The day after her 17th birthday, Allison Garcia was scooping ice cream at her summer job in Ocean City when she got a call from a number she didn’t recognize.The voice on the other end of the line was frantic.Law enforcement officers — either police or ICE — had just walked into the Somers Point restaurant where Garcia’s mother worked as a waitress and hauled her out, a friend said.“I didn’t know what to do,” Garcia said. “I was going crazy.” The teen, a U.S. citizen, knew her 50-year-old mother had lived for decades in the U.S. after arriving from Mexico as an undocumented immigrant. But Garcia never imagined her mother could simply disappear from work one day.She later learned the officers who took her mother were local police who brought her to the Atlantic County jail because of a warrant stemming from a domestic dispute with Garcia’s father. Then, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents got involved and moved her mother to the ICE detention center in Elizabeth, the teen said.Within a few days, Garcia got a shocking call from her mother — from a city in southern Mexico. She’d been deported.It was August and Garcia was suddenly home alone in New Jersey, about to start her senior year of high school in Atlantic County. With no siblings nearby, Garcia’s cousin told school officials she would look after the teen.The honors student was expecting to spend her senior year applying to college and trying to ace the four Advanced Placement classes on her schedule.Instead, she was working extra shifts at her job to pay the mortgage on her family’s Atlantic County house and trying to figure out how to manage her mother’s finances.By the middle of the school year, Garcia had missed 21 days of school, dropped two of her AP classes and watched her stellar weighted 4.8 GPA drop to a disappointing 3.5.Even her college fund was gone, used to pay for her mother’s legal defense. The future Garcia so clearly envisioned for herself a year ago was derailed as soon as ICE detained her mother.“I was forced into this adulthood that was not meant for a 17-year-old girl,” she said.Allison Garcia and her mother, Patricia Balbuena Soto, at a high school athletics banquet in 2025. Courtesy of Allison GarciaGarcia is one of thousands of New Jersey children from immigrant families whose school year was upended because of a surge in ICE detentions and deportations under President Donald Trump.Though ICE officials say their crackdown is focused on “criminal aliens,” data from the Deportation Data Project shows the majority of immigrants detained in New Jersey since January 2025 had no criminal record.Students who spoke with NJ.com said they had missed weeks of classes and were falling behind in school while living in constant fear that their parents will be deported — or that ICE will come for them next.Like Garcia, many of the students say they are changing their college plans and taking on adult responsibilities well beyond what most teenagers usually face.Teachers and school officials say ICE fears have transformed the school year, with alarming increases in absences. In some cases, students simply left class one day and never returned — a grim new reality in a state with the nation’s second-highest percentage of immigrants.By some estimates, New Jersey was home to about 450,000 to 500,000 undocumented immigrants before the Trump administration began stepping up immigration enforcement.That undocumented population includes about 45,000 to 55,000 students enrolled in schools, according to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. It is unclear how many additional K-12 students in New Jersey are U.S. citizens living with undocumented parents.ICE did not respond to NJ.com’s request for comment about how immigration enforcement is affecting students and schools.The agency has also not said how many people in New Jersey have been caught up in ICE crackdowns. But an NJ.com analysis — using data gathered by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California Berkeley School of Law in collaboration with UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy — found more than 8,300 people in New Jersey were picked up by ICE last year. In the first three months of 2026, ICE made another 2,636 arrests, according to the data.It is unclear how many of those nearly 11,000 arrests affected families with children.ICE fears were put starkly on display in February when a viral video showed students waiting at a school bus stop running away when ICE agents appeared at their apartment complex in Lindenwold in Camden County.The elementary school students shouted “ICE! ICE!” as immigration enforcement vehicles approached their bus stop while conducting a nearby operation. The video of the scene later sparked protests from residents who said children in the U.S. shouldn’t have to live in fear.Camden County Commissioner Jonathan Young said at the time that the video “underscores the type of terror our residents are living under every day.”Many New Jersey parents without legal immigration status have spent the school year weighing whether to send their children to class, fearing that leaving home could expose them or other family members to ICE, said Betsy Ginsburg, executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, a statewide group that represents school districts.“A big part of the reason why so many immigrants come here is to give their children a better life via the public school system,” Ginsburg said.“It’s a terrible dilemma for families,” she added. “And it’s a terrible dilemma for schools.”Missing school, missing studentsThe effects of immigration enforcement on students is hard to escape in some schools across New Jersey.One Newark teacher said he now regularly sees “hug circles” in his high school, where students who don’t know what else to do embrace classmates whose families are facing ICE detention or deportation.“I think the kids feel helpless. I feel helpless as an adult,” said the teacher, who asked not to be named because his school did not give him permission to speak publicly.Schools across the country are feeling the direct and indirect effects of ICE enforcement, according to a report titled “The Fear is Everywhere” by two UCLA researchers.“One fifth‑grader I work with is terrified he’ll come home and his parents won’t be there.”Alice Carcilli, an Atlantic City teacherOf 600 high school principals surveyed across the U.S., more than 60% reported students from immigrant families missed school as a direct response “to policies or political rhetoric related to immigrants” during the 2024-25 school year.Principals also reported that students from immigrant families had disappeared from school without a word to school officials.In New Jersey, the numbers tell a similar story. Enrollment in the state’s largest school district has dropped significantly.The number of students in Newark Public Schools had been steadily increasing since 2019, reaching 43,980 in the 2024-2025 school year, according to state Department of Education data. But this school year, enrollment has dipped by more than 800 students in Newark, according to a district spokesperson.It’s impossible to know how many students left the district, which serves 60% Latino students, because of ICE enforcement. But many educators say it is a factor in enrollment dips in Newark and other districts.Both New Jersey and federal law says public schools must enroll all children, including those living in the country illegally. But fear can be powerful enough to keep families out of schools even though the law guarantees their right to enroll and attend, said Udi Ofer, a Princeton University professor and former executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey. “There’s so much fear and anxiety right now that people go underground,” Ofer said. “They’re not exactly looking at what the letter of the law says — and you can’t blame them.”Many school districts have faced complex questions about when and if ICE agents can enter schools.Under the “Safe Communities Act” signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy on his final day in office in January, New Jersey restricts ICE agents from entering “sensitive locations,” including schools, hospitals and houses of worship.The state Department of Education is working with the state Attorney General’s Office to help districts implement the new law, said department spokesperson Michael Yaple. The state also has mental health and other resources to assist schools trying to help students “experiencing deportation‑related trauma and anxiety," he said.“The New Jersey Department of Education recognizes that fear and stress associated with immigration-related activity in communities can negatively affect students’ mental health, school attendance, and academic performance and that our schools are on the frontline of providing students the supports they need,” Yaple said.In some districts, teachers are not waiting for directives from the state to do what they can to support immigrant families, said Cristian Moreno-Rodriguez, the executive director of El-Pueblo Unido of Atlantic City, a nonprofit immigrant rights group. “Schools are limited in what they can do,” he said. “Teachers are unofficially filling in the gaps.” Moreno-Rodriguez meets teachers in parking lots to drop off “know your rights” information. The wallet-sized cards offer people a script they can use if ICE comes to their door or stops them on the street. At one meeting, he said he gave a teacher a stack of red cards that she quickly shoved into her bag. Later, the teacher put the cards into students’ backpacks.Some teachers have also been wearing the red cards on their ID lanyards at school to let students concerned about ICE know they are available if they need to talk.“One fifth‑grader I work with is terrified he’ll come home and his parents won’t be there,” said Alice Carcilli, an Atlantic City teacher and social-emotional learning facilitator who helps students navigate immigration‑related stress.In Trenton, Pastor Erich Kussman of St. Bartholomew Lutheran Church said his members have been walking immigrant children to school because their parents are afraid ICE could detain them if they leave their homes.“That’s not something a school should rely on,” Kussman said. “But it shows what happens when families don’t feel the school system can protect them.”Teacher Alice Carcilli marched at the No Kings protest march in Atlantic City in March. Immigrant Legal Resource Center's Red Cards were being distributed at the Make the Road New Jersey Student Success Center in Elizabeth. Jim Lowney | For NJ.com, Reena Rose Sibayan | For NJ.comSenior year upendedNine months after her mother was deported, Garcia has settled into a new routine of paying the mortgage, sewer and insurance bills at her Atlantic County home. But she says nights without her mother are the most difficult. She longs to see her mom in the kitchen cooking her tacos de chorizo con papa. “It’s not even just the food, it’s like the feeling of being taken care of,” Garcia said. Her mother, Patricia Balbuena Soto, came to the U.S. in her 20s from Mexico, where she didn’t finish middle school and was working in a shoe store by age 12. She always pushed her U.S.-born daughter to “be more,” Garcia said. She remembers her mother saying, “‘I didn’t come here for you not to go to college.’” Balbuena Soto did not respond to NJ.com requests for comment from her new home in Mexico. After she was deported last summer, she was dropped off in Villahermosa, a city in southeastern Mexico that has become a popular site for U.S. immigration officials to leave deported immigrants.The city was hundreds of miles from Balbuena Soto’s family home in Cuautla, about an hour outside of Mexico City. Balbuena Soto appeared to get on ICE’s radar after she entered the Atlantic County Jail last summer.Garcia said she wasn’t around when her parents got into a domestic dispute that eventually led to her mother’s arrest in July. Her mother was charged with home invasion and possession of weapons, which police records described as a glass bottle and a mop.Garcia said her mother disputed the charges and said she took a video of the incident she planned to show police, but she was deported before the case ever went to trial.ICE agents can see who is being detained through a federal information‑sharing program that gives immigration authorities access to data about who is being held in local jails.An ICE spokesperson said the agency apprehended Balbuena Soto because the system indicated she had violated immigration law. She “had previously been removed from the United States four separate times and reentered illegally, a federal felony,” the spokesperson said.Garcia and friends of the family dispute ICE’s account and say they have no knowledge of Balbuena Soto ever leaving the U.S.On July 25, the day Balbuena Soto was brought in, ICE agents detained 34 people across New Jersey, according to an NJ.com analysis of available data. About two‑thirds of those arrested were picked up outside of jails, in their homes, workplaces or on the street.ICE records from the day of her arrest show Balbuena Soto had never been convicted of a crime. This is true for more than 75% of the people ICE detained in New Jersey in 2025, according to an NJ.com analysis.An immigration judge ordered Balbuena Soto’s removal from the country on August 5.ICE officials declined to provide NJ.com with records documenting Balbuena Soto’s alleged removals and re‑entries or her immigration court proceedings. A subsequent request for information from the Department of Justice was also denied. Requests to speak with Balbuena Soto’s attorney went unanswered.Allison Garcia sits with her dog Moose outside her home in Atlantic County. Jim Lowney | For NJ.comGarcia said she confided with a staff member at her high school that her mother had been deported. Her counselor reached out to her teachers to explain Garcia’s situation, warning that the upheaval at home might make it harder for her to sustain her typical level of academic focus.“She said to give me a little bit of grace and understand what I was going through. And for the most part, all of my teachers have been super amazing,” Garcia said.Though her dream of going to the University of California at Los Angeles now seemed out of reach, Garcia pushed ahead with college applications. Touring colleges without her mother was particularly painful. “Those are moments where you expect your mom to be there,” she said. “At the same time, everything I do now is kind of for her, too.”Garcia eventually received several acceptance letters, including one she’d hoped for from Rutgers University’s Honors College.But with each college acceptance, the 17-year-old had to make follow-up calls to explain her financial situation. Her college fund of $10,000 went to pay her mother’s lawyer and she no longer had her mother’s salary to help support her. She still plans to study psycholog