The state’s top education official is opposed to a new Trump administration directive allowing immigration officials to pursue those not here legally in schools.

“People would stop sending their kids to school,” Tom Horne told Capitol Media Services, saying they or their parents might be afraid. Anyway, he said, even if a child was brought to this country illegally, “it’s not their fault.”

What it also would do, Horne said, is undermine a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which concluded the state cannot refuse to educate children regardless of the legal status of the parents or the students themselves.

On Tuesday, Benjamine Huffman, named by Trump as acting director at the Department of Homeland Security, voided a 2021 policy enacted by the agency’s prior director that made enforcement of immigration laws off limits in certain “sensitive locations.” These included health care facilities, religious institutions, playgrounds and schools.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” said an agency spokesman in prepared comments. “The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

And this comes on the heels of Trump’s separate executive order directing federal agencies to no longer recognize birthright citizenship, something that, on a prospective basis, would deny legal status to the children of those not here legally and making them subject to arrest and deportation themselves.

Horne said he’s not convinced that, despite the new directive, that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement will now start showing up at schools.

“If they’re going to arrest anybody, it’s the parents, not the kids,” he said.

But Horne, a Republican like Trump, said it’s not good policy. Still, he said that there may be little that schools can do if ICE agents show up at their doors.

“I don’t know how they would stop them if they wanted to go in,” he said.

“There’s a supremacy clause in the Constitution,” he continued. “You don’t want to resist the federal government.”

It’s not just Horne who believes that having immigration agents showing up at schools is a bad idea.

“The attorney general disagrees that ICE should be operating on school campuses, let alone hospitals or churches,” said Richie Taylor, press aide to Democrat Kris Mayes. “There are myriad other ways that federal immigration law can be enforced without disrupting the work of medical professionals or scaring children who are just trying to receive an education.”

And Taylor, speaking for Mayes, also had no clear advice for what actions school officials can or should take to deal with immigration raids.

“First, consult with their legal counsel before moving forward with anything,” he said. Taylor also said schools should also be “communicating with parents about these possibilities.”

Mayes previously has said she will take on the Trump administration when she believes it is acting in ways that are unconstitutional or illegal. That most recently occurred Tuesday when she joined with other states to oppose the president’s directive to federal agencies to no longer recognize the citizenship of children who are born in the United States to parents who are not here legally.

But Richie said his boss may not pursue a challenge to the new policy allowing ICE raids in places that the Biden administration had considered off limits.

“I think it’s going to depend on how it is enforced,” he said.

Horne said what is crucial in all of this is that 1982 case of Plyler v. Doe about the rights of all children, regardless of legal status, to get a public education.

That stemmed from a 1975 Texas law withholding state funds for the education of those who were not “legally admitted” into the United States. It also authorized local school districts to deny enrollment in their schools to those students.

In that case, the justices said the law runs afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. It says no state shall “deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

“Whatever his status under the immigration laws, an alien is surely a ‘person’ in any ordinary sense of that term,” wrote Justice William Brennan for the majority. “Aliens, even aliens whose presence in this country is unlawful, have long been recognized as ‘persons’ guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment.”

That ruling, however, didn’t stop some Arizona lawmakers from seeking to provoke a new challenge of their own.

In 2009, then-Sen. Russell Pearce proposed requiring public schools to ask parents to provide documents showing their children are in this country legally.

The Mesa Republican insisted he wasn’t trying to keep those children out of school, at least not initially. Instead, he said, the state was merely trying to get information so it could calculate the cost on Arizona taxpayers.

But Pearce admitted that one goal was to challenge the 1982 Supreme Court ruling.

“To take Plyler v. Doe on, you have to have the data,” he said. Pearce said he believed the Supreme Court might be willing to reconsider once Arizona could show the financial burden.

His measure cleared the Senate Education Committee but died when it was held in the Rules Committee which is supposed to review legislation for constitutionality.