Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown is terrorizing a generation of Latino children, with research from CAP showing that mass deportation policies “create toxic stress for young children by breaking families apart, instilling fear in the immigrant community, and preventing families from accessing programs that meet children’s most basic needs.”
With an estimated six million U.S. citizen kids having at least one undocumented family member in their household, “policies that cause children emotional distress and economic insecurity in early childhood interfere with their healthy development and derail their future success”:
Being separated from a parent or caregiver—or even the idea of a separation—exposes young children to stress and trauma. In extreme cases, children may be present during immigration raids, where armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents may burst into a home and forcibly remove parents. Children who have been separated from their parents frequently show signs of trauma, including anxiety, depression, frequent crying, disrupted eating and sleeping, and difficulties in school. Many young children also have a misunderstanding of legal status in general, often equating being an immigrant with being unauthorized. These children may believe that they or their authorized relatives are also in danger of being deported, further escalating their fear.
Anecdotal evidence from across the U.S. has shown that this kind of fear isn’t just limited to the confines of the home, either. In New Mexico earlier this year, thousands of children and teens vanished from schools, after immigrant and Latino parents kept them home following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid that terrorized the Las Cruces community, resulting in a 60 percent spike in absences that the district’s superintendent called “alarming.”
And, this fear doesn’t differentiate between who is and isn’t here legally:
Regardless of whether they are separated from a parent or just facing the threat of parental deportation, young children are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of heightened stress because they are in a critical developmental period. Children in the broader Latino community can experience distress even if everyone in their family is authorized. In fact, there is evidence that immigrants—whether they are citizens, legal residents, or unauthorized—experience fear of deportation and feelings of vulnerability at similar rates. Young children in the immigrant community can experience psychological distress after just seeing or hearing about their peers being separated from their families and friends.
Children are particularly perceptive of their surroundings, and that includes their parents’ stress, according to CAP:
“I’ve been pretty stressed since the election,” [DACA recipient] Miguel said, “and [Daniel] does pick up on it. I’ll read him a story and he’ll interrupt and say, ‘Hey Papa you look really sad or worried, what’s wrong?’ And I’ll have to tell him, ‘Oh well it was a long day at work,’ but typically it’s because I read something about some action that the [Trump] administration is taking.”
But the reality is that immigrant parents like Miguel are being forced to take steps to ensure the future of their children in the U.S. in case they are deported, including giving power of attorney to relatives or close friends:
Miguel and Carmen decided that in the case of their deportation, Daniel would stay in the United States with his grandparents, who are now U.S. citizens, to maintain stability in his life.
“It’s hard enough that [his] mom and dad would not be around to the degree that [Daniel’s] used to, and so it just made more sense,” Miguel said. “Daniel was born here, he’s a U.S. citizen, he goes to school here, [so] let’s keep him in a stable environment.”
There’s no current numbers on how many children were left with no guardian at all following the U.S. government deporting parents without any notice, but 2011 research indicated that at least 5,000 U.S. citizen children were in foster care following the deportation of their parents.
While CAP notes that “together, the consequences of toxic stress and economic insecurity on young children could severely affect the nation’s future workforce,” it’s also important to note that it’s about more than just money, it’s about kids, and mass deportation policies stand to irrevocably scar and harm this entire generation of Americans for years to come. This isn’t a question of if we can do better, it’s a question of why aren’t we doing better.