Since the outset of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, Carolina Reyes, the director of the Arco Iris Bilingual Children’s Center in Maryland, had to start having conversations with parents about whom she should contact in case they disappear in an ICE raid.
“I had to say, ‘You need to have a plan. I know it’s difficult, but you need to have a plan,’” Reyes told Salon. “I know it’s difficult, but you need to have a plan. And then they were like, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about it.’ I was like, ‘I understand, but you have to because, unfortunately, you don’t know if you go to work and something happens, who’s going to take care of your child? What is going to happen? What do I have to do?”
According to Reyes, this is only one of many difficult conversations she has had since the beginning of the Republican mass deportation campaign earlier this year.
“We had a meeting with my teachers where we need to prepare if ICE comes. As a school, we are not allowing anybody to come into our school. We close the door and we lock down a little bit, if that’s the case. We are not going to release anybody, not to, particularly ICE or anything like that. We call parents too. We talk about it, and if we see ICE or any situation where we feel uncomfortable, parents will be notified,” Reyes said.
From 2011 until the beginning of Trump’s second term, child care facilities had been off limits for ICE raids. Trump ended the protection afforded to child care facilities and other sensitive locations in January, telling immigration officers to “balance a variety of interests” when conducting operations in or around such locations.
While it’s not clear whether ICE has conducted any raids on early childhood education centers yet, the rule change earlier this year and the administration’s readiness to detain children and families have left providers across the country in a state of anxiety with organizations advising that providers prepare for potential raids.
The potential for direct raids on facilities isn’t the only issue impacting parents and children since the beginning of the GOP mass deportation campaign. For many of the families Reyes has worked with, parents are afraid to go to work because they’re worried that they, or one of their family members, might be targeted by ICE. At the same time, Reyes said, ICE had targeted those seeking food assistance at places like local churches, which left families of mixed immigration status with nowhere to turn.
“Here in Maryland, ICE was going to those places too, to arrest people, so we started our own food program a little bit here, asking our own families to donate food so that families didn’t have to go to those places,” Reyes said.
And the fear in the community goes beyond just noncitizen residents.
“I did have some families who were concerned and worried, even though they had legal status in the United States, you know. But they’re immigrants, so we look like immigrants and Latinos, and some of them were concerned about that too,” Reyes said.
Reyes’ experience is only a keyhole view into the dramatic effect that Trump and the GOP’s policies are having on the child care industry and the families that rely on it in the United States.
The child care and early childhood education industry is among those most impacted by Trump’s immigration policies. According to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at Berkeley, around 500,000 workers in the industry are immigrants, accounting for about 21% of the industry’s workforce nationwide.
The percentage of child care workers born outside the United States varies widely by state as well. In Florida, for example, 38% of early childhood educators were born outside the United States, while in a state like Vermont, the number is closer to just 3%.
Beyond statistics, there are some communities in which immigrants maintain a critical role in terms of child care. The 19th detailed in a report this year the detention of Orozco Forero, a worker who cared for children with Autism and was the only provider who would take some children in her community.
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One child care provider located near Columbus, Ohio, who wished to be identified only as Ann, told Salon that since Trump’s mass deportation campaign began, they’ve been having a hard time finding new workers.
“I have two who, in the middle of the hiring process, disappeared, or they no-showed. And then I found out from other trusted sources who know them that they are involved in immigration proceedings,” Ann said. “Even today, there’s one woman who was supposed to start with us — I don’t know the correct immigration or political term — she’s got clearance to be in the US. She’s originally from Mexico. Her father’s here, but they were able to get her immigration status made legit, if I can say it that way. But she’s disappeared for two weeks, and then I found out today that she’s had to travel to Cleveland for a court proceeding. I said to the other person who knows her, I just asked her, ‘is she okay?’”
Ann said that the new problems haven’t been limited to hiring workers either. She told Salon that immigrant families have recently had problems getting financial benefits through Ohio’s Publicly Funded Child Care program for their children, who are American citizens.
“Now what’s happening is I have immigrant families who have immigrant children, and U.S.-born children, we are having a hard time getting the families care and benefits for their entire family, including the U.S.-born child, and that’s when I start losing all hope in this,” Ann said.
In the past, Ann said, she would be able to appeal the decision made by the county government to the state government with a high success rate. Now, however, she says families are increasingly being denied at the state level, too.
According to Arabella Bloom, a researcher at the center, the mass deportation campaign, which impacts parents, children and the people who staff child care centers, is hitting a system that was struggling to begin with.
“I think something important to note about childcare is that the system that we currently have right now — it’s kind of generous to call it a system,” Bloom said. “It’s very patchwork. Programs are happening in public schools, but programs are also happening in people’s homes. And so there’s not like a cohesive early childhood system. It’s a lot of programs kind of operating on their own. You know, many early childhood programs are for-profit, but they’re barely making ends meet.”
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Bloom said that, even for those workers who are not immigrants, there is a “real fear about interacting with immigration,” especially among Hispanic workers and other people of color.
The pressure from Trump’s mass deportation campaign comes in addition to more direct attacks on immigrants’ access to early childhood education from his administration and the Republicans in Congress.
The Trump administration announced in July, for example, that it would be making undocumented immigrants, who are already largely ineligible for federal benefits, ineligible for Head Start and that administrators for Head Start would be checking for eligibility based on immigration status.
“This decision undermines the fundamental commitment that the country has made to children and disregards decades of evidence that Head Start is essential to our collective future,” Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, told the Associated Press at the time.
Bloom explained that some changes in the recent GOP budget also stood to have an outsized impact on the workers in the early childhood education industry, especially cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.
“We know that roughly 43% of early educators rely on public benefits to make ends meet because pay is so low, so it’s kind of just a like a perfect storm of at the same time that immigration efforts are ramping up, and that’s obviously going to be very impactful for the one in five early educators who are immigrants,” Bloom said.
The GOP attacks on public benefits and immigration policy “threaten the supply of care that’s already hard to find,” Rachel Wilensky, a senior analyst on child care and early education at the Center for Law and Social Policy, told Salon.
Wilensky cited a CLASP study from 2018, which found that immigration actions like those being carried out by the Trump administration this year, and those that were conducted in the first administration, left a lasting impact on the physical, social and emotional development of young children.
“Good nutrition, regular health care, a stable and healthy living environment, and nurturing care are necessities for children to grow and learn and ultimately do well in school, in their jobs, and throughout their lives,” Wilensky said. “When children don’t have their basic needs met—or when they experience hardship and distress—it undercuts their growth and development and can have enduring effects. Immigrants have been central throughout our nation’s history, and their experiences matter for our future. The success of the United States is tied to the health and well-being of immigrants, as well as their success in school and later careers.”
