people” with the way it was talking about immigrants, and several also mentioned that they had friends or family or neighbors who had been arrested.
Miller: You know, one of the themes that’s been emerging in our conversation so far, is some students retreating from the publicness of school out of fear, but you both also saw another thread in your reporting, which is some students, in a sense, going in the opposite direction and becoming more politically active. What did you find?
E. Miller: Yeah, in that same survey, we asked students, “What is bringing hope or support?” and several of them mentioned being inspired by young people speaking out and speaking out themselves at protests, walkouts. I talked to a couple of students at David Douglas High School about a walkout they planned back in February, including a student, Joaquin, who it was his first time planning and leading and organizing a walkout like this.
Joaquin: Overall our main reason for doing the walkout is because our school is comprised of like people of all diverse backgrounds and when we see injustice we don’t like to just stay silent, and I’m glad that we did it and I’m glad that we made our stand.
E. Miller: We also heard from students who went down to Salem to lobby for some of those bills that we talked about to support immigrant students and their families.
Miller: We’re obviously on summer break now, but did educators you talked to have any ideas about how they’re going to be approaching this same issue in the fall?
E. Miller: Yeah, so in the fall, I mean, I just want to say each Oregon school district is going to be required to have a plan to provide notice if federal immigration authorities show up at a school building. So that’s new. But we actually heard from a couple of folks that they’re concerned for students this summer without school to go to, there’s concern that students are going to be more isolated, that they’re going to stay home, that their mental health might suffer, especially if school districts are unable to have summer programming.
Miller: Liz and Holly, thanks very much.
E. Miller: Thanks.
Bartholomew: Thanks a lot, Dave.
Miller: Elizabeth Miller is one of OPB’s Education Reporters. Holly Bartholomew covers Portland’s suburban communities for OPB as a Report for America Corps Member.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
