Alex Rodriguez Silva moved into his family’s dream home in Hialeah in South Florida three years ago. In August, he handed the keys to the new owners and packed his family’s belongings into a moving van for a four-day drive to Denver.

“We couldn’t take it anymore, the constant fear that one of us could be disappeared by ICE,” Silva said in an interview translated from Portuguese. “We wanted to stay in Florida, where we’ve built our life, but my kids deserve a place where they feel safe and welcome.”

Silva, 40, is a natural-born American citizen engaged to Ana, a Brazilian woman who came to the U.S. in 2009 and overstayed her tourist visa. Ana has one child from a previous relationship who also lacks legal permanent status, and their youngest child is an American citizen.

Silva’s children were enrolled in a public elementary school when the Trump administration rescinded rules that blocked immigration enforcement in schools in January. He said his family weighed the life they had built with the risks of increased immigration enforcement and opted, like thousands of other immigrant families, not to enroll their kids in a Florida public school this year.

Education leaders who are watching how immigration policies affect schools expect classrooms to get emptier every year. Still, this year, they were caught off guard by falling enrollment rates in some of Florida’s largest districts.

In Orange County, the School District saw an enrollment decrease of around 6,600 students this year, more than double the 3,000 students the district predicted would leave for charter schools, said School Board member Stephanie Vanos. She said the majority of the unexpected departures were children in immigrant families. The district’s total enrollment is just over 182,400.

“Allowing immigration enforcement activities near schools sets up a culture of fear among immigrant families,” Vanos said. “There’s this narrative that non-white people don’t belong here.”

This reporting is part of a new collaboration organized by Carnegie-Knight schools of journalism to produce intensive, public service news coverage of immigration issues, including the U.S. immigration courts. Fresh Take Florida interviewed education officials across the state.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been blocked from detaining people in “sensitive areas” like schools and churches since 2011, and the Joe Biden administration expanded those restrictions four years ago.

Immediately after the policy was rolled back in January and immigration agents got the green light to operate on school campuses, Vanos said, Orange County schools saw sharp increases in absenteeism, particularly in schools with large immigrant populations. Absenteeism has since steadied, but she said the enrollment decrease is just as concerning.

There have not been any confirmed immigration raids at public schools in the United States since the January policy change. Immigration agents attempted earlier this year to enter two public elementary schools in California to interview students, according to an April news conference held by Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, but they were denied entry. Carvalho served as superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools for 14 years before moving to Los Angeles.

“It is extremely disturbing that these students aren’t coming to our schools,” Vanos said. “We don’t know if they are going to school at all.”

Enrollment also took a hit in Broward County’s public schools, which reported a decrease of more than 11,300 students this school year. The enrollment decrease seems focused in immigrant communities, said Broward School Board member Sarah Leonardi, but it’s hard to know for sure. Broward’s district-wide enrollment, not including charter schools, is about 187,850 students.

“We’ve seen it anecdotally, in pockets of communities and certain schools,” she said. “But families and communities where there is a lot of immigration tend not to speak up about these issues in public ways because they’re scared.”

Debbi Hixon, the chair of the Broward County School Board, said immigration agents have not come to any schools in Broward, but the threat of detentions on campus has a pronounced impact on students.

“Students should feel safe in schools,” she said. “We live in a world where they don’t. We have active shooter and lockdown drills once a month. To add that as an additional concern for safety is disheartening. I feel very un-American.”

A similar enrollment situation emerged in the past few weeks in Miami-Dade County, which oversees more than 400 schools with a majority Hispanic enrollment, according to data from the Florida Department of Education.

Overall enrollment decreased by more than 13,000 students this year, according to an August presentation by Superintendent Jose Dotres. The district – with about 328,000 students – predicted a 5,000-student decrease.

The county averages 7,000 new out-of-state students each year, peaking at 20,000 enrollments around 2020, said School Board member Luisa Santos. This year, that number is less than 2,000 students.

“Data does back up this sharp and clear trend that people from outside the state are not coming here,” Santos said. “There’s a general sense of fear and distrust that now, at any moment, school can be disrupted by agents coming in and pulling families apart.”

In his presentation at the start of the school year, Dotres said the enrollment decline could not be directly attributed to immigration enforcement. He cited the state-sponsored mass exodus of students to charter schools as another cause of shrunken school populations in Miami-Dade County, a factor that likely contributed to decreased enrollment numbers around the state as well.

Santos said immigration enforcement agents were seen interviewing a contractor in a school parking lot before the semester started. Agents haven’t had contact with students or staff in schools, but school employees have been caught in the net of deportations.

Wualner Sauceda was a first-year science teacher at a Hialeah middle school when he was detained in January and deported to Honduras about a month later. Sauceda, who came to the United States as a child and held Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, was detained at one of his scheduled immigration hearings.

Andrew Spar, the president of the Florida Education Association, said events like Sauceda’s deportation distract from a school’s primary purpose: nurturing growth and encouraging learning, which affects students even if they don’t happen on campus.

“Schools need to be safe spaces for students and families,” he said. “Any time we impugn the sanctity of our schools and their ability to carry out their mission, we do harm to the future of this state and country.”

Deportations and the threat of immigration raids, Spar said, affect students even if they don’t happen on campus.

“When a teacher who is beloved by the community is detained and deported, it certainly weighs on the minds of students and staff at the school,” Spar said. “Especially for first-generation students, who hope to achieve the American dream here, they are certainly more concerned. If their teacher can be taken, what kind of protections are there for their families?”

Silva said he and Ana decided to move when their oldest child started refusing to get out of the car at school drop-off in the mornings. Their child cried nearly every day, Silva said, asking for Silva to drop the kids off instead of Ana because she doesn’t have legal permanent status in the country.

“All she wanted was to be involved and spend those precious moments with our kids in the mornings before she went to work,” he said. “But she’s brown, and she speaks English with a thick accent, so she’s the first target when ICE comes knocking on car windows in the drop-off line to check for papers.”

The family’s move to Colorado felt like a small relief, Silva said in an interview with Fresh Take Florida in November, but the United States doesn’t feel like a safe place for him to raise a child without legal permanent status.

“The life that I should be enjoying with my fiancée and my kids feels like it’s passing right by me,” he said. “Every moment I should be spending with them, I’m thinking about the day that Ana gets arrested in front of our kids in the grocery store or our oldest kid gets pulled out of class by ICE. I am constantly scared that I am going to lose my family.”

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Bea Anhuci reports via Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at [email protected]. You can donate to support our students here.