America’s Public Schools: Canaries in the Coal Mine of the Biden Border Crisis
By Todd Bensman on April 3, 2023
The following is adaptated from the new book by CIS Fellow Todd Bensman, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
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Public schools will be the first place most Americans see, feel, and suffer from the Biden border crisis. Local schools face the most immediately visible impacts because a main feature of the Biden border crisis, and also of the earlier Trump swell (2018–2019), was children in family groups coming to exploit the Flores loophole (a 2015 revised court settlement requiring government release of detained immigrant children and their guardians within 21 days).
It’s impossible to determine from available public records how many children came in among roughly two million people in family groups that Border Patrol apprehended and likely stayed from 2018 through 2022. But these events, combined with the arrival of some 800,000 "unaccompanied minors", added up to two million to the nation’s 49.5 million students who attend American public schools in just those few short years. A 1982 Supreme Court ruling required enrollment regardless of immigration status, so school districts have been taking in every kid who shows up no matter their numbers, unfunded new costs, and hardships associated with pressure on educators to maintain high academic scoring.
For a glimpse into what those kinds of hardships look like under the pressure of migrant child surges, parents throughout America whose children attend public schools need look no farther than Liberty County, Texas, and its Cleveland Independent School District (CISD), some 50 miles northeast of Houston.
Just in the last five years, Liberty County and its CISD’s 143 square miles have drawn tens of thousands of illegal immigrant families with school-age children. Where thick timberlands were clear-cut rose a vast jumble of single- and double-wide trailers on low stilts, hand-hewn shacks made of leftover construction material, and parked motor homes. The community is called “Colony Ridge”. It sprawls over some 35 square miles of unincorporated former timber company lands all around the outskirts of old settler towns like Plum Grove, Cleveland, Dayton, and Splendora, nary a group of trees in sight now.
https://cis.org/Report/Americas-Public-Schools-Canaries-Coal-Mine-Biden-Border-Crisis
