Not long after President Trump took office, the staff at CentroNía bilingual preschool in Washington began rehearsing what to do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came to the door. As ICE became a regular presence in their Latino neighborhood in the summer, teachers stopped taking children to nearby parks, libraries and playgrounds that had once been considered an extension of the classroom.
And in October, the school scrapped its beloved Hispanic Heritage Month parade, when immigrant parents typically dressed their children in costumes and soccer jerseys from their home countries. ICE officers had begun stopping staff members, all of whom have legal status, and school officials worried about drawing more unwelcome attention.
In California, where the immigration crackdown began in June, child-care facilities have experienced months of increased absences among students and staff.
Trump’s push for the largest mass deportation in history has had an outsize effect on the child-care field, which is heavily reliant on immigrants and already strained by a worker shortage. Immigrant child-care workers and preschool teachers, the majority of whom are working and living in the U.S. legally, say they are racked by anxiety over possible encounters with ICE officials. Some have left the field, and others have been forced out by changes to immigration policy.
At CentroNía — and elsewere — ICE’s presence and the fear it generates have changed how many schools operate.
“That really dominates all of our decision making,” said Myrna Peralta, the chief executive of CentroNía.
The child-care industry depends on immigrants
Schools and child-care centers were once off limits to ICE officials, in part to keep children out of harm’s way. But those rules were scrapped not long after Trump’s inauguration this year. Instead, ICE officials are urged to exercise “common sense.”
In October, ICE officials arrested a teacher inside a Spanish immersion preschool in Chicago. The event left immigrants who work in child care, along with the families who rely on them, frightened and vulnerable.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, defended ICE officials’ decision to enter the Chicago preschool. She said one teacher was a passenger in a car that was being pursued by ICE officials. She got out of the car and ran into the preschool, McLaughlin said, emphasizing that the teacher was “arrested in the vestibule, not in the school.” The instructor, who had a work permit, was later released. The driver went inside the preschool, where officials arrested him.
About 20% of America’s child-care workers were born outside the United States and one-fifth are Latino. The proportion of immigrants in some places, particularly large cities, is much higher: In the District of Columbia, California and New York, around 40% of the child-care workforce is foreign-born, according to UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.
The American Immigration Council estimated in 2021 that more than three-quarters of immigrants working in early care and education were living and working in the U.S. legally.
There is evidence the toll on the workforce is mounting. Since January, the number of immigrants working in child care has dropped by 39,000, according to a report published Wednesday by New America, a left-leaning think tank. This, in turn, has made it more challenging for U.S.-born mothers of children younger than 6 to work. The researchers estimate there are 77,000 fewer of them in the workforce because of the increase in ICE arrests.
The effect in California
About 39% of early educators in California were born outside the U.S. — one of the highest concentrations nationwide, according to the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. In Los Angeles County, 57% of the staff at child-care centers are Latinas, the center found.
At the International Institute of Los Angeles’ preschool programs, the staff and family communities are “extraordinarily stressed,” said President and Chief Executive Cambria Tortorelli. Over the last few moths, student attendance has declined and withdrawals have increased. One family self-deported to Honduras.
In June, all nine of the institute’s preschools canceled the kindergarten graduation ceremony because they “didn’t want to risk family members who might be caught up.”
Because California was part of the first round of raids, the brunt of enforcement occurred in July and August, said Nina Buthee, executive director of EveryChild California, a membership association for child-care centers.
In response to the fears, the state passed a law — Assembly Bill 495 — that makes it easier for families to designate another adult to care for their children in case they are deported, and prohibits child-care facilities from collecting information about a child‘s or family’s immigration status.
But the effect on child-care programs has lingered, Buthee said. Field trips and off-campus excursions have been canceled at some programs because they don’t want parents, students or staff to be put at risk. Staff members continue to call out sick when an ICE raid is reported nearby.
Meanwhile, many parents have added additional emergency contact lists for their children, just in case the others are detained.
“Some lists go all the way down to 12 people,” Buthee said. And parents are so concerned about being detained while their child is at school that they’ve started storing extra clothing and toiletries in classrooms — just in case the child can’t go home for several days.
Fear hits even those legally in U.S.
At CentroNía, one staff member was detained by ICE while walking down the street and held for several hours, all the while unable to contact colleagues to let them know where she was. She was released that evening, said the school’s site director, Joangelee Hernández-Figueroa.
Another staff member, teacher Edelmira Kitchen, said she was pulled over by ICE on her way to work in September. Officials demanded she get out of her car so they could question her. Kitchen, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child, said she refused and they eventually let her go.
“I felt violated of my rights,” Kitchen said.
Hernández-Figueroa said ICE’s heightened presence during the federal intervention in the city has taken a toll on employees’ mental health. Some have gone to the hospital with panic attacks in the middle of the school day.
When the city sent mental health consultants to the school this year as part of a partnership with the Department of Behavioral Health, school leadership had them work with teachers rather than students, worried their anguish would spill over to the classroom.
“If the teachers aren’t good,” Hernández-Figueroa said, “the kids won’t be good either.”
It’s not just adults who are feeling more anxious. At a Montessori school in Portland, Ore., teachers observed changes among preschoolers in the weeks after an ICE arrest nearby in July. After pulling over a father who was driving his child to the school, agents encountered him in the school parking lot and tried to arrest him. In the ensuing commotion, the school went into lockdown.
Amy Lomanto, who heads the school, said teachers noticed more outbursts among students, and more students retreating to what the school calls “the regulation station,” an area in the main office with fidget toys that kids can use to calm themselves.
“With the current situation, more and more of us are likely to experience this kind of trauma,” she said. “That level of fear now is permeating a lot more throughout our society.”
Balingit writes for the Associated Press. Gold is a Times staff writer and her reporting is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative.
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