Raffaele Law

2025 Updates

This page will strive to post relevant changes to the Department of Education, Special Education, and Federal policies that impact teachers and students.

Education Department layoffs hit offices that oversee special education and civil rights enforcement (10/13/2025)

A new round of layoffs at the Education Department is depleting an agency that was hit hard in the Trump administration’s previous mass firings, threatening new disruption to the nation’s students and schools in areas from special education to civil rights enforcement to after-school programs.

The Trump administration started laying off 466 Education Department staffers on Friday amid mass firings across the government meant to pressure Democratic lawmakers over the federal shutdown. The layoffs would cut the agency’s workforce by nearly a fifth and leave it reduced to less than half its size when President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20.

Read the full article here. 

Supreme Court agrees to review bans on transgender athletes joining teams that align with their gender identity (07/03/2025)

The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether states may ban transgender students from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity, revisiting the issue of LGBTQ rights in a blockbuster case just days after upholding a ban on some health care for trans youth.

The decision puts the issue of transgender rights on the Supreme Court’s docket for the second year in a row and is by far the most significant matter the justices have agreed to hear in the term that will begin in October.

Read the full article here. 

Changes in Immigration Enforcement (01/21/25)

On January 21, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new policy allowing immigration officers and agents to carry out enforcement actions—including arrests and searches—of undocumented immigrants in “sensitive locations” including schools and churches. This new directive replaced a policy previously implemented in 2011, which had established that officers and agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”)  would not carry out enforcement actions at these sensitive locations except in limited situations. In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security had expanded the list of sensitive locations to include social services establishments and  places where children gather, including school bus stops, playgrounds, and childcare centers.

Under the newly announced policy of January 2025, those previous protections are no longer in place. 

For additional information and resource links, please visit COPAA.