In other parts of the country, the welfare checks have resulted in children being taken out of their homes and put back into government custody
Late on a spring morning, toward the end of the school year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security emailed a southwest Idaho school resource officer.
A DHS special agent told Caldwell Police Department Cpl. Patrick Lewis, who doubles as a school resource officer for the Vallivue School District, that the agency was checking on unaccompanied migrant children to help confirm their school attendance and “get eyes on the children to verify health and welfare.”
Lewis confirmed the addresses of at least three Vallivue students and provided information about a visit he made to one family’s home. He also confirmed the addresses for the parents or guardians of two additional students, according to April and March emails obtained by InvestigateWest.
But some of the students that the agent was looking for weren’t enrolled in Vallivue, Lewis said, directing DHS to check with the neighboring Caldwell School District. Latino students make up nearly 63% of the Caldwell School District and 41% of students in the Vallivue School District.
There, the federal agent’s request was met with skepticism. Caldwell’s director of student safety, Eric Phillips, immediately forwarded the email to his superintendent.
“I want to believe that they are just checking on health and welfare, but I also don’t want to end up in an immigration operation if that makes sense,” Phillips wrote in an April 21 email to Caldwell Superintendent Shalene French.
DHS has said the welfare checks are routine and to ensure that unaccompanied children who arrive at the border without a parent or guardian are "safe and not being exploited.” But Caldwell school officials, as well as immigrant advocates in Idaho and across the country, warn that the checks are a new trend that coincides with the Trump administration’s latest immigration crackdown.
Similar “wellness” checks were first reported in Los Angeles in April, around the same time DHS officials were reaching out to the two school districts in Idaho. In hundreds of cases since then, the welfare checks have resulted in unaccompanied migrant children being taken out of their homes and put back into government custody, according to reporting by CNN. Welfare checks have also been reported in California, New York and Hawaii, according to reporting by the New York Times. There have not been any reports of unaccompanied migrant children in Idaho being taken into custody.
With the start of the next school year just a few weeks away, it’s not clear how many Idaho school districts have procedures in place for how to respond to such inquiries, or whether other districts have shared student information with federal agents.
In addition to Caldwell and Vallivue, InvestigateWest called and emailed eight other majority-Latino districts to ask if they had been contacted by DHS. Three districts — Shoshone Joint, Wilder and American Falls — said they had not been contacted. Vallivue officials and school board members didn’t respond to questions.
Immigrant students across the country are grappling with fears about mass deportation and immigration enforcement efforts by the Trump administration. In Idaho, school officials and advocates have reported immigrant families already fearful of deportations have become hesitant to send their children to school because of enforcement activity in the state.
In the 2021-2022 school year, there were 6,219 Idaho students who were eligible for the Migrant Education Program, a federal program that provides support and resources for migrant students. It’s not clear exactly how many unaccompanied migrant students attend Idaho schools because schools don’t collect information about immigration status.
Jennifer Podkul, chief of global policy and advocacy with Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit that seeks to protect unaccompanied migrant children living in the U.S., said keeping unaccompanied children in school has a huge impact not only on their immigration case but their ability to “integrate well into our society.” Many children are already afraid to seek medical help, food assistance or other resources as a result of the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts, she added.
“Making schools a place that people are fearful about because they're collaborating with ICE is going to have a long-term detrimental impact on this entire country,” Podkul said.
At the Caldwell School District, the superintendent told Phillips, the safety director, in an email not to disclose “any student information” to DHS without a warrant or subpoena.
Travis Manning, chair of the Caldwell School District’s board of directors, said in an email reply to Superintendent French that the Vallivue school resource officer’s response is “disconcerting” and suggests the school resource officer was able to use information from schools to “try and track down what they believe are illegal immigrant minors.”
He also questioned federal agents' motives.
“When has Homeland ‘Security’ EVER en masse checked ‘on the health and welfare of unaccompanied children that were released into the US by the last political administration?’” Manning said in an email. “I’m guessing never.”
Different views on what student info is shareable
In Idaho, unlike in California, lawmakers have encouraged law enforcement to cooperate fully with federal immigration agents and to sign up to arrest and detain immigrants through a program known as 287(g).
Manning, Caldwell’s board chair, said Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s executive order in March, which said state law enforcement agencies should cooperate with ICE to the “fullest extent of the law,” may put students at risk if local law enforcement is sharing their information with federal agents.
The emails obtained by InvestigateWest show Chip Slingerland, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, asked Caldwell’s school security and Vallivue’s school resource officer to confirm attendance and contact information for several unaccompanied immigrant children.
“These are very cut and dry- we are trying to verify they have access to food, water, bathroom, and safe living conditions, in addition to being enrolled and attending school,” Slingerland wrote in an April 15 email to Lewis.
Three weeks before, in response to another inquiry from Slingerland, Lewis also told the federal agent about a visit he made to the home of an unaccompanied migrant student who had missed “an excessive amount” of school. Lewis told Slingerland in a March 25 email that when he arrived at the home with a school staff member, the unit was being cleaned by the property management company.
“There was no answer at the residence but a neighbor [said] ‘multiple families’ [were] staying at the home as it was a rental property,” Lewis wrote. “We never heard back from the family regarding where they relocated.”
DHS has claimed the welfare checks are to protect unaccompanied migrant children from exploitation and trafficking.
“The previous administration allowed many of these children who came across the border unaccompanied to be placed with sponsors who were actually smugglers and sex traffickers,” wrote Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of public affairs for DHS, in an email to InvestigateWest.
Immigration experts told CBS news last year that while some unaccompanied children have fallen victim to trafficking, most of them settle with government-vetted sponsors, who are often family members.
McLaughlin said President Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “take the responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to reunite children with their families.” She also claimed the administration has “already reunited over 5,000 unaccompanied children with a relative or safe guardian.”
The wellness checks also come after the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which under the Biden administration operated separately from ICE, granted immigration officials access to a database of information for unaccompanied minors in February, according to National Public Radio.
Advocates who work with unaccompanied children are concerned that the welfare checks are being conducted by federal agents who aren’t social workers or trained in child welfare cases. The welfare checks have also resulted in arrests of parents and guardians of the unaccompanied children, who are often undocumented themselves, said Podkul.
“From our understanding, the welfare checks are from ICE agents who have no training in interviewing kids or have a lot of training on identifying exploitation or trafficking,” Podkul said. “With the checks, they're also making collateral arrests, so questioning and looking at the immigration identity documents for the sponsors or adults who might be living in the house with the child.”
McLaughlin acknowledged that reality in an interview with the New York Times in late May. During some of these “wellness checks,” agents have detained caregivers who were undocumented, and in cases where there were no other adults authorized to care for the children, agents have placed the children in government care, the Times reported.
Manning also questioned the way DHS agents reached out to both school districts.
“They went about the process via a circuitous route, back channels, really, by going through a city police department, hoping that the SROs working for our district would access the school information systems and then provide the private addresses, contact information and other private information for these kids,” he said.
Legal questions
The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act says information from a student’s educational record must not be shared unless the district has written parental permission. But “directory information” — which can include the student's name, address, phone number, email address, date and place of birth, grade level, enrollment status and dates of attendance — can be disclosed.
Directory information is determined by each school district, and parents must be given an opportunity to opt out of the district sharing it, said LeRoy Rooker, a former director of the U.S. Department of Education's Family Policy Compliance Office for 21 years.
Both Caldwell and Vallivue school districts include a student’s name, address, grade level, birth date and place, and period of attendance in school as “directory information” in their policies. That means the district can share that information, according to Rooker, but they aren’t required to.
In January, following Trump’s executive order rescinding a Biden administration policy that protected “sensitive areas” like churches, schools and hospitals from immigration enforcement, Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Debbie Critchfield issued a statement reiterating that state and federal law provide all students an “equal right to enroll and participate in public elementary and secondary schools.”
She urged school districts to make sure they are following state and federal laws when sharing any student information.
“Historically, schools have not been allowed to ask questions about immigration status,” she wrote. “Because the information is not collected, it cannot be provided to any law enforcement agency.”
When asked about the information the Caldwell Police school resource officer shared with DHS, Scott Graf, spokesperson for the State Board of Education, said how a school resource officer works with local law enforcement and a school district is up to them.
He added that “all parents deserve to trust that schools are protecting their child's information by abiding by state and federal laws” and if they are concerned with information sharing, they can contact their school district.
A Caldwell Police Department spokesperson defended Lewis’ actions and said he acted according to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
“Homeland Security Investigators contacted the Caldwell Police Department regarding their efforts to check the welfare of unaccompanied minors who may have been released into the United States,” wrote department spokesperson Char Jackson in a statement. “In response to their request, and to ensure children were not in danger, a Caldwell Police SRO provided directory information on two students from a local school to assist with their inquiry. The information shared was not protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.”
The Caldwell Police Department provides SROs at Vallivue and two charter school districts.
After Trump rescinded the order making schools a “safe space” from immigration enforcement, Vallivue School District issued a statement saying they were committed to keeping all children safe at school.
“The Vallivue School District does not share information from a student’s school file with ICE or any outside agency that could reveal a student’s undocumented status,” the statement said. “Doing so would violate federal privacy laws, specifically the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.”
InvestigateWest reached out to Vallivue School District Superintendent Lisa Boyd, Assistant Superintendent Joey Palmer and School Board Chair Toni Belknap-Brinegar, each twice via email, with specific questions about the district’s response to DHS officials and whether Vallivue has developed any policy to protect student information from immigration authorities. They did not respond. All five members of the Vallivue School Board also did not respond to email inquiries.
The Caldwell district staff took a more cautious approach with the agents. In an email to Phillips, French, Caldwell’s superintendent, said she spoke with Amy White, a lawyer specializing in education law at Anderson Julian & Hull LLP, who advised that “without a legal warrant or subpoena, we will not disclose any student information.” French said it is also Caldwell School District policy not to release any information that is not required by law and that parents have the option to object to even basic “directory” information like addresses, contact information and school enrollment status, from being shared at all.
Idaho law also allows for the disclosure of directory information but requires that public school districts protect students' educational records from unauthorized use and prohibits them from sharing student information without written consent.
Many members of the Caldwell School Board of Trustees were taken by surprise when they learned about the DHS outreach. Manning, the board chair, has served on the board for 10 years and had never heard of Homeland Security officials seeking information about students.
"It's clearly a political shift that is happening, and it's coming from the top of our federal government,” Manning said.
In an emailed statement, French said she has also never heard of the welfare checks. When she learned about the correspondence, she said, in an email to InvestigateWest, “I felt disappointment in the blatant disregard of what it means to be human, and concern for our families.”
Even if sharing basic student information with federal agents is legal, Podkul says schools have a choice whether or not to communicate with immigration authorities about students.
“I've seen around the country, school districts that have publicly stated, ‘we will not comply, we will not be providing student information,’" Podkul said.
‘Safeguarding our children’
Even before DHS reached out to Caldwell’s security officer, longtime school board Trustee Marisela Pesina said she worried about the undocumented families in Caldwell. Since President Trump took office, Pesina said she has learned of many undocumented parents in the district skipping doctor’s appointments and pulling their kids out of classes to avoid leaving their homes and risking an interaction with law enforcement.
“As a trustee, I want to make sure that we're following our laws, but I also want to make sure that we are safeguarding our children,” Pesina said. “We're on high alert of everything going on around us and want to make sure that everyone has due process and that we’re just protecting our kids.”
None of the school officials who spoke to InvestigateWest know if DHS was able to contact the students. Manning said DHS asking for information about unaccompanied migrant students will likely contribute to what fear already exists among Latino communities in Caldwell.
“I know a number of people who are here illegally, who work hard, who pay taxes, whose kids are in the schools, and they are scared,” Manning said.
The consequences are all the more dire for unaccompanied children, said Podkul.
“We have kids who aren't coming to our offices or the lawyers for the kids aren’t seeing them. And we need to talk to them so we can help them in court and deportation proceedings,” she said. "It's real. This is really tragic.”
InvestigateWest (investigatewest.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit investigatewest.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates.