Tennessee schools may soon report students’ immigration status as measure advances in statehouse

A Tennessee proposal that would require schools to verify students’ immigration status is headed to the state House floor. The bill passed its final committee vote on Tuesday amid protests that tracking this information is a time-consuming and costly burden for school staff.

Representative William Lamberth, R-Portland, sponsored the bill and has framed it as a data tool in which schools would report to the state government how many of their students can’t produce documents proving their legal status. Members of the crowd sang protest songs after the vote and chanted in the hallways of the Cordell Hull Building, “Vote them out!”

Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, spoke out against lawmakers advancing the measure.

“Across history, we’ve seen the dangers of governments making and keeping lists of the people that they think don’t belong. But rather than learn from our past, these power-hungry politicians, desperate for Trump’s approval, are doubling down on their efforts to identify and track immigrant students in the hopes of one day being able to exclude them from our schools,” she said in a statement.

This is an amended version of HB793, which in its original form would have allowed public schools to refuse undocumented students or charge their families tuition. Lamberth introduced the amendment, which now only requires schools to report the number of undocumented students. That prevents the state from potentially losing more than a billion dollars in federal education funding as barring students from school due to their immigration status runs afoul of long-standing legal precedent and violates federal civil rights laws.

While Lamberth stressed that the amended version of the bill does not jeopardize federal funding, critics are still concerned about how much this reporting bill would cost Tennessee taxpayers. Research shows that evaluating the immigration status of all students in the state would cost about $55 million in just the first year.

Laurie Brown, CEO of Intrepid College Prep in Antioch, testified at a House Finance, Ways and Means Committee hearing on Tuesday that teachers and staff would need additional training to properly assess students’ legal status.

“We’re thinking about the time it would take to train them.” she said. “Who would be responsible for training them? Who would fund the people who are doing the training of our staff members? Who would be following up on making sure that these systems are effective and being played out in a thoughtful way?”

Brown further noted that enrolling students should be a welcoming process but this measure would prevent school staff from establishing trust with families.

Representative Charlie Baum, R-Murfreesboro, said he had concerns about the original measure but is more comfortable with the amendment. Still, he questioned if these reporting requirements might discourage kids from going to school, which he said could hurt their chances of one day being gainfully employed.

Lamberth said schools already ask students for documents, like birth certificates and proof of residency and, under his proposal, the state would now have a record of how many students can’t produce that information.

If implemented, the bill would take effect during the 2026-2027 school year.