Children from immigrant families need more intensive support as they grapple with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, but county schools have fewer staff who can step in to help, officials said Monday.

County school leaders are trying to give these children more assistance, but local officials say they could use more people to handle the growing need. Even though there are fewer international students enrolled in Montgomery County schools this year, the complexity of their cases is rising.

“The work in this space is absolutely skyrocketing,” County Councilwoman Kristin Mink said during an education committee meeting. “Each of these traumas, to one student and one family, is also traumatizing a whole community of students and others around them.”

As Mink was on her way to the morning meeting, she said she saw an immigration-related operation unfolding. She said a group of people was detained, with a teenage boy caught up in it as he sought to help his father.

“This is happening every day, repeatedly,” Mink said. “The level of trauma that our student body is facing from this crisis is hard to even wrap my mind around. It’s an absolutely unfathomable, unfathomable timeline that we are living through right now.”

Across the state, there are early indicators that Maryland schools are educating fewer students from immigrant families.

Data presented Monday showed that, between July and December, Montgomery County enrolled roughly 1,540 newcomer students — defined as children who are brand-new to the country or are returning to the United States after years spent abroad.

That’s about half as many newcomers enrolled by that point in the 2023 school year.

“One of the reasons international enrollment is down is because of the time we’re going through and the really hateful and harmful and racist attacks from the Trump administration,” Councilman Will Jawando said.

Support for students

Montgomery County school leaders employ specialized counselors to work with immigrant students. Staffers can speak to students and their families in a dozen languages, including Spanish, Amharic and Farsi. Some of the staffers are mental health professionals who came from the same countries as the newcomer students.

The district employed 37 of these counselors in 2023, but that’s dropped to about 20, according to Monday’s presentation. These staffers help guide students into the Montgomery County system, conduct mental health check-ins and mobilize around crises.

They triage referrals from the more than 200 schools in the county.

“That’s a lot of work for a small team,” said Margarita Bohorquez, the district’s director of international admissions.

“I have two Ethiopian [counselors] who speak Amharic and Tigrinya and can help that community,” she added. “But we have a very large Ethiopian population. I could use five of those [counselors] to really communicate with the community.”

Jawando told district leaders to keep the County Council informed of its immigration-related needs as they work through the budget process.

“You’re dealing with crisis level — with less people,” he said.

Pain points

Some Montgomery County students have left the country with their parents, who were deported, or faced deportation proceedings themselves, according to CASA, a nonprofit based in Hyattsville.

“The issues that people are calling us for have changed to crisis mode,” said Oscar Alvarenga, the district’s newcomer transition coordinator. “When we find out that a student’s parent got picked up yesterday, and that student is asking, ‘Where’s my parent?’ it creates such a crisis.”

Staff members must pivot immediately so they can support the affected kids, he said.

For families who are deported or must leave the country quickly, Bohorquez said, district officials must expedite processing their education records so students can more easily enroll when they reach a new country.

“We’re seeing a huge increase of families who are getting deported and need these records yesterday,” Bohorquez said.