ABSTRACT
School counselors working with undocumented Latinx students have increasingly drawn on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, yet this framework carries an epistemological limitation: it treats surrounding systems as structurally neutral, obscuring racialized mechanisms of exclusion and endangerment. This position paper proposes a theoretically integrated alternative grounded in six pillars: LatCrit theory, Menjívar and Abrego’s concept of legal violence, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and nepantla theory, Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth model, Rendón’s Validation Theory, and a critique of the Dreamer narrative’s politics of deservingness. Drawing on recent scholarship documenting enforcement-driven enrollment declines, fractured college-going pathways, and the contradiction of silence and disclosure produced by legal violence, the paper grounds this framework in current evidence, identifies implications for school counseling practice, and offers a case illustration of practice from within the framework.