Trump Targeting Services for Multilingual Learners Leaves Gaps in Schools The 74

Professional development for teachers of multilingual learners? Cancelled.

Newcomer centers opened to ease immigrant students’ transition to school? Closed.

Hiring new English language learner teachers? Suspended.

These are among the tangible effects of the Trump administration’s targeting services and supports that go toward educating more than 5 million English language learners in the nation’s K-12 public schools.

And there are other, more subtle changes: Many newcomer students, in light of the president’s aggressive deportation campaign, are now too afraid to answer simple questions, the type that not only shed light on their lives but give insight into their academic needs.

“I’m hesitant to have all the conversations about country of origin — conversations that celebrate diversity and create a community culture of inclusion — because now if you ask a kid ‘Where are you from’ or ‘Where were you born’ you visually see their walls go up,” said Texas teacher Tammy Ingraham Baggett.

Through multiple directives, the Trump administration has gutted the Education Department, including its Office of English Language Acquisition, leaving it with just a single staffer. The administration rescinded critical guidance on English learners’ rights earlier this year while the president’s proposed 2026 budget would eliminate $890 million to support multilingual learners in the classroom.

Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and director of the National Newcomer Networka coalition of over 150 educators, researchers, and advocates from 35 states, said such cuts would have a “substantial, devastating impact.”

Her organization joined forces with another group, Immigrant Connections, to ask educators this past summer to describe what would be sacrificed. Oklahoma, which would lose $6.4 million in funding, would no longer be able to meet multilingual learners’ needs, education leaders said.

The state would lose valuable school programs, professional development and family engagement geared toward these students — including translation and interpretation services. Likewise, Virginia, Vázquez Baur said, could lose $17.5 million, which would bring about a cascade of cuts, including tutoring for English learners and critical support for students who have gaps in their education.

“And we know when we lose funding for some groups of students, it hurts all students because resources are pushed to the very edge,” she said.

Teachers whose multilingual learner programs have already been axed are giving away their textbooks online, hoping they could be of use in another location, and some schools have suspended hiring new English learner teachers, unsure of how many students will show up and attend these classes, immigrant student advocates tell The 74.

Schools could be further hampered in serving these students by the federal government’s recent retreat from its monitoring and oversight role. Without that, Vázquez Baur said, it’s up to states to hold themselves accountable for meeting their legal obligations to educate these children.

She expressed hope that educators will continue to follow the old directives, even in states that support Trump.

“Politics have taken over many state legislatures — including some state agencies — but at the district level, no matter what state you’re in, people are committed to supporting these students,” she said.

JoAnne Negrín has worked with multilingual learners in New Jersey for much of the past three decades. She’s retired from her full-time post and now serves as a consultant.

Negrín said she has worked hard to identify newcomer parents so that they could fill much-needed positions in the school system, their Ukrainian and Spanish language skills in great demand as the local immigrant population increased in recent years.

“We were perennially short on classroom aides,” she said. “And parents needed jobs to get settled. So, I started helping them through the process and getting aides in every school that needed them. It was a win for all. We solved a staffing issue, the parents got a paycheck, we got school-level language assistance and the kids got to have a parent in the building while they acclimated.”

But Negrín worries this effort could be lost: She’s particularly concerned about a Venezuelan woman and her husband who were recently hired by the district as bilingual math and science teachers.

“I spent hours over Zoom helping them sign up for assessments and then walking them through New Jersey certification,” she wrote in a Facebook message. “At that point, I told our HR director to make them his first, best offer because they would soon figure out how valuable they are. He brought them in for around $70,000 each. Now, two years later, they own a home, have pets, they’re part of the community, and they are happy and settled in.”

But it’s unclear how long they will be permitted to stay.

“I hate this not only for these teachers, but because I don’t know what the district will do if it loses them,” she said.

Amy Halsall, a teacher in Indianapolis, said her school has not received funds for professional development so conferences are not being offered — or educators are required to pay for it themselves.

“We normally have funds for supplies and materials and that is on hold,” she said. “Due to funding cuts and federal policies where parents have to reveal their status, our district is not offering adult ESL classes. We have to be very creative in how we help.”

And newcomer students to her school are scarce, she said: There were just two this year compared to 10 last year.

Perhaps the greatest loss to Ingraham Baggett’s district, she said, was of the newcomer centers, which were, until recently, thriving inside nine of the district’s 12 high schools.

Each campus served 20 to 50 such students, she said, with 250 total and four to six teachers per site. Ingraham Baggett, the longest-serving biology teacher in the program, piloted the science courses, wrote most of the curriculum materials and led districtwide training sessions throughout the year for her colleagues.

“This year I got a phone call in August from my principal, two days before going back to school. The entire district had less than 30 high school New Arrival Center program students enrolled,” she said. “They were consolidating the program. All those program teachers had to be reassigned. Only three got to go to the new campus to continue.”

She said many students who qualify for the services refuse to participate, afraid of being identified as new immigrants.

“They’re declining services to be less easily identified by ICE, which means they’re missing out on an amazing start to a successful education,” she said.

Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor of education at Harvard, who spent years researching the educational outcomes of immigrant children for her upcoming booksaid every critical program cut, every staff member let go or reassigned represents another lost opportunity for immigrant children as they and their families feel the walls closing in around them.

School leaders, she notes, are living through a difficult moment. Long established and trusted programs for newcomer students are suddenly politicized, morphing their existence into an unintended statement, an opposition to a president who has frequently targeted education — and educators.

“It’s this slow burn that has been happening,” Oliveira said. “It comes in all of these different ways. You start to cut that lifeline. Not only are the programs not available, but the people who are able to tell parents about it, distribute the information, inform them … that has been the biggest worry.”