Beyond Ecological Neutrality: A LatCrit, Borderlands, and Community Cultural Wealth Framework for School Counselors Working With Undocumented Latinx Students

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.