EDITORS/NEWS DIRECTORS:

Even before President Donald Trump took office a second time, the child care and early education workforce — broadly defined as caregivers and preschool teachers — was stretched thin. Now, the president’s immigration crackdown is straining the workforce, which is heavily reliant on women from other countries.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which for decades steered clear of preschools, has been given the green light to enter them when “common sense” dictates it. In July, agents attempted to arrest a father in the parking lot of his son’s preschool in Oregon. Last month, agents followed a teacher into a Chicago preschool and arrested her and a male companion inside.

Preschools, particularly those that teach Spanish, say they are losing valuable educators because of changes to immigration policy under Trump. Even those who are still working and living in the U.S. legally say they fear encounters with immigration authorities.

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READ AP'S STORY

Trump’s crackdown on immigration is taking a toll on child care workers

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THE DATA

According to UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, 21% of those who work in early care and education are foreign-born. Their July analysis also includes a state-by-state breakdown of this data, showing that some states — like California and New York — have a much larger share of immigrants among child care workers.

Immigrants who work in early childhood — as nannies or teachers or child care employees — tend to be better educated than U.S.-born workers. Many of them have been recruited to work in Spanish-immersion or bilingual preschools, where native Spanish speakers are a particular asset.

Since January, there was a drop of 39,000 in the number of immigrants working in child care, according to the Better Life Lab at the think tank New America. Researchers there said this in turn has hurt maternal workforce participation, saying it contributed to 77,000 fewer U.S.-born mothers with children under 6 in the workforce.

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BACKGROUND ON IMMIGRATION POLICY

While running for office, Trump pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in history. Since then, he has made it easier for immigration authorities to make arrests, ending programs that protected immigrants from deportation and infusing ICE and U.S. Border Patrol with billions more in funding.

There is a common misconception that most immigrants who work in early care and education — as nannies or child care workers or pre-k teachers — are undocumented. But the American Immigration Council estimated in 2021 that three-quarters of immigrants who work in the field are living and working legally in the U.S. And they are as a whole better educated than their U.S.-born counterparts.

Many immigrants fear an encounter with immigration enforcement even when they are living and working in the U.S. legally. That’s because ICE and Border Patrol officers have stopped, detained and arrested even those with legal status and, in some cases, citizenship.

There are also forms of legal status that are precarious. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have had their employment authorization discontinued because of changes to immigration policy under Trump. That includes many child care workers.

Many of them had fled violence, poverty or natural disasters in their homes and received Temporary Protected Status, which allowed them to live and work legally in the U.S. But Trump ended those programs, forcing many out of their jobs — and the country. Just last month, 300,000 immigrants from Venezuela lost their protected status.

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TAKE YOUR REPORTING FURTHER

— Talk to child care and preschool providers. Ask them both about the impact of immigration enforcement on their immigrant employees and on their operations more broadly. Many child care providers, for example, have started limiting how often they take children to public parks or libraries and have been preparing for the possibility that immigration enforcement officers will show up at their schools.

— Ask them about their background check process and if they employ immigrants who do not have employment authorization.

— Talk to immigrants working in child care. Ask them about credentials and work experience in their home countries and why they left. Ask them if they have changed their habits to avoid encounters with immigration enforcement.

— Speak to parents of children at preschools or child care centers that have been affected. Ask them how they feel about these impacts and whether they think immigration enforcement is just or useful. Ask them to weigh in on what they would believe would happen to their own child if the child witnessed the arrest of a teacher.

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