America’s fragile child care system relies heavily on immigrant workers. Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown could cripple it.
Since 2011, federal guidance has advised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents against conducting enforcement in “sensitive locations” like hospitals, churches, schools and day care centers. On his first day back in office, Trump removed these longstanding protections, marking a major change from his first term as president. Now — with ICE officials charged with increasing their daily arrests from a few hundred people to upward of 1,500, and top immigration agents demoted for not deporting people fast enough — day care centers stand as direct targets.
The crackdown on immigrants threatens to upend an industry where foreign-born staff make up one-fifth of the workforce nationally — and nearly half in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Jose, California. Research led by the New American Economy think tank estimated that over 200,000 undocumented immigrants work in child care and day care services. The new, harsher enforcement comes at a particularly precarious time, as major employers phase out remote work policies, leaving parents with an intensifying scramble for child care.
Child care programs already have an employee turnover rate 65 percent higher than average. The pay helps explain why: As of 2023, the median hourly wage for full-time, year-round child care workers was just $14.60, and the field ranked as the 10th lowest-paid occupation out of nearly 750 jobs across the economy, according to one analysis. The Trump crackdown could make everything even worse.
Jessica Brown, an economist at the University of South Carolina, has studied how earlier bouts of immigration enforcement affected child care markets. Her analysis of the Secure Communities program, which operated nationwide from 2008 to 2014, found that even when immigration enforcement primarily targeted men, it still disrupted female-dominated child care. The program decreased the overall supply of child care workers and centers and reduced enrollment overall.
Despite claims that immigrants are taking jobs from native-born Americans, when immigrant workers left the child care industry, native-born workers didn’t fill the gap. Instead, the number of native-born child care workers also decreased — as costs went up and centers closed.
Today’s situation could prove even more disruptive.
“The current raids represent a much more salient threat of deportation for women,” said Brown, who anticipates a larger impact on child care markets compared to Secure Communities, at least in the short-term. “The long-term effect depends on whether this becomes the new normal. More importantly, it’s about perception — even if the raids decrease, once fear takes hold in immigrant communities, the chilling effects could linger.” Among those most vulnerable to such fear are the children themselves.
The cascading effects of immigration enforcement
These chilling effects aren’t theoretical. The first Trump term provides insight into the impacts these raids could have on both kids and child care providers. Back in 2017, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), a national anti-poverty organization, launched a multistate study on how Trump’s immigration policies were affecting children under age 8. In interviews with staff and families across six states, researchers found that children as young as three were showing signs of trauma from fears about enforcement.
Early childhood educators reported disturbing new behaviors — increased aggression, separation anxiety, and withdrawal — that they described as distinct from children’s behaviors in past years. One preschool director in Georgia described a 5-year-old child whose anxiety was so severe that he was biting his fingertips until they bled.
The study found widespread drops in day care attendance and enrollment as families isolated themselves. Programs reported parents leaving young children with older siblings or grandparents instead of in formal care, minimizing time outside the home to avoid law enforcement encounters. With enrollment declines cutting into already-thin margins and state subsidies often tied to attendance, these shifts threatened the financial viability of centers that entire neighborhoods depend on.
The crisis extended beyond the direct provision of child care. Providers and parents reported increased reluctance to access public benefits like health insurance and nutrition assistance due to worries that Medicaid or SNAP information could be shared with immigration officials.
Early childhood staff themselves reported intense anxiety about increased incidents of racism and xenophobia affecting the families they serve and, in some cases, themselves personally. Many providers described the emotional burden of being asked by parents to become emergency guardians for their children in case they were deported.
One-third of young children in the US live with at least one parent who speaks a language other than English at home, and these children achieve better academic outcomes in dual-language child care programs — programs that often rely heavily on immigrant teachers.
Wendy Cervantes, the director of Immigration and Immigrant Families at CLASP who co-led the research, told Vox that the difficulty of finding child care providers who have the right skills to educate dual-language children is often overlooked. “There are not a lot of people who have the training and are also bilingual who are competent,” she said.
How policymakers, advocates, and child care directors are trying to protect families and staff
During the first Trump administration, many child care providers didn’t even know their centers were protected under the “sensitive locations” federal guidance, leading advocates to launch national campaigns to raise awareness about these safeguards. Now, however, those same advocates are working to help providers understand that guidance is no longer in effect, but that they still have constitutional rights.
“They still have rights under the Fourth Amendment to restrict the extent to which ICE can enter,” Cervantes said. Immigration agents still need signed judicial warrants with a specific person’s name and address to raid a private space. To help providers navigate these changes, CLASP is coordinating resources and planned a national webinar at the end of February for child care programs specifically.
Many child care centers are also developing new protocols to operate in this environment. Some are removing outdoor signage to avoid ICE attention and developing new systems to communicate warnings to parents. Others are rethinking their data collection policies, to limit questions that ask about families’ immigration status.
“There’s a difference between finding out something and documenting,” said Atenas Burrola Estrada, an attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights. She emphasized the importance of child care centers making plans ahead of time so that staff know what they need to do if ICE enforcement comes.
“What can be different about child care is the fear-factor, and it can be much more traumatizing for a small child,” she said. “Providers also need to know who to call if mom and dad don’t come home, so they can avoid children ending up in state custody.”
Some states are hoping to create new protections through legislation. In California, a bill would make it harder for ICE agents to enter schools or child care centers. And even if agents met the requirements for entry, they’d still only be able to enter areas where children aren’t present.
In Congress, Democrats Rep. Adriano Espaillat and Sen. Richard Blumenthal recently reintroduced a bill to codify the “sensitive locations” federal guidance. But the legislation is a long shot: It failed to pass in 2017, and today’s political landscape has shifted so that even many Democrats now support tougher immigration enforcement amid growing concern about border security. Earlier this year, Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, requiring mandatory detention for immigrants accused of theft and related crimes – exactly the type of broad enforcement that advocates fear could sweep up child care workers.
As politicians wage war on immigration in the name of protecting American jobs, their policies threaten to unravel the very system that keeps millions of Americans — especially mothers — in the workforce. In classrooms across the country, children form bonds with care workers who help shape their earliest years, and immigrant teachers create the bilingual, multicultural spaces that define modern American childhood. The political crusade against immigration may score political points, but on the ground, it’s setting up a chain reaction that could cascade through the entire economy — from parents forced to cut back work hours to businesses losing productive employees to a generation of children without supportive care at their most formative age.
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
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