Immigrants Learn English for Free at California Colleges. Under Trump, Some are Skipping Class
Delilah Brumer, CalMatters | May 21, 2025
Your donation will help us produce journalism like this. Please give today.
They speak Farsi, Cantonese, Spanish and at least two dozen other languages. Some earned master’s degrees in their home countries, while others never finished middle school. At California’s community colleges, more than 290,000 students take free, non-credit English as a Second Language classes.
As immigrants, many of these students enroll in the classes to integrate into American life, advance in their jobs, support their children or build community. The classes have grown in popularity in recent years — an enrollment bright spot for the state’s community college system, which has struggled to fully rebound to pre-pandemic student counts.
But as news of international student visa revocations and reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids during President Donald Trump’s second term spread across the state, many community colleges have seen some of these students switch to online learning, or stop showing up to class altogether.
So far there’s no statewide data on 2025 enrollment in non-credit ESL courses at California’s community colleges. But several anecdotes from professors and enrollment numbers from individual community colleges paint a similar picture: A heightened fear of ICE is driving students away. In the San Fernando Valley, one professor has lost about 15% of her enrollment this semester. In San Marcos, several classrooms abruptly transitioned from mostly in-person instruction to walls of Zoom squares.
As the semester goes on, ESL professors are offering “Know Your Rights” cards to students and informing their classes of the community college system’s pledge to not participate in federal immigration enforcement efforts. They’re also continuing to connect their students with campus resources such as food pantries and tutoring centers.
ESL classes have expanded post-pandemic
Los Angeles Pierce College began offering non-credit ESL in 2021, and last year the college hired a full-time professor to boost the program. Enrollment in the classes skyrocketed from about 50 in 2021 to more than 350 in 2024. Dennis Solares, the adult education coordinator at Los Angeles Pierce College, said that students seeking to improve their job opportunities drove the recent ESL enrollment growth.
“We offer an opportunity that can help them communicate more, get acclimated with the community and get better jobs,” Solares said.
The classes attract a diverse swath of students. Azucena Hernandez, 42, enrolled in ESL at Palomar College in San Marcos so that she could better support her three kids with day-to-day tasks. She started as a monolingual Spanish speaker, but after several semesters she can comfortably have conversations in English.
Hernandez now volunteers in the beginner levels of ESL as a peer instructor. She said her most important takeaway from these courses is “the family made at school.”
“Every day we are learning something new, and there is companionship,” Hernandez said. “We are united to learn.”
Hernandez’s professor, Sheri Cully, has taught ESL for more than 40 years. She prioritizes civic engagement and real-world learning in her classes. One long-term project that her students work on is maintaining a community garden and advocating for its affordability and accessibility at local government meetings. Cully said she admires her students’ work ethic and resilience.
There were 30,000 more students enrolled in non-credit ESL courses across California’s community colleges during the 2023-24 academic year compared to the 2018-19 academic year, according to state data. The growth has been driven by several factors, including heightened demand for workforce training as the state’s economy expands and the college system’s push to expand ESL after the pandemic, according to a written statement to CalMatters from the California community college system’s chancellor’s office.
ESL courses bring state funding to community colleges based partially on enrollment, so several colleges have been working to continue this expansion after enrollment dropped during the pandemic. But student fears about immigration enforcement may thwart those efforts.
Fears of ICE entering schools
An estimated 100,000 college students live in California without permanent legal status, and 3.3 million Californians live in mixed-status households, according to data from Equity Research Institute, a USC research group. Some of these students question whether coming to class is worth the risk of entering a public campus where ICE has access, and they have opted to take courses virtually. But not all students have access to a computer or Wi-Fi at home, and some older students may not be comfortable with the technology required for college courses.
Jessica Buchsbaum, the ESL department chair at City College of San Francisco, oversees a program serving about 6,000 students, ranging from teenagers to octogenarians. She said the non-credit ESL enrollment was “growing intensely in the fall semester, but it has now softened.”
“We’ve definitely heard that students may be afraid to come to school,” Buchsbaum said. “In an environment when there’s so much hate directed at immigrants, we are here to serve this population. These are people who bring incredible energy and hope to our communities.”
In January, the Trump administration threw out policies implemented in 2011 that limited the ability of ICE agents to arrest people at churches, schools and other areas designated as “sensitive locations.” A statement from the Department of Homeland Security said the change was necessary so “criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.”
California’s community colleges are public campuses, meaning they are limited by federal laws from attempting to prevent ICE agents from coming onto or near spaces that are generally considered open.
Over the years, the California community college system has supported immigrant students, such as offering Dream Resource Centers and connecting students with nonprofit legal services. The system has pointed college administrators to a 2017 state law that prohibits campus police departments from “generally providing personal information… about an individual for immigration enforcement purposes, including, but not limited to, the individual’s home address or work address, unless that information is available to the public.”
The chancellor’s office refused an interview request from CalMatters for this story. In a written statement, the office said, “The mission of the California Community Colleges is to educate and provide social and economic mobility to all Californians seeking to improve their workforce and workplace skills as well as improve their English language literacy.”
ESL professors provide support and students keep learning
Rachel Cerdenio is an ESL professor at Los Angeles Pierce College and the daughter of immigrants from the Philippines. She said the years she spent watching her parents struggle to navigate life in the United States without strong English skills spurred her to teach ESL.
For Cerdenio’s intermediate courses, she created a curriculum focused on connection to the college and student success. She recently assigned students to visit a campus resource like the student health center or the library, ask questions about it and share the information with their classmates.
“I wish my parents had the experiences that I am giving my students now,” Cerdenio said. “I want them to succeed, and I want them to be part of the campus and know about the resources that are here.”
Solares has given presentations in adult education courses, including Cerdenio’s classes, about immigrant students’ rights and the resources available to students, regardless of their immigration status.
“We had a huge influx of students, but with the change in politics students are naturally scared, and so there’s students who choose not to come to classes anymore,” Solares said. “The vibe is more tense. It’s more scary. But we support the students, and we equip the professors to support their students.”
Delilah Brumer is a fellow with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.