A New School Year—and a Test of What We Learned from Metro Surge

By Carlos Mariani Rosa, MnEEP Executive Director

As Minnesota students return to classrooms this fall, we have an opportunity—and an obligation—to ask what it will take to make our public schools places where every child can learn, belong, and participate fully, regardless of their immigration status or the actions of the federal government.

Metro Surge showed how quickly immigration enforcement can reach into our schools and communities. Students stayed home. Families changed routines, moved classes online, or left altogether. Schools scrambled to provide transportation, food, instruction, family support, and a sense of safety amid extraordinary disruption. Sahan Journal found that temporary online options served more than 20,000 Minnesota students at the peak of Operation Metro Surge.

In Fridley Public Schools (ISD 14), enrollment is growing again as students return for the new school year. But the district is still carrying at least $1.97 million in identified direct costs and revenue impacts connected to last winter’s immigration-enforcement crisis. Critically, that number does not include enrollment-related state aid losses, additional staff time, security expenses, or mental-health and academic-recovery costs. The district also spent money on emergency e-learning and door-to-door transportation when families were afraid to take children to school.

Those are reminders that restoring attendance is not the same as repairing the damage—and that the costs of U.S. D.H.S. /ICE Metro Surge have not been borne equally.

Federal immigration enforcement concentrated educational harm in schools serving many of the students and families most directly targeted by ICE. Immigrant and refugee learners were the first to lose access to classrooms, relationships, stability, and a sense of safety, belonging, and community. As school enrollment losses translate into fewer school resources, many of those same students could be asked to bear the consequences again, through fewer teachers, fewer supports, and fewer opportunities.

For Minnesotans to meet our state Constitutional obligation to public education, this new school year must be about more than getting students back through the doors. It must also be about rebuilding trust with families, ensuring schools have the resources to support students whose learning was disrupted, protecting every student’s access to education, and preventing the harms of federal immigration enforcement from becoming longer-term inequities within our public education system.

A longer-term threat to Minnesota school enrollment

Even before Metro Surge began, Minnesota schools were already seeing fewer newly arriving immigrant and refugee students as federal immigration and refugee policies sharply reduced new arrivals.

By the beginning of the 2025–26 school year, one of Minnesota’s historic sources of new students had already been dramatically constricted. Federal refugee data show that Minnesota went from nearly 3,000 primary refugee arrivals in 2024 to just 170 during the first 11 months of federal fiscal year 2026. 

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) data also show a sharp decline in students identified as “Recently Arrived English Learners” (RAEL). Both District and Charter schools reported 6,395 RAEL students to MDE in 2024, compared with 4,789 in 2025—a decline of about 25 percent. MDE defines RAELs as K–12 English learners who have attended a U.S. school for less than 12 months at the time of testing.

These are different measures, and we do not yet have statewide 2025–26 RAEL data to tell us exactly what happened during the last school year. But together they raise a larger enrollment concern.

Metro Surge disrupted the education of immigrant students and families already here. While at the same time, broader federal immigration policies have sharply reduced the number of newcomer and refugee families arriving.

That combination could mean that even where attendance rebounds this fall, some Minnesota districts face a longer-term decline in the number of students they serve, and eventually in the resources available to serve them.

Why this matters especially in rural Minnesota

The consequences of new federal immigration enforcement practices could be especially profound in rural Minnesota.

In parts of the state confronting decades of population loss, declining birth rates, and an aging workforce, international migration has helped offset population decline, fill jobs, sustain school enrollment, support local businesses, and keep money circulating through local economies.

Southwest Minnesota illustrates what is at stake. Between 2020 and 2025, the region lost more than 6,600 residents through domestic migration while gaining more than 5,600 through international migration. Minnesota’s Department of Employment and Economic Development has identified international migration as a major source of population growth in the region.

For rural school districts, that demographic reality has direct consequences. Immigrant and newcomer families have brought school-age children into communities where fewer children are coming up behind each graduating class. Those students do more than generate additional English learner funding. Like every student, they produce general state and federal funding tied to their enrollment, resources that help sustain teachers, programs, transportation, and other school services.

In communities where international migration has been one of the few forces offsetting long-term population loss, reducing immigration while simultaneously making established immigrant families less secure risks accelerating demographic and economic pressures those communities have spent years trying to reverse.

What last year’s enrollment losses tell us about what comes next

We do not yet know how much lower newcomer arrivals, family departures, and broader demographic change will affect Minnesota school enrollment in the years ahead. But last year gives us an early indication of what sustained enrollment losses could mean for our public schools.

Sahan Journal found that among 29 Minnesota districts and charter schools providing comparable data, enrollment fell by approximately 1,700 students between October 2025 and March 2026. During the comparable period the previous year, those same schools lost fewer than 80.

We cannot say that Metro Surge caused every one of those students to leave. But Sahan documented the mechanisms that connect enforcement to enrollment: Dramatic attendance declines, thousands of students shifting temporarily online, families leaving Minnesota or the country, students withdrawn after prolonged absences, and schools losing contact with some families altogether.

Those losses also show why the future enrollment question matters financially.

Because Minnesota school funding is tied in part to enrollment, losing students can also mean losing state and federal resources.

For the 2025–26 school year, Minnesota’s basic general education formula allowance was $7,481 per adjusted pupil unit. At that rate, 1,700 pupils represent roughly $12.7 million in basic formula value.

That does not mean schools lost exactly $12.7 million; the actual amount depends on how those students are counted under Minnesota’s funding formulas, when they left, and whether they returned. But it gives us a scale of how much public schools stand to lose as student enrollments are impacted. 

However, that potential lost revenue only captures part of the cost impacts to school as a result of harmful ICE immigration practices.

Schools were already spending additional resources to keep students connected to education during Metro Surge, from online instruction and transportation changes to family outreach, food, interpretation, and additional staff support. Now, some of those same districts could face lower revenue if enrollment does not recover.

And the longer-term consequences go beyond what districts spent last winter or what they may lose next year. Declining enrollment can mean fewer teachers, programs, and supports for the students who remain. If fewer newcomer families continue to arrive, those effects could deepen over time, particularly in communities where immigrant students and families have helped sustain both schools and the communities around them.

The consequences go beyond lost revenue

During Metro Surge, schools were being asked to do more, not less. Districts created emergency online-learning options, adjusted transportation services, delivered food and educational materials, conducted intensive family outreach, provided interpretation and support, and devoted additional staff time and resources to keeping children connected to school.

For the students themselves, the consequences are still larger.

A funding formula cannot tell us what months of missed instruction will mean several years from now. It cannot measure the effect of interrupted English-language learning, the loss of trusted teachers and classmates, or the fear children carried into places that should have offered stability and belonging.

The financial consequences of Metro Surge may take years to understand. So may the consequences of sustained enrollment decline, particularly if fewer newcomer families continue to arrive.

Meanwhile, we know from many conversations we’ve had with teachers, students, and parents that harm has gone beyond financial impacts and major changes in school operations as educators sought to protect young people from harm. A toll has been exacted on all on their sense of safety, ability to focus on instruction and on learning, on the ability to form and maintain a positive school community environment. 

Yet, what has become apparent for many is the vitally central role our public schools can and do play in having healthy, mutually supportive and caring communities through-out the state. With empirical research informing us that such communities bring value-added to academic achievement we would be wise to strengthen the role of schools in building healthy communities. We should thus not be surprised when a school absent from community life produces low academic outcomes. 

Perhaps Metro Surge has led us to focus on enabling whole community schools as a necessary component for meeting our state’s education attainment goals.

Five ways Minnesota can take action right now

So for many positive reasons let us not wait years to respond. Here are five big actions Minnesota can take right now to ensure schools harmed by federal immigration enforcement actions are not forced to absorb more harm from the corresponding long-term effects and to lay the groundwork for an even better state public education system.

• The State of Minnesota should strongly demand that our federal government work with us – not act on us – to ensure that our legal and moral obligation to provide for universal public education is not compromised by immigration enforcement actions. 
• The Minnesota Legislature and Governor should strengthen its laws guaranteeing universal access to a public pre-K through secondary education.
• The Minnesota Legislature and Governor should recognize the costs borne by schools as a result of the massive federal ramping up of immigration surveillance and enforcement depicted by the ICE Metro Surge Operation and make schools whole for those outlays.
• The Minnesota Legislature and Governor and all residents should acknowledge the mental and physical trauma, academic disruption, and social costs borne by students, teachers, and whole communities as a result federal immigration enforcement practices and provide them with new counseling, support services, and material supports.
• The Minnesota Legislature and Governor should acknowledge the central role that public schools must play in maintaining safety, belonging, and access to social, economic, and health support for students and teachers and equip schools with policies and resources to deliver and/or connect those to them.

The federal government chose to impose their “Metro Surge” operation on us, including the targeting of our public schools for enforcement activities. Minnesota’s students did not. The question now is what Minnesota is willing to do to ensure the integrity of our public education system and that its children, schools, and communities are not left carrying its lasting consequences.