Schools do not collect information on students’ immigration status due to a 1982 Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. Doe, which granted undocumented students the constitutional right to a free, public education.
Collecting such data could discourage undocumented families from enrolling in school, potentially undermining that right, advocates say.
But Tennessee lawmakers, in an effort to challenge the Plyler decision, are debating legislation that would require schools to collect all students’ immigration information as soon as the 2026-27 school year.
Legal experts say the move would ripple across the country. Since President Donald Trump’s reelection win in November 2024, at least seven states, including Tennessee, proposed action to limit undocumented students’ access to a free, public education, according to an Education Week analysis. Efforts in four have failed.
The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the Project 2025 policy playbook shaping much of Trump’s agenda, has encouraged such legislation with the stated goal of getting the highest court to overturn the landmark decision.
Still, the current bill under discussion in Tennessee is a pared-down version of the one initially introduced last year, which would have allowed public schools to charge tuition or even deny enrollment of undocumented families.
For some, simply collecting and reporting immigration information in the aggregate is not enough.
“Requiring verification and reporting data sheds light on the number of [undocumented] immigrants in public schools, but it does nothing to stop the flow of taxpayer dollars subsidizing their education,” wrote Corey DeAngelis, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Educators protesting these legislative efforts in the state capitol since last year, including Ally Dorsey, a teacher in Chattanooga, are hopeful that, as Tennessee senators have delayed voting on the amended bill twice now, it may be a sign that the effort may fail.
“Anytime that they’re continuing to postpone it, I’m currently counting it as a win,” Dorsey said. “We want them to vote no on this bill, but even just them postponing it a week means that we are applying that pressure, and they’re feeling it.”
What Tennessee Republicans are seeking to achieve
In March, the Tennessee House passed a version of the Plyler challenge bill that would require schools to collect immigration status information from all students enrolled or seeking to enroll in the 2026-27 school year.
Families would have to indicate whether their child is “a citizen of the United States; is in the process of obtaining United States citizenship; holds a valid legal immigration or visa status; or is subject to pending immigration proceedings in which a final order of removal has not been issued.”
Schools would then report how many students provided or failed to provide such documentation to the state department of education. The education agency would then compile the data for other state agencies and offices, including the state’s department of safety and homeland security’s centralized immigration enforcement division, which was created by legislation in 2025 to oversee state and local collaboration with federal immigration authorities.
Proponents in the legislature have argued that student privacy would be protected since the data collected would be reported in the aggregate. But legal experts, including Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, say individual students’ information would still be collected at some point and could be subject to subpoena.
“It’s harder to protect [information] once it’s collected, so the solution is just not to ask and not to collect it,” she said.
Logistical and financial hurdles also loom.
“You would be asking school personnel to now act like they are Department of Homeland Security officers checking for immigration status, collecting and recording immigration status, and then reporting that information” Rodriguez Kmec said.
Organizations like the Immigration Research Initiative think tank say that verifying the status of all students in the state would require hiring, training, and equipping at least 934 school personnel, which would cost about $55 million statewide.
Cost concerns have already shaped the legislation. Lawmakers scaled back the original proposal in part due to concerns that violating federal law could jeopardize as much as $1.1 billion in federal education funding. That risk underscores the legal uncertainty surrounding the effort.
State Sen. Bo Watson, a Republican and co-sponsor of the Senate bill, returned the bill to the calendar on March 26 and told local news outlets that his colleagues need more time to discuss the pared-down House legislation before a vote in the Senate.
“It’s an opportunity to kind of continue some negotiations, both between the two chambers as well as within the caucus. There are a number of members who like the original bill and do not prefer the House version,” he said.
Watson did not respond to request for comment from Education Week.
It is unclear when the bill will be revisited and which version would move forward.
Challenges to Plyler concern legal experts like Rodriguez Kmec because should the decision be overturned and undocumented students lose free access to public education, it would create a second class of children who are unable to get an education legally, and unable to work, she said.
Meanwhile, educators like Dorsey worry that if successful, even just collecting immigration status information could erode an already fragile trust between schools and immigrant families.
“My job as an educator, my heart, is to teach children and mold them for the future, and for the first time in 13 years, I’m being asked to be put in a position that could potentially harm my children and my families, and I’m not OK with it,” Dorsey said. “We’re not ICE agents. We didn’t sign up for this. We don’t want it.”