This brief discusses how research on child development, neuroscience, and trauma can inform federal policy regarding the treatment of children and their families arriving at our nation’s border.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied the U.S. government’s motion to dismiss Legal Aid Justice Center’s lawsuit on behalf of detained immigrant children and their families, striking a blow to a new immigration policy that has kept thousands of children unnecessarily detained for months.
The migrant caravan underscores the dire need to address the root causes of migration from Central America to the United States, including the pervasive violence that forces children without parents and families with young children to embark on a life-threatening journey of thousands of miles to seek safety in the United States.
This report from Urban Institute and the National Center for Children in Poverty found that expanding state immigration enforcement policies increased material hardship (such as eviction or difficulty paying for basic household expenses) in immigrant households with children. Although the policies target unauthorized immigrant populations, lawful immigrant households also experienced more material hardship in states with expanded enforcement, suggesting a broader climate of fear created by such policies.
This analysis provides new estimates of the potential impacts from the proposed Trump administration changes to the public charge rule. Using 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation data, it examines the (1) share of noncitizens who originally entered the U.S. without LPR status who have characteristics that DHS could potentially weigh negatively in a public charge determination and (2) number of individuals who would disenroll from Medicaid under different scenarios.
This updated publication provides a detailed timeline of the Trump administration’s actions to rollback child protections. The timeline details when all these actions took place, who put them into action, and what the impact on children is.
The potential impacts of expanding the regulation known as “public charge” have yet to be fully understood, but experts anticipate that young children in immigrant families—more than 90 percent of them US citizens—could be disproportionately affected.
The Trump administration is seeking to undo the 1997 Flores settlement with changes that would again allow immigrant children to be locked up indefinitely. In the midst of its zero-tolerance policy and implementation of separation of parents and children at the border, the administration has announced a plan to issue regulations that would remove the important settlement protections.
Children of immigrants are at greater risk of going without enough food than the children of native-born citizens – even when income levels and other economic factors are taken into account. Immigrant families often experience economic hardships, of course, but their food insecurity may also be traced to U.S. federal and state policies that make some immigrants ineligible for food stamps.
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