On March 17th, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials detained activist Jeanette Vizguerra, who became a symbol for the immigrant rights movement after she took sanctuary for nearly three months in a Denver church during the first Trump administration. Vizguerra, 53, has four children–three born in the U.S.–and three grandchildren. A few days earlier, a San Diego man was taken away by masked ICE agents while his five-year-old daughter shook and cried in the car. In early April, 37 people working for a roofing company in Whatcom County, Washington, were detained in an ICE raid. So many of them had kids that the local school district’s charitable foundation set up a donation page. “What doesn’t always make the news,” the page states, “are the children left behind who are suddenly left without a parent and provider. These kids need immediate and ongoing support to make it through an impossible time in their life.”
This is not a post about immigration policy in the broadest sense. I am not an immigration policy expert, and my purpose here is not to debate the reasons why individuals may choose to enter the United States illegally. Nor should the mere fact of having a child shield a person from detention or deportation if they have committed a violent crime. However, as the Trump administration moves forward with plans for mass deportation–including going through multiple IRS administrators in search of a likely illegal path for the Department of Homeland Security to access tax records of potential targets–those who care about strong families must stand up and speak out.
As of 2018, an estimated 4.4 million children were U.S. citizens and had at least one parent who was undocumented.1 That represents 6% of all U.S. children. These are families whose children are part of our schools and child care programs, our sports teams and drama clubs, our churches and synagogues and mosques.
The common rejoinder–Well, the parents should’ve thought of that before they came to the country illegally–is hollow. This is not a question of border enforcement. These children are here; they are citizens of the United States. America is their home country. If we allow their lives to be thrown into chaos by capriciously detaining parents who have committed no other offense, we are damaging the social fabric of our communities and the future of the nation. This is a question of family policy.
Any policy decision involves trade-offs. To go after so many parents and inflict so much trauma in the name of immigration enforcement is counter to the goals of nearly every ideological movement. The very first priority of Project 2025, the influential conservative manifesto, is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” Upending the lives of millions of American children by removing the two-parent stability that can drive so much of healthy child development, and spiking the risk they will experience poverty or homelessness, is a curious way to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
Pointing out the hypocritical disconnect between Trumpist rhetoric and policy surrounding families can feel futile. After all, this same administration is busy preparing to enact massive cuts on Medicaid (a program that covers ~40% of all U.S. births) and other social safety net programs relied on by low-income families, all in order to fund tax breaks for the rich. That does not mean we should sheath our righteous anger or stop holding those in power to account, particularly when it comes to an event as irreversibly life-altering as having a parent ripped away–and particularly when it is conducted by people who claim to hold the family sacrosanct and who commonly clothe their defense of it in religious terms. The barbarism of such an act must be condemned by all of good conscience, regardless of the letter on their voter registration form.2
There is a place for immigration enforcement. There is a place for border control. The current mass deportation policy, founded on the dehumanization of the undocumented that places their families outside the circle of concern, will establish neither justice nor peace because the foundation of both is the realization that all humans are connected on the basis of their inherent dignity. The mass deportation of nonviolent people with no consideration for whether they have children, or the consequences of such a policy on those children, costs us a shard of our national soul.
- Another 850,000 children are estimated to be undocumented themselves; so, perhaps contrary to popular belief, the overwhelming majority of children who have an undocumented parent are U.S. citizens.
- This imperative is most pronounced for those on the political right, given the current political context. Indeed, while there has been a well-documented shift toward family policy on the right, many of those right-leaning commentators who consider themselves champions of family life are conspicuously silent when it comes to the impacts of mass deportation on children, the pregnant, and citizen spouses.