Public education in the United States acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed in daily life. Here, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is exerted over refugee students and their families in US public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected on refugee and other immigrant networks in Southern Arizona, a US–Mexico border region marked by increasing anti-immigrant policies and practices, I reveal how the everyday practices and policies of one school district reflect and reinforce the government’s control over refugee students. I argue that the ways in which the students are sorted, marginalized, and denied opportunities as learners is inextricable from their positioning as non-citizens by the federal and state governments. Specifically, I demonstrate the linkages between the federal education policy, Every School Succeeds Act, Arizona State’s Proposition 203: English Language Education for the Children in Public Schools, which eliminated bilingual education, and the school district’s approach to teaching refugee students. Finally, I offer recommendations for creating more inclusive, assets-based learning environments for refugee students that push back against the neoliberal favoring of competition and one-size-fits-all solutions in public education.

在美国，公共教育是新自由主义的政府工具，通过它，国家权力和主权得以在日常生活中得到部署和转变。在这里，我研究了在美国公共教育中如何对难民学生及其家庭施加主权差异。我利用在亚利桑那州南部（一个以反移民政策和习俗为特征的美国-墨西哥边境地区）收集的关于难民和其他移民网络的42个月的人种学数据，我揭示了一个学区的日常习俗和政策如何反映和加强政府对难民学生的控制。我认为，将学生分类，边缘化和拒绝作为学习者的机会的方式与联邦和州政府将其定位为非公民的方式密不可分。特别，我展示了联邦教育政策，《每个学校成功法》，亚利桑那州第203号提案：消除了双语教育的公立学校儿童英语教育与学区教难民学生的方法之间的联系。最后，我提供了一些建议，为难民学生创建更具包容性，基于资产的学习环境，以反对新自由主义对竞争的支持以及公共教育中的“千篇一律”的解决方案。