A $1 million federal grant created to curb school violence after the 2018 Parkland school shooting is now being used to create a more welcoming environment for an “influx” of violent immigrant children — and the Department of Justice (DOJ) is taking notice, the Daily Caller News Foundation has exclusively learned.
The DOJ’s STOP School Violence Program awards schools grants to “improve school security” by training and educating school staff and students on violence prevention and crisis response, according to the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). A hefty grant approved for Florida’s Monroe County Schools (MCS) is specifically aimed at reducing immigrant-led violence, saying the increasing number of new immigrant children in the school system has fueled a rise in “juvenile crimes,” Open the Books found and shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The purpose of this project is to implement school safety solutions to prevent violence and improve school climate, by providing targeted support for immigrant students who have historically been underserved, marginalized, adversely affected by inequality, and disproportionately impacted by crime, violence, and victimization,” the grant description reads. “Monroe County has experienced an influx of migrant families with a concurrent increase in juvenile crimes. This has overwhelmed local resources such as law enforcement, community mental health, and schools.”
The grant description admits that school arrests have skyrocketed by 119% in the past two years, with “immigrant youth represent[ing] high percentages of offenders.” This violence is then blamed on immigrant students’ “trauma” and them having “to navigate an educational system that is foreign to them while not having the English skills to do so.”
Monroe’s solution, which was approved for the $949,471 grant in 2024 under the Biden administration, is to cater to the immigrants by better “welcoming newcomers” and offering a “trauma informed orientation program” to address “gang, and/or familial violence in their home countries, and/or violence during their journey to the United States.” The school climate will be improved, the grant description insists, “by providing trauma-informed cultural awareness training for teachers,” developing a task force for English learners, providing “social-emotional English language immersion” and creating a Spanish and Haitian Creole program for immigrant parents.
“The Department of Justice remains committed to supporting school safety and protecting all children from violent crime. FY25 grant opportunities for the STOP School Violence Program have not yet been noticed,” a department spokesman told the DCNF.
A source familiar with the matter said the DOJ is looking into the grants that have already been awarded and whether the funds are being used appropriately.
MCS did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Open the Books found 14 other grants within the same program that directly address violence brought on by immigrant populations.
Sodus Central School District in New York, for instance, received $1 million for an initiative to give “an increasing number of English language learners” in the district a “Place to Belong,” Open the Books found. Another $1 million went to schools in Oxnard, California that have the “highest numbers of suspensions due to incidents of violence with and without injury, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, and English language learners.”
Yet another $1 million grant went to Miami-Dade Public Schools, where the district has struggled to meet “the needs of such a richly diverse student body” when “nearly one-quarter [of students] are English language learners, including children representing more than 160 different nationalities.”
Similar grants instituted originally by the Trump administration to address mental health concerns in schools in the wake of the Parkland shooting were co-opted by the Biden administration in 2022 to include mentions of gender identity and race. While the Department of Education (ED) in June 2025 planned to allow the grants to end and be replaced by an updated version without the “divisive ideologies,” a Biden-appointed judge prohibited this move in October, and a federal appeals court in December upheld the injunction.
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