How many ICE raids have occurred in schools since 2020?

Executive summary — No reliable count exists in the provided materials: reporting and government data reviewed do not offer a definitive tally of ICE raids that took place inside K–12 schools since 2020. Multiple analyses emphasize the measurable impacts on student attendance, mental health, and educational equity, and note that publicly available enforcement datasets and journalism describe raids and heightened activity but stop short of producing a confirmed nationwide number ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}. Advocacy publications frame raids as part of broader criminalization and call for institutional resistance, which shapes how incidents are documented and reported ^[5].

1. Why the official record is silent — government data and GAO reviews don’t list school raids. The GAO review of ICE enforcement statistics and ICE’s own datasets catalog arrests, detentions, and removals over time but do not disaggregate actions by the physical site “school” in a way that produces a clear count of raids inside schools since 2020 ^{[3] [4] [6]}. These sources show variation in enforcement volume across years and note limitations in ICE’s reporting, which means researchers and journalists cannot reliably extract a nationwide school-specific raid total from federal data alone. The absence of a labeled category for “school-based enforcement actions” in ICE reporting—highlighted in the GAO’s critique of data completeness—explains much of the evidentiary gap and why secondary analyses rely on case reports rather than aggregated tallies ^[3].

2. What journalists and researchers can document — impacts and case reporting, not a full count. Education and regional reporting chronicle multiple high-profile incidents, rising fear among families, and measurable educational consequences following immigration enforcement operations; those accounts establish pattern and consequence more than a census of events ^{[1] [2]}. Researchers correlate spikes in absences and declines in engagement with periods of heightened immigration enforcement activity, and local news pieces describe specific school-based encounters. Those accounts are useful to show consistent harms to student well-being and attendance, but they are not designed to produce an exhaustive, verifiable national count of raids in schools since 2020. The available literature therefore supports conclusions about effects rather than a definitive numerical total ^{[1] [7] [8]}.

3. Diverse perspectives: advocacy, academia, and watchdogs emphasize different questions. Advocacy materials frame school raids as a symptom of a criminalization regime and urge organizers and schools to resist or prepare for enforcement actions; these pieces emphasize moral and policy imperatives and may compile incident lists to support advocacy goals ^[5]. Academic sources and civil-rights-focused projects emphasize educational equity and quantitative impacts—attendance, funding, and demographic shifts—without claiming a comprehensive raid count ^{[7] [9]}. Watchdog and government reviews focus on the integrity of ICE data systems and call for stronger reporting practices, signaling that a reliable, queryable dataset on sites of enforcement does not currently exist in federal public reporting ^{[3] [6]}. Each perspective serves a different informational need, and together they explain both the recognized harms and the persistent data gaps.

4. Why different agendas matter for how incidents are recorded and publicized. Advocacy toolkits aiming to “defend against ICE raids” encourage documentation and publicizing of incidents to mobilize communities, which can increase visibility but may not adhere to standardized evidence protocols needed for a census ^[5]. Journalists and researchers seek verifiable chains of custody for data—dates, locations, and corroborating agency or school statements—which are often unavailable when rapid enforcement and community fear suppress reporting. Government transparency advocates and auditors instead prioritize structural data reforms at ICE that would permit automatic, verifiable categorization of enforcement locations; until those reforms, the most public and repeated claim that cannot be substantiated is a precise national count of school raids since 2020 ^[3].

5. Bottom line and what’s needed to answer the question definitively. The materials reviewed consistently show strong evidence of school-related impacts from immigration enforcement and document individual incidents, but they do not produce a validated nationwide number of ICE raids in schools since 2020. A definitive answer requires either: improved ICE reporting that tags enforcement locations by type, a consolidated public database compiling verified incident reports with standardized criteria, or a systematic journalistic inventory vetted against official records. Until one of those changes occurs, any numerical claim about the total number of school raids since 2020 will rest on incomplete data and differing methodologies across advocacy, academic, and journalistic sources ^{[1] [2] [5] [3]}.