April 1, 2026
Keri Rodrigues, President of the National Parents Union
Today, a sitting president walked into the Supreme Court to watch arguments in his own case.
Read that back.
A sitting president. Applying political pressure. In a courtroom. In America. In 2026.
Donald Trump signed his birthright citizenship executive order on his very first day back in the White House, declaring that babies born on American soil would no longer be automatically considered citizens if their parents were here illegally or without permanent status. Courts have blocked it at every single turn, finding it violates the Constitution, over a century of Supreme Court precedent, and longstanding federal law.
And yet here we are. April Fool’s Day, 2026.
Except nobody’s laughing.
I’m going to skip the constitutional law lecture. Brilliant people are doing that in the courtroom today, and honestly the 14th Amendment is not that complicated. What I want to talk about is what’s already happening to your kids’ schools, right now, while everyone’s glued to the courtroom theater.
Because this was never just an immigration story. Not from the jump. Not for one single second.
Educators are watching this case hard, because if the order takes effect, it would massively expand the population of undocumented children in this country, which would scare families away from putting their kids on a school bus, even though a 1982 Supreme Court decision says states cannot deny children a free public education based on immigration status.
That decision is Plyler v. Doe. And if you are in education policy right now and you are not saying that name in the same breath as this Supreme Court case, you are missing the entire game.
Here’s the short version: Texas tried to cut off school funding for undocumented kids and charge them tuition to walk through the door. Immigrant families sued. And they won. The Court said denying children a basic education would create a permanent underclass. Because of that ruling, school districts are not even supposed to be collecting immigration data on students or their families.
That protection exists for a reason. The moment you require families to prove their child’s status at the school door, you don’t get compliance.
You get kids disappearing from rosters.
Not because they left the country. Because their parents are terrified. And scared parents do not send their babies into buildings that feel like traps.
The people running this show know exactly how that works. That’s not a bug. That’s the feature.
The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, has called for states to restrict public education for undocumented students and is actively pushing states to challenge Plyler directly, arguing it will cost states hundreds of millions in education spending in 2023 alone.
Stephen Miller walked into the White House and met with Texas state legislators to push ending public funding for the education of undocumented kids.
This is not a tweet. This is not a fringe position bubbling up from some dark corner of the internet. This is the White House. This is the blueprint. They put it in writing.
Tennessee has bills moving through the legislature right now that would track students’ legal status and let public schools turn children away at the door. Other states are right behind them.
So here’s what’s actually happening here: they are not just fighting over who gets a birth certificate. They are constructing the legal architecture to exclude children from public school entirely. Birthright citizenship is the first brick. Plyler is the wall they’re headed for next.
Don’t get distracted by the shiny object in the Supreme Court.
Don’t wait for a ruling to understand what this is costing us. The damage is live. Right now. In schools across this country.
An NYU professor who studies immigration enforcement and school attendance has been documenting reports of “constant fear, anxiety and stress” from immigrant families afraid to send their children to school. She says the potential end of birthright citizenship creates even larger communities paralyzed by that fear.
And fear has a direct line to your school’s budget. When local immigration enforcement goes up, Hispanic student enrollment goes down. That’s not speculation, that’s documented. In most states, districts get funded based on daily attendance and enrollment numbers.
Empty seats are not a neutral outcome. They are lost dollars. Lost programs. Laid-off teachers. The fear campaign is a school funding crisis wearing an immigration costume, and it’s already running.
And then there’s the piece almost nobody in education is clocking: Medicaid. If birthright citizenship is eliminated, children who would have been citizens may no longer qualify for Medicaid. For kids with disabilities, schools are still legally on the hook under IDEA. But the federal funding that helps pay for those services? Gone. That cost shifts onto local districts. Which shifts onto your property taxes. Which lands on every single family in your community, regardless of where your kids were born or what passport their parents carry.
The whole community pays. Every time.
Let me be real with you. Immigration does not produce easy consensus across our 1.8 million families. Our people have genuinely different views on the border, on enforcement, on what the immigration system should look like. I’m not going to pretend otherwise and I’m not going to talk down to anyone about it.
But here’s what I know.
I have never met a parent, not one, who believes a child born in this country should be stateless. I have never met a parent who thinks a kindergartener needs to pass a legal status hearing to get a seat in a classroom. Not a Republican parent. Not a Democratic parent. Not a libertarian, not an independent, not a parent who voted for Trump twice. Not any parent.
More than a quarter of a million babies born in the U.S. every single year would be swept up by this executive order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute. Those are children growing up in our neighborhoods. Sitting in desks next to our kids. They will be our kids’ teammates, best friends, prom dates, coworkers, and neighbors. There is no version of a functioning public school system that locks them out at the door and comes out stronger on the other side. None.
The 14th Amendment was written to bury the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Black people were not entitled to the protections of citizenship. The people who wrote it understood in blood what happens to a country when you decide some children born on this soil belong here less than others. They settled it. They put it in the Constitution.
The Court will rule sometime between June and July.
But the fear is already in the hallways. It’s already in the empty seats. It’s already in the budget spreadsheets of districts that were already running on fumes before any of this started.
Parents need to be paying attention. All of us. Not just some of us.
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With more than 1,800 affiliated parent organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, the National Parents Union is the united, independent voice of modern American families. We channel the power of parents into powerful policies that improve the lives of children, families and communities across the United States. https://nationalparentsunion.org/