School efforts aimed at improving academic outcomes of immigrant students largely emphasize curricular, structural, and programmatic strategies. Such task-driven practices, when conducted in isolation from the social and cultural domains that connect immigrants to school, fail to fully engage or motivate students, thus betraying the promise of such strategies. This qualitative study explored the belief-driven caring practices of two teachers toward immigrant students and the ways that such practices influenced students' engagement with and motivation toward school. This comparative case analysis reveals the widely divergent practices employed by individual teachers despite school attempts to provide uniform curriculum and instruction believed to support the academic achievement of immigrant students. Implications for this study include school assessment of caring practices, reflection on development of institutionalized and explicit definitions of caring, and guidelines for implementation of such practices. (Contains 1 table.)