Funding Paused for Migrant Education as Trump Plans Cuts

Jacki Bravo wasn’t sure going to college was in the cards for her.

As the child of farmworkers from Mexico, she didn’t know much about higher education in the U.S. She also suffers from a chronic illness, which made school difficult, and it wasn’t clear she could find a program that could accommodate her medical needs.

“I didn’t really see college as an option. I was like, ‘OK, I’ll get a job right after [high school],’” she said. “I think that’s a common mindset that a lot of people have, especially in migrant families. I just wasn’t that informed at all.”

It wasn’t until a recruiter from the College Assistance for Migrants Program at Portland Community College in Oregon visited her high school that Bravo realized just how accessible higher education could be. The program offered a scholarship and textbook assistance, tutoring and peer mentorship, and a weeklong orientation retreat, during which she met some of her now-closest friends.

CAMP is a 53-year-old federal program that provides funding to about 100 colleges and nonprofits nationwide to help them recruit and support the children of migrant farmworkers and fishermen through their first year of college. The program is considered wildly successful, with about three-quarters of CAMP participants completing their first year of college—a retention rate similar to students nationwide. At many institutions, CAMP participants have retention and graduation rates higher than their colleges’ student bodies over all.

“You get … a really great support system,” said Bravo, who participated in the program last year. She called the program’s staff “the nicest people I’ve met.”

But now CAMP’s future is unclear; the federal government is withholding fiscal year 2025 appropriations for it and other migrant education initiatives, and President Donald Trump appears intent on eliminating those programs entirely next year.

Directors of CAMP and High School Equivalency Program (HEP) sites at colleges and nonprofits were slated to receive their funds for fiscal 2025 at the beginning of July, but the money never arrived, Greg Contreras, the president of the National HEP/CAMP Association, told Inside Higher Ed. (HEP helps migrants and their family members earn G.E.D.s.) The Department of Education informed the directors in June that the Office of Management and Budget was reviewing the programs, but they have received no information since about if and when the funds might be released. OMB is also withholding funds, totaling nearly $7 billion, for other educational programs under review, including hundreds of thousands of dollars for adult education. Neither ED nor OMB responded to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.

Now, institutions are being forced to close their programs and lay off staff, even though cohorts of new CAMP participants have already been admitted for the coming fall semester; over 8,000 students are slated to participate in HEP and CAMP programs this year, according to the association.

Contreras, who is the director of the CAMP program at PCC, received a layoff notice from his college on Tuesday, with his final day slated for Aug. 20—just weeks before his program is supposed to conduct a weeklong orientation for PCC’s 45 incoming CAMP students.

“Maybe I’m going to need to bump up this orientation to August, and because I don’t have a budget, I’m maybe going to get one or two days instead of that full week we had where we could take the students on a retreat, where we could have meals for them,” he said. “I would be forced in a way to really limit and condense something that was very, very effective … I kind of call it a warm-up to the year.”

Institutions are searching for other people or offices on campus that can provide CAMP students with the tutoring and advising the program typically offers. But at most institutions, including PCC, it is unlikely CAMP students will be given scholarships and stipends they were promised if funding does not come through. Some institutions’ annual CAMP budgets are as high as $475,000, which Contreras said is too much money for colleges to make up on such short notice, especially as they grapple with other cuts resulting from the Trump administration’s actions and state-level budgetary shortfalls.

“It’s going to be sparse, and it’s not going to have that same wraparound support and that same sense of community,” he said. “[But] we don’t want to tell the students, ‘We don’t have the programs, and good luck to you, still come to school.’ They deserve way more than that.”

‘A Place to Land’

CAMP and other migrant education services were created in the hopes of supporting seasonal farmworkers and their immediate families, who may lack access to information about how to apply to college and are often left behind in the college admissions process, according to Seline Szkupinski Quiroga, a former CAMP director at Arizona State University.

“They may not have the support at the high school in terms of being in the right classes, being included when recruiters from colleges visit—that was a big thing I found, [that] they weren’t invited to those presentations because it was assumed they weren’t going to go,” she said. “And once they arrive at the colleges and universities, [CAMP gives] them the support of learning about the resources, a place to land, just being in a community of students who understand.”

Along with CAMP and HEP, ED also funds the Migrant Education Program, which was designed to provide support for K–12 migrant students as they move between schools according to where their parents are working. (MEP’s funding has also been frozen, according to news reports.)

Even if funding is restored, however, all three programs could be in danger. Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal would eliminate all funding for the Office of Migrant Education as part of his administration’s dismantling of ED.

In the president’s proposed budget, he wrote that the programs “work to the detriment of children’s academic success by encouraging movement from, rather than stability and consistency in, a single location.”

But Contreras argued that Trump’s reasoning betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of farmworkers’ professions—and their importance to American life.

“What the administration doesn’t understand is, with farmworkers, that is their way of living. They have no other options than to relocate, go here, go there, follow the work. And if farmworkers didn’t do that, we wouldn’t eat,” he said. “We would starve. This country would struggle … if we didn’t have the sacrifices of farmworkers—and the true essence of that word, ‘migrating.’ Going to this community to pick the apples, then going to this community to pick the pears, then going to this community to pick the blueberries.”

He noted that the program’s strong outcomes show that they do not work to students’ detriment.

Trump’s budget also asserts that the Office of Migrant Education takes resources from American students by encouraging “ineligible non-citizens” to attend U.S. colleges and universities. CAMP participants must be U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.

Motivating Students

Michael Heim, the leader of HEP and CAMP at Washington State University, said that a core goal of CAMP is to show migrant students that college can be accessible to them.

“Those students are thinking, sometimes, coming out of high school that maybe college is not really for them. They might have had some loss of learning in K–12 and it makes it feel like the dream of a university degree … is out of reach,” he said. “Its first job as a service is to find students that would be motivated to participate in the program.”

If the Office of Migrant Education shutters, he worries that a significant number of students will self-select out of higher education purely because they don’t think they’re cut out for college.

He also noted that the universities themselves will suffer, losing the enrollment of dozens of students who likely wouldn’t have attended without a CAMP recruiter seeking them out.

Though Bravo’s semester in CAMP is over, the cuts are still going to affect her; the program had hired her to serve as a mentor to next year’s cohort.

“We were so stoked about being [mentors],” she said. “We saw this as another opportunity to not only guide students, but to connect with them on such a [deep] level and really hone our leadership skills.”

The cuts “break [her] heart,” said Bravo, who hopes to study economics and become a financial adviser. “The next CAMP cohort is not going to be able to experience the same opportunities I had and that many others had.”

Contreras and other leaders from the National HEP/CAMP Association said they plan to travel to Washington, D.C., next week to try to convince the government to release their appropriations and vote against cutting migrant education from the 2026 budget.