Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

While the chilling effects of immigration enforcement on immigrants are well documented, the literature's focus on the consequences of immigration enforcement may masks the ways more common police practices exclude and isolate undocumented youth. This study uses unique administrative data to examine how policing practices affect the college outcomes of undocumented youth. We merge data from the New York Police Department's Stop-Question-Frisk (SQF) program, which records over 5 million police stops in NYC between 2003 and 2014, with CUNY administrative data, which reliably identifies legal status and offers data on the population of undocumented youth attending college in New York City. We use the SQF data to estimate individual level exposure to police enforcement near places of residence and around college campuses and estimate the effect of exposure on students' academic performance. Our preliminary results indicate that undocumented students' academic performance, relative to students with legal status, is adversely affects by the number of stops around campus. The result illustrate that stop-and-frisk and related police tactics have unintended spill-over effects on the behavior of undocumented youth.