Caminantes: Youth, Schooling, and Immigration Precarity in New York City

Laura Peláez

Immigration courts decide futures every day, without cameras, without press, and without accountability. Children and families can and often do disappear into the system with no public oversight. In New York City, where more than 200,000 newcomers have arrived since 2022, thousands of children and youth juggle schooling while navigating ongoing immigration proceedings. If these futures are often decided out of public view, this study seeks to illuminate how legal precarity shapes students' daily lives and educational aspirations. This ethnographic project asks: How do immigration and education policies intersect to shape the trajectories of newcomer youth navigating immigration proceedings in New York City public schools? How do students in legally precarious circumstances make sense of their schooling experiences and aspirations for the future? Focusing on young people ages 16–21, the study draws on accompaniment as a research method, participant-observation, and in-depth interviews. It explores the mechanisms and scripts through which legal uncertainty affects students' aspirations, decisions about school completion, and hopes for college attainment. By foregrounding the voices of youth navigating these systems, this study highlights the ways schools are entangled with the broader web of immigration enforcement, sometimes as spaces of support, but also as sites where fear, uncertainty, and instability are reproduced. In doing so, it hopes to contribute to education research by deepening understanding of how immigration enforcement reshapes the possibilities and limits of educational futures, and by offering insights that can inform more responsive educational practices and policies for immigrant-origin students.

About Laura Peláez

Laura Peláez is a PhD candidate in Sociology of Education at NYU Steinhardt, where she also teaches as an adjunct professor of Education Studies and facilitates academic skills workshops at NYU's Prison Education Program at Wallkill Correctional Facility. Her research examines how immigration and education policies intersect to shape the trajectories of asylum-seeker youth in New York City public schools. Rooted in her experiences as Central American, as a youth worker and community organizer, Laura approaches her research with a commitment to liberation, dignity-centered inquiry, theoretical rigor, and acompañamiento as both methodology and ethic. She specializes in critical migration studies and ethnographic methods, and her dissertation draws on accompaniment, participant-observation, and in-depth interviews with young people ages 16 to 21 to examine how immigration precarity shapes students' aspirations, decisions about school completion, and pathways to college. Beyond her dissertation, Laura has contributed to summative evaluations and cross-district research projects on continuous school improvement, funded by the Wallace Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her community work spans collaborations with asylum-seeker youth, shelter-based families, educators, and immigrant-serving organizations on college access, housing justice, mutual aid networks, and socioeconomic inclusion across New York City. Laura holds a B.A. in Social Research and Public Policy from NYU Abu Dhabi, and her doctoral work is supported by the Urban Democracy Lab and the ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. In her free time, Laura is a salsa dancer, aspiring ceramicist, and avid explorer of immigrant-owned restaurants across NYC.