When President Donald Trump began his second term in January, he promised to launch the “largest deportation program in American history.” Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization with a small bureau in New York City, wanted to understand how Trump’s aggressive immigration policies could affect the nation’s largest school system, particularly those who were most likely to be targeted: immigrant students.
Chalkbeat New York reporter Michael Elsen-Rooney gained unprecedented access to ELLIS Prep, a public high school in the Bronx whose mission is to guide newly arrived, often over-age, immigrant students into college.
The relationships Elsen-Rooney built were critical when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, arrested Dylan Lopez Contreras, a first-year ELLIS student and the first known New York City student to be detained by federal agents during Trump’s second term. Chalkbeat broke the story and was able to detail how Dylan had tried to navigate a complex system: turning himself in at the border roughly a year earlier, gaining entry through a Biden-era program, and showing up to routine court dates in Manhattan. Despite those steps, agents arrested Dylan at the courthouse, part of a nationwide blitz in which immigrants were detained after their court hearings.
Elsen-Rooney didn’t stop reporting after Dylan’s arrest. He also wrote a haunting narrative about another student at ELLIS: Bridget, an undocumented student and friend of Dylan’s. Elsen-Rooney illuminated the forces that propelled Bridget and her mother to come here, namely for Bridget’s education. He showed the hardships they endured, the rollercoaster of emotions they felt as they considered whether to stay in the U.S., as well as the school’s efforts to keep Bridget’s education on track.
Chalkbeat also created a first-of-its-kind analysis to understand how migration had reshaped enrollment in New York City’s public schools — a difficult task because education officials don’t ask new students for their immigration status.
The result of Chalkbeat’s work is an unmatched portrait of how New York City’s students and schools navigated the early months of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — and what the future could hold for a school system with declining enrollment.
