Trump's Border Plan Would Complicate Life for Kids Who Cross to Attend School

Born in the United States, Mayra Kahori Vidaña Sanchez spent most of her childhood in Juárez, Mexico. When she was around 12, Vidaña Sanchez moved a few miles north of the border to El Paso, Texas, for school. Although technically a U.S. citizen, she spoke little English and carried a pocket dictionary to class. She spent hours listening to pop music and watching American television, trying to absorb not only a language but a culture that felt undeniably unfamiliar.

Despite her efforts, a few kids at school made fun of Vidaña Sanchez and her brother for their accents and supposed foreignness. Yet once, during elementary school back in Mexico, she’d had to give back a scholarship after the mother of a classmate complained that it shouldn’t have gone to a kid born in the United States. Not quite Mexican, not quite American. 

These days, she brushes off such slights. But the 19-year-old is still navigating a life bisected by a border crossing. A sophomore studying industrial engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso, Vidaña Sanchez has technically lived and studied in the U.S. for years. Yet many days, she can still be found guiding her car out of her family’s home in Juárez toward the border—and school—before dawn, a sometimes-international commuter if not technically an international student.

Vidaña Sanchez’s story is not unusual. All along the U.S.-Mexico border, hundreds of children from kindergarten on up make their way through checkpoints and guard stations each day to study. This has been happening for decades. Many, like Vidaña Sanchez, are Americans born to Mexican parents who desperately want to create a better life for their offspring and see education as the path forward. But in recent months, as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has spewed divisive rhetoric—vowing to build a wall along the border, accusing Mexicans of being rapists—and emboldened his anti-immigrant supporters, crossing the border has become a more fraught process for some of these students. (Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has expressed support for comprehensive immigration reform, including creating a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants, which is in line with President Obama’s views on the topic.)

Vidaña Sanchez said during a phone conversation that she has encountered a few people in El Paso recently who think a border wall is a good idea and that immigrants are stealing jobs. I hear what you’re saying and I respect you, she replies, but I just don’t agree. Once, she was so scared an encounter was about to turn violent that she sprinted away. Vidaña Sanchez recounted the incident with laughter, joking that her friends teased her for putting her athletic prowess to good use.

But she quickly turned serious. “I have no idea,” she replied to a question about whether things might improve after the election. “I hope it gets better after the election, because if it doesn’t…” She trailed off a little. She’d like to help her father, an engineer educated in Mexico, and mother, a cashier, come to the United States, and to see her younger cousin, born in America but spending the early years with family in Mexico, have an easier time fitting in north of the border. But she’s worried. “I’m trying to encourage as much voting as possible,” she said.

The tension at the border isn’t all new. Lines to cross are long and wait times can run several hours, delaying students and workers alike. As if relaying a minor annoyance like being cut off in traffic, Vidaña Sanchez said that sometimes “random people” on both sides of the border create “a little wall” to prevent students and others who are occasionally able to use a shorter line for regular commuters from moving forward. Their motivation isn’t necessarily racial. Often, it’s self-interest. “They just don’t think it’s fair for you to go first,” she said. “I try not to let it stop me or bother me.”

While the politics aren’t nearly as contentious on the northern border with Canada, even students there wonder what the impact of a Trump election would be. Ken Lambert, an American who recently spent time studying at Brock University just across the border from Niagara Falls, New York, says he’s experienced unpleasant interactions with border guards, although he acknowledges that they’re minor—comments about America being inferior to Canada, for instance. “These small jabs at each other can make living on the border uncomfortable at times,” he said. “I think that sense of bond is gone.” Lambert now lives in Philadelphia, but says friends who still live near the border say the election has intensified some of the negative rhetoric.

At border crossings that aren’t jammed with cars and pedestrians, students cross with relative ease. Several years ago, then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan visited Columbus Elementary School in New Mexico, just a few miles from the border. Nearly three-quarters of the children at the school commuted from Mexico at the time. (Many are American because the nearest hospital to their homes is actually in the United States and some Mexican women have been allowed to give birth there before returning to Mexico.) According to the Washington Post, children have been crossing the border for school there for more than six decades. These days, they are required to be U.S. citizens, but back in the 1950s, that wasn’t a requirement. And while there have been lawsuits over the years and not all residents think the children should be allowed to attend school in New Mexico, there has traditionally been broad support for allowing these children to obtain an education north of the border.

Despite some of the campaign rhetoric, not much seems to have changed this election cycle, according to Border Partners, a group working in the area. It’s hard to say, said a spokesman for the group, whether a Trump presidency would make it more difficult for children to cross because the situation is so unique. 

Yet it isn’t entirely unheard of. Although it seems to have less red tape, New Mexico isn’t the only border state where schools accept U.S.-born children from across the border. As the Huffington Post noted, U.S.-born students living in Mexico who want to go to school in places like California and Texas are often required to either prove they live in the district or pay tuition, which many can’t afford. A spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency told the site that it was up to each district to enforce those requirements. However, in Arizona, where support for curbing illegal immigration has been particularly widespread in recent years, the state has acted as the enforcer and “cracked down on border-crossing students.” For a variety of reasons, some families opt to put their children in Mexican schools instead. The country estimates that it has several hundred thousand U.S.-born students enrolled in its schools.

That crackdown hasn’t happened in New Mexico so far, although it’s unclear what a Trump win would mean for these families. The principal of the Columbus Elementary School told KRWG, a local television station, that he’d even seen an influx of kids from states like South Dakota after those children experienced the deportation of a parent. The families realized, he said, that they could reunite in Puerto Palomas, Mexico, just over the border, and that their children, born in the United States, would still be able to attend American schools like Columbus. That’s happened in part because officials there don’t enforce the same restrictions as their counterparts in places like Arizona.