Will filling out student aid form target undocumented parents for Trump’s mass deportations?

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Incoming president Donald Trump has vowed to deport all of the country’s undocumented residents.

For students who are eyeing college, his presidency represents a potentially brutal Sophie’s Choice if they have undocumented parents: Risk exposing them to a possible immigration dragnet by completing the federal Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, or leave thousands of dollars in cash for school on the table. 

While researchers and advocates have yet to hear anything concrete from Trump representatives about using financial aid data to target undocumented residents, they know families are afraid.

“Front line staff that work directly with students are reporting that students and parents are asking them if the FAFSA is safe” given Trump’s campaign promises of mass deportation, said Marcos Montes, policy director for Southern California College Attainment Network, a coalition of nonprofits that help students apply for college admission and financial aid.

The National College Attainment Network said those fears are justified. It “cannot assure mixed-status students and families that data submitted to the US Department of Education, as part of the FAFSA process, will continue to be protected,” a message on its website read late last month.

That fear is exacerbated by Trump’s claims Sunday to NBC News that the only way to deport undocumented parents whose children are citizens is to have the whole family leave. “I don’t want to be breaking up families,” Trump said. “So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.” How Trump can force out citizens, including those with parents not born in the U.S., is unclear; experts say ending birthright citizenship would violate the U.S Constitution.

An estimated 3.3 million Californians live in mixed-status households, including 1 in 5 children under 18, according to data from Equity Research Institute, a USC research group.

A California workaround

Experts say California students eligible for financial aid can minimize the possible harm to their undocumented parents. Unlike the FAFSA, the state aid application is not shared with federal agencies. That policy is among the various protections in place under California’s so-called “sanctuary” laws that limit the use of state resources to help federal immigration enforcement. Several legal experts told CalMatters the Trump administration would have to clear a high legal bar to gain access to those state records and that court cases have put restrictions on how wide a net immigration enforcement agencies can cast in their search for data. 

Because the deadline for state financial aid is in March — though there are plans to move it to April — and the federal deadline is much later, Californians attending college here should complete the state application first, said Montes. Then they should wait to see if the Trump administration will break precedent and begin using the federal financial aid data for immigration enforcement purposes.

 An estimated 3.3 million Californians live in mixed-status households, including 1 in 5 children under 18. 

Equity Research Institute

That strategy is also endorsed by Madeleine Villanueva, the interim higher education director at Immigrants Rising, a California-based advocacy and research group focused on undocumented residents. She stressed that there’s a bevy of analysts and immigrant rights advocates who’ll be watching for updates from the Trump administration.

“Unfortunately, we can’t say what’s going to happen federally,” she said. But the California state aid application, known as the California Dream Act Application, is an “extra layer of safety when it comes to applying for financial aid.”

The California Student Aid Commission, an agency with the sole goal of getting students more money, suggests students may need to forgo federal aid given the risks to their families. The agency, which runs the state’s financial aid programs, wrote in a memo last month that completing just the state aid application is a “viable option” for students in mixed-status homes who have “fears of adverse action by federal immigration enforcement.”

However, taking a wait-and-see approach with federal aid means California campuses won’t have a full picture of how much aid a student is likely to get when they send out financial aid estimates to admitted students in the spring. The University of California’s central office worries that students may not complete the FAFSA and lose out on aid. Both UC and the California State University indicated to CalMatters they’ll process either form students submit and will work with students who file their federal applications later.

About 400,000 Californians receive the Cal Grant, which waives tuition at the public universities and partially at private colleges. That grant plus the state’s Middle Class Scholarship can add up to more than $17,000 in aid in one year. The state aid application ensures students fearful of the federal application can still receive the state support for which they’re eligible.

The University of California’s undergraduate student government is also on edge about FAFSA. The lack of a firm firewall “could put certain students at risk,” said Saanvi Arora, external vice president for UC Berkeley’s student government and a board member for the systemwide student government. 

Understanding the FAFSA risk

Students who are citizens and permanent residents are eligible for up to $7,400 in Pell grants and access to federal loans that come with repayment protections that are often stronger than what the private sector offers. To receive this aid, students who live with their parents need them to fill out portions of the federal aid application. More recently, parents without Social Security numbers have been asked to indicate they lack one and then must answer a set of questions about their identity.

The U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees the country’s immigration enforcement, have a regularly renewed agreement limiting the use of a student’s personal information. Because students need to be citizens or permanent residents to get financial aid, a signed agreement between the two departments states that students’ information they submit for FAFSA will be matched against an eligible immigration list called SAVE. It’s one that hundreds of state, local and federal agencies use to determine whether an individual is eligible for federal benefits. Neither SAVE nor the agency that operates it, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, are used for immigration enforcement purposes. 

Conceptually, it’s not hard to use that federal financial aid data for enforcement purposes, according to experts who spoke with CalMatters. However, doing so would be a major break from current protocol. 

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Education “has not provided and will not provide information gathered through FAFSA to any federal immigration-related agency for law enforcement activities,” wrote in an email James Kvaal, who holds the number two spot at the U.S. Department of Education and is the top higher education officer in the federal government. However, he wrote, “students and their families should make the decisions that are right for them.”

That does not “sound like a robust encouragement to go ahead and fill out the FAFSA,” said Bob Shireman, who was a senior higher education official in the education department during the Obama administration.

The agreement between the departments “is not much of a firewall, it is more like a picket fence,” Shireman said in an interview. The agreement can be changed in a matter of months, he said, “so if the next administration wants to use education department records to identify people who may have an immigration status that could subject them to deportation, I don’t see anything preventing that from happening.”

Federal laws limit the data sharing that can occur between the U.S. Department of Education and law enforcement agencies, said Shelveen Ratnam, a spokesperson for the California Student Aid Commission. Ratnam said that current law “strictly prohibits” agencies in possession of personally identifiable information, like parental data, from releasing that information, with few exceptions. Some other laws and policies also apply and the gist is that an agency can only use the personal information of others in ways that support the mission of that federal agency.

But if the U.S. Department of Education gets subpoenaed for information, the department’s “responses and likelihood of challenging the demand for information are unknown,” according to Ratnam.

Even analysts who say using parental FAFSA information is an inefficient way to find possible undocumented parents urge caution. They say it’s not out of the question that a Trump administration could try to make use of that data for immigration enforcement purposes.

While “it’s sort of methodologically flawed as a way to identify individuals,” said Corinne Kentor, an immigration and higher education researcher, “that doesn’t mean that it won’t be attempted. But I think it is probably harder and more work than other avenues.”

California Dream Act Application is safer

The California Dream Act Application has more protections than the federal application. Though originally designed to allow undocumented students who are California residents to apply for state college benefits, the application in 2024 was modified to permit any student who ran into problems with the federal application to at least apply for state grants. The change stemmed from colossal data issues with the federal application this year that prevented students with parents without Social Security numbers from completing the FAFSA.

According to a 1988 federal appeals court decision, “the government can’t enforce a subpoena that is just ‘fishing’ for data about undocumented people,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a scholar on immigration law at UCLA. That’s in contrast to “trying to gather information on a particular individual that the government has reason to suspect is here in violation of the immigration laws.”

Arulanantham also said that a federal agency asking California’s financial aid agency to search databases for undocumented students could run afoul of the 10th Amendment.

Finally, the state’s financial aid agency could challenge a judicial order or subpoena that seeks student records on the grounds that it’s not specific enough and violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, Ratnam said. 

Now what does all this mean for students with undocumented parents who already submitted FAFSA information last year? Their information is already in government systems. Should they continue to file their FAFSA? Experts had few answers. They said that’s a decision that only families can decide together given the varying protections available.

Arora, the UC student government member, is sympathetic to those households. It’s “absolutely a tough question,” she said. That’s one reason she wants UC officials to bolster existing immigration legal aid services, such as bringing in more lawyers. 

It’s one answer she has to her own question: “How do we mitigate retribution that’s likely to happen against those students?”