Beyond Protection: An Administrator’s Guide to Building Belonging for Immigrant-Origin Students

When schools serve immigrant-origin students well, they serve all students well. This guide helps K-12 administrators move beyond reactive crisis measures toward the proactive, systemic work of building schools where every student can thrive.

In December 2025, UCLA IDEA released Fear Is Everywhere, a nationally representative survey of more than 600 high school principals led by researchers John Rogers and Joseph Kahne. The findings were stark: 70% reported students from immigrant families expressing fear about their safety, while 64% reported these students missing school due to immigration policies and rhetoric. Schools are responding heroically—78% of principals created emergency response plans—yet administrators describe feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by constant crisis response.

This guide helps administrators move beyond emergency plans to the deeper work: building relational infrastructure, reviewing curriculum, and creating the conditions where belonging doesn’t depend on heroic individual effort but is embedded in how the school operates every day.

The guide offers a framework for assessing your current approach and identifying where to begin, whether that’s crisis response protocols, organizational self-assessment, curriculum review, or strengthening relational infrastructure. It connects each entry point to practical resources and positions this work as central to your school’s core educational mission.

Developed by Re-Imagining Migration, this guide reflects our belief that schools can serve as civic infrastructure for belonging—places where immigrant-origin students and their peers develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to participate fully in democratic life.