Montgomery County schools lost about a dozen students who were deported or left the country with their deported parents since the beginning of this school year, according to the state’s largest immigrant advocacy group.

CASA, a nonprofit based in Hyattsville, estimates that four high school students were deported, and eight other students accompanied their deported parents.

The organization also said one other student was detained by federal agents but later released. No arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, occurred on any district campus, a school spokesperson told The Banner.

“Youth should be focused on their education, not deportation,” Shannon Wilk de Benitez, CASA’s director of education and services integration, said in a statement.

“The threat and reality of family separation, including deportation of students,” she said, “has, in part, driven a decline in student attendance and enrollment at school.”

Principals across the nation, and Montgomery County school officials in particular, have voiced similar concerns about the impact of federal crackdowns on attendance and students’ mental health.

So have students.

“Students are terrified to go to school,” Jariane Martinez, 16, a junior at Seneca Valley High School in Germantown, told The Banner on Thursday.

“I can’t feel comfortable with my identity being Hispanic in Maryland, one of the most diverse places because I’m afraid that just being me, being Hispanic, is going to get me in trouble,” she said.

Ella Wan, 14, a freshman at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, said she’s disgusted by the detentions and deportations.

“Their main focus should be their education, going to school and learning and spending time with their friends,” she said. “It shouldn’t be ... do you think I’ll make it home today?”

A recent Banner analysis shows that ICE operations in Maryland have swept up immigrants from 81 countries, with those from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico representing about three-quarters of those arrested. It also showed that the vast majority of those arrested did not have criminal histories.

Neither ICE or the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, responded to requests for comment about the federal government’s policy on detaining and deporting minors and young adults.

A CASA spokesperson said the organization is tracking detainments and deportations of immigrants in the county and state through its ICE tip hotline and with additional community resources.

Close to school grounds

Citing the safety and privacy of the families impacted, CASA did not provide more specific information about the students who were deported, including their gender and ages, and when they were detained and deported.

A school spokesperson declined to provide comment about the students, citing federal confidentiality laws.

But ICE operates near Montgomery County schools, said de Benitez, heightening anxieties and discouraging undocumented parents from walking their children to school.

“In September, masked individuals chased down and violently detained two community members in front of Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring,” she said in a statement. “Consequently, school attendance dropped immediately.”

Montgomery County Council President Natali Fani-González called the deportation of students and their parents “cruel.”

“These are people that I know. These are people who go to school with my own kids. These are folks who live in our communities, and some of them have been here for many, many years,” she said.

Fani-González moved to Montgomery County as an undocumented teenage immigrant from Venezuela and later became a U.S. citizen. She said parents facing deportation often face an awful choice — to wrench their U.S. citizen children out of the world into which they were born, or to leave them in the U.S. in the care of others.

“Separating families,” she said, “is not a solution.”