The last time Donald Trump was president, rumors of immigration raids terrorized the Oregon community where Gustavo Balderas was the school principal.

News spread that immigration officials were trying to break into schools. There was no truth in that, but school staff had to find students who were avoiding school and persuade them to go back to class.

“People just started ducking and hiding,” Balderas said.

Educators across the country are bracing for unrest regardless of whether the president-elect follows through on his promise to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country illegally. Even if he just talked about it, immigrant children would suffer, educators and legal observers said.

When “you constantly threaten people with the possibility of mass deportation, it really hurts people’s ability to function in society and get their children to get an education,” said Hiroshi Motomura, a professor at the UCLA School of Law.

This fear has already begun for many.

“The kids are still coming to school, but they’re scared,” said Almudena Abeyta, superintendent of Chelsea Public Schools, a Boston suburb that has long been a first stop for Central American immigrants coming to Massachusetts. Now Haitians make the city their home and send their children to school there.