By Mikayla Slaydon

The Trump Administration has attacked immigrant and mixed-status families’ access to child care and early education and other public benefits programs since his first term. The first year of the second Trump Administration has put immigrants and their families at the center of heightened and intense immigration enforcement activities and attacks on program eligibility. As a result of the confusion and fear caused by these attacks, CLASP has updated its 2017 resource on eligibility for federally funded child care and early education programs such as Head Start and the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG). This updated resource is more essential than ever, as children disappear from classrooms and early education programs and all families, especially immigrant families, too often encounter mountains of red tape just to access important benefits like child care.

This administration has worked extensively to undermine child care and early education programs and dismantle access for children and families, including citizen children in mixed-status families and citizen children who are legally eligible for programs. These attacks include but are not limited to:

• Attempting to reverse the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act guidance outlining Head Start and Early Head Start as education programs and thus allowing any child, regardless of their or their family’s immigration status, to access and benefit from these programs.
• Limiting the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) terms that Head Start programs could use; and restricting the use of federal funding for any training and technical assistance that supported DEI initiatives.
• Swiftly and punitively freezing funding due to alleged “fraud” in Minnesota and other states earlier this year.
• Proposing to change how programs assess eligibility, with more
• Attempting to limit accessibility for Head Start and the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), including the newly proposed Head Start rule and the newly released final rule for CCDF.

The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged the administration in court over DEI attacks, mass office closures and layoffs, and eligibility for immigrant children in Head Start, and was granted preliminary that halt the implementation of these efforts.

Despite blatant attempts to destabilize an already fragile child care sector, CLASP will continue to emphasize how necessary accessibility for programs that support basic needs are for the one in four children who live in immigrant households in this country. When immigrant families and children are facing attacks from every angle, highlighting true facts about program eligibility and resources available to immigrant families is essential.

For an updated analysis on program eligibility for immigrant families and children, please see CLASP’s resource here.

CLASP’s safe spaces guide empowers early childhood programs to create a safe spaces policy to protect families’ safety and privacy and safeguard against immigration enforcement activities.