In 2025, Minnesota schools scrambled to adjust to a new presidential administration that declared itself firmly against diversity, equity, inclusion — and immigration.
In January, as President Donald Trump took office, his administration announced that schools would no longer be exempt from ICE activity. Minnesota schools and community groups responded by preparing school staff on what to do if ICE showed up on campus.
Meanwhile, Minnesota universities faced threats from federal investigations, the arrest of international students and the clawing back of research funding, as Trump attempted to reshape the higher education landscape.
Here are our top five education stories from a year of presidential upheaval.
Starting in fall 2024, I made weekly visits to a Minneapolis classroom full of new immigrant students learning about how to navigate middle school in the United States. The class was full of unique personalities — including Yosi, a studious eighth-grader who hopes to become an immigration lawyer, and Santiago, a mischievous student who struggled to focus on school after a harrowing journey through the Darien Gap.
At the beginning of the year, the students were simply figuring out how to adjust to a new school system in a new country. But after Trump’s election, the concerns they raised became more centered on immigration. Their teacher vowed to do her best to protect them. My story follows Yosi and Santiago as they navigate their first year in an American middle school during a turbulent political moment.
Training new teachers — including special education teachers and teachers of color — has been a longstanding bipartisan priority in Minnesota. But some of the programs funding new teacher training at the University of Minnesota and University of St. Thomas were federally funded. They were axed early in the Trump administration’s purge of anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The funding was initially reinstated by a judge before the Supreme Court allowed the cuts to proceed.
One of the St. Thomas programs that lost funding provided college students with internships at a St. Paul elementary school, so they could explore a career in education. That same program also provided scholarship funding so they could finish their education degree. One student told Sahan Journal that through that program, he’d discovered a passion for special education. But with his scholarship funding gone, he joined the Minnesota National Guard to pay for his degree.
In March, immigration authorities arrested three Minnesota university students or recent graduates, ostensibly for past minor criminal offenses. All three were from predominantly Muslim countries; two had made past social media statements supportive of Palestine. Dozens more international students saw their legal status revoked. Although immigration judges threw out the cases of the arrested students, ICE invoked rare laws to keep them detained. Finally, federal judges ordered the students released from jail — after they had been detained for more than a month. The Trump administration ultimately backtracked on the tactic of revoking student visas.
After reporting on the cuts to teacher training grants, I wanted to know more about how federal funding cuts were affecting the University of Minnesota. My colleague Shubhanjana Das and I requested data on all the federal grants to the university that had been terminated or suspended — and then reached out to researchers representing nearly 100 grants. The reasons for these cuts varied, but many of them were part of the Trump administration’s larger push against diversity, equity, and inclusion. One cut grant had been helping develop a better malaria vaccine. Another was giving students hands-on experience creating space robots. Capturing these stories helped provide a scope of what has been lost.
With so much turmoil surrounding both immigration and American universities, we wondered how international student enrollment at the University of Minnesota might change. At first blush, the impact was minimal — less than a 1% change in international student enrollment this year compared to last year. But with the help of Sahan’s data reporter, Cynthia Tu, we peeked under the hood to find that new international student enrollment from India — the #2 home country of U international students — declined significantly this year. Shubhanjana and I interviewed students and U officials and found that visa delays in India were the primary factor driving the drop.