Their Families Keep California Farms Running. Trump Cuts Just Stripped a Lifeline From Them

Now, programs for those students have been put on hold or cut back. Some school districts scraped together money to keep the programs running through summer, but others canceled programs altogether and laid off staff.

The Butte County Office of Education, which oversees the Mini-Corps program for the state, laid off more than 400 employees as a result of the cuts. The Santa Clara County Office of Education laid off 22 staff and shuttered many services for migrant students, including college visits, a math and science program, a debate tournament and summer programs.

“Our hope is that we find some other finding source,” said Tad Alexander, deputy superintendent of the Butte County Office of Education. “But right now it feels like they’re trying to bleed it out.”

On the move with the harvest

Nearly 80,000 students in California are migrants, moving every few months with their parents for work, according to a recent report by West Ed, an educational research and development organization.

That could mean winter in Porterville for the orange harvest, spring in Salinas for strawberries, summer in Madera for peaches, fall in Oroville for almonds. Some families even venture to Washington for cherry season, or to Mexico between harvests.  The majority of migrant farm workers are legally authorized to live and work in the U.S., according to WestEd.

Although most migrant students are in school at least part of the time, some aren’t enrolled in school at all. They’re either working in the fields themselves, caring for younger siblings or otherwise helping their families.

But migrant students had relatively high graduation and college-going rates – primarily community college – in part thanks to the Migrant Education program. Students can get help with reading, math, science, English language skills, one-on-one tutoring, health and social-emotional support, and help enrolling in college and navigating life after high school.

For nearly a century, the U.S. has offered services and protections to farm laborers from other countries. The Bracero program, an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico starting in 1942, allowed Mexican laborers to legally work in U.S. agricultural fields.

That program ended in 1964, but President Lyndon Johnson stepped in to enact a host of other programs that benefitted migrant laborers, including the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act and the Migrant Education program.

Early in his career, Johnson had worked as a teacher at a school along the Texas-Mexico border where most of his students were the children of immigrants. He helped teach them English, started sports and literary clubs and drove them to nearby towns for athletic and speech competitions. He used his first paycheck to buy playground equipment.

That experience was the inspiration for the Migrant Education program as well as Johnson’s other anti-poverty programs from that era, according to the National Archives.

The Migrant Education program served about 270,000 students nationwide last year, and is among the smallest of the federal education grants. Of all the programs Trump defunded on July 1, Migrant Education has the lowest price tag: $121 million for California, $375 million nationwide.

‘Dark times’

De-funding the program has had a chilling effect on migrant families everywhere, said Debra Benitez, director of migrant education services for WestEd. Most migrant families deeply value education, she said, and are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices for their children to go to school.

The Migrant Education program allows that to happen, she said.