By J. Jacob Kirksey, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj

This study investigates the impact of the 2018 immigration raid at Load Trail LLC, a trailer manufacturing company in Sumner, Texas. It analyzes the raid’s severe and enduring effects on the postsecondary pathways of students in the surrounding areas. Situated within the broader discourse on legal vulnerability, this research highlights how exposure to immigration enforcement operations and pervasive anti-immigrant sentiments contributes to diminished educational opportunities. Using robust longitudinal data from Texas, the findings indicate pronounced declines in four-year college enrollment and shifts toward employment during high school, particularly among Latinx and English-learner students. These results delineate the extensive collateral consequences of immigration enforcement on community members not directly targeted by the raid. By documenting the raid’s deleterious effects on both immediate educational engagement and longer-term career prospects, this article calls for targeted policy measures designed to buffer the negative impacts and support the resilience and upward mobility of affected student populations.

By Cora Bennett, Virginia Graves, Benjamin Meadows 

Federal immigration statutes are enforced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, ICE enforcement does not occur in a vacuum; it has a well-documented legacy of spillovers. Understanding the actual behaviors of immigration enforcement is exceedingly difficult owing to opaque or unavailable data. In this article, we are able to match the level of local immigration enforcement in local areas to school-district-level elementary and middle school achievement scores. Specifically, we merge ten years of individual-arrest ICE records from the New Orleans district field office obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request to district-level achievement scores to understand how immigration enforcement affects the human capital of children. We find that overall responses to enforcement as measured by district-level achievement scores are sharp and large, with achievement scores dropping anywhere between 0.27 and 0.52 of a standard deviation.

By Antonia Vaughan

Researchers of risky topics have benefitted from a burgeoning literature on researcher safety, including that specifically focused on researching the far right (Pearson et al. 2023; Pruden 2024; Gelashvili and Gagnon 2024; Sibley 2024). Much of this literature has focused on tackling urgent concerns and providing practical advice, targeting the individual and the institution. Drawing on 21 interviews with researchers of the far right and manosphere, this report complements these efforts by detailing how researcher safety is impacted by environmental factors. Focusing on three key stakeholders – the institution, the manager and the researcher themselves – the report illustrates how individual efforts and interactions between stakeholders have significant implications for safety and underlines the need to situate researchers within the academic context. Arguing that barriers to safety pivot on both what is known about risk and what is possible to mitigate, the report highlights areas to focus on to improve both current and future practice. To examine the impact of stakeholders and how their interactions have an impact on safety, this report proposes a matrix highlighting the varying roles, responsibilities and capabilities of each actor. In doing so, it illustrates the necessity of understanding the researcher within a broader framework rather than focusing on the researcher in isolation. These findings contribute to concerns about the ability of researchers to safeguard themselves, and the importance of environmental factors in affecting the safety of researchers. Although focused on researchers of the far right, the findings are likely applicable to researchers of extremism more broadly, who face similar harms in the same environment.