Major urban school systems that added large numbers of students from abroad are now reporting notable declines in enrollment as immigration enforcement and fewer border crossings reduce the influx that once strained classrooms, budgets, and local services.

Cities and counties that saw sudden surges of students who spoke little or no English are now watching those rolls shrink. Administrators and local leaders attribute part of the change to stepped-up enforcement and a sharp fall in new arrivals, which has immediate effects on staffing, class composition, and funding formulas tied to headcount.

That drop isn’t uniform, but it’s significant in several large districts. Los Angeles, New York City, Miami-Dade, and parts of Virginia and Colorado have reported declines ranging from single digits to dramatic plunges in new enrollments, and those numbers reverberate through budgets and planning for services like translation, social work, and immunization programs.

School districts that support mass migration from the Third World come up with a lot of different euphemisms to refer to migrants, like “new-to-country,” “newcomer,” and “new arrivals,” in order to socially psy-op American students and families into believing all Third World illegals are culturally compatible with Americans, or that they do not negatively affect American students. 

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A Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesman told The Federalist that while attendance declined by 1-2 percent at the end of the 2024-2025 school year “in some communities where immigration enforcement activity was reported,” enrollment in other areas “remained steady.” 

He also said that this year’s enrollment decreased by about 4 percent compared to last year, which he said is 1.79 percent below enrollment projections. 

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New York City saw enrollment fall by 2 percent over the past year, its steepest decline since the coronavirus pandemic. 

As Chalkbeat put it, “A wave of immigration buoyed dozens of NYC schools. Now, their enrollment is plummeting.” That “wave of historic migration” accounted for tens of thousands of immigrants entering the city’s public schools in 2022. 

In New York City, a late 2023 report from the United Federation of Teachers found that more than 300,000 students in the city attended school “in overcrowded classrooms.” 

As Mehlman noted, New York schools were forced to “adapt” to accommodate those who speak little or no English, hire social workers to deal with students’ experiences of “traumatic border crossings” allowed under the Biden administration, and deal with food, clothing, and health burdens like immunizations. 

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Miami-Dade County, Florida, saw a massive drop in new students from other countries enrolling, dropping from around 14,000 in 2024 and about 20,000 in 2023 to just 2,550 in 2025. The plunge occurred in part because so many fewer people are crossing the border. 

The decrease in enrollment has lowered the budget by about $70 million, and while school administrators might complain about less money in the school district, Americans should keep in mind that such funding is driven by people who are illegally accessing, overcrowding, and overburdening American public schools in the first place. 

However, in Florida, those funding strains coincide with the state making it easier for families to choose alternatives to public schools, allowing students to avoid being trapped by a failing system. 

Just like New York, south Florida schools were overcrowded as well, and a 2023 report from the University of Miami stated that the “unparalleled 2.3 million migrants” who crossed the southern border created a situation where a “record-breaking number of migrants place burden on city resources.” 

Local leaders say the change has been especially visible where districts spent heavily to respond to a sudden influx. Northern Virginia, for example, saw big budget lines for language services and accommodations; similar pressures showed up in cities where school counts ballooned practically overnight. That sort of rapid growth forced districts to hire bilingual staff, expand support teams, and redirect money from other priorities to meet basic needs.

There’s a real cost to those surges. One widely cited figure puts the average annual expense per student in New York City at about $36,000 when accounting for full services and supports, and districts reported millions spent on translation, health services, and social work tied to new arrivals. School systems pushed to adapt also faced overcrowded classrooms, stretched nurse and counselor capacity, and higher spending for immunization and basic needs interventions.

One in three residents of Virginia’s largest school district, the D.C. suburb of Fairfax County, is foreign-born, and the county has one of the highest populations of foreigners in the country.

In 2020, 18.7 percent, or more than 35,000 students, were considered to have limited English proficiency. The school district brags about having “students from 204 countries who speak more than 200 different languages at home,” and spent about $95.4 million on accommodating them in 2020. 

With arrivals down, those emergency-style responses are being reassessed. Some districts face immediate budget shortfalls because funding formulas counted on continued growth, while others see an easing of overcrowding and logistical strain. The political angle is plain: enforcement and border policies change who shows up in classrooms, and those shifts ripple into dollars and staffing.

From a Republican perspective, the enrollment drop is proof positive that stricter border control affects local schools and public spending. The claim that these declines are the result of enforcement and fewer crossings sits alongside calls for continued action to secure the border, manage enrollment impacts, and preserve educational resources for American children.

For districts that expanded services in response to the migration surge, the coming years will mean recalibrating budgets, readjusting staffing levels, and deciding how to restore or reassign programs started to meet urgent needs. The political fights over who pays and who benefits will continue as enrollment numbers settle into the new normal.