Excerpts:
“It’s the most anti-child agenda I have ever seen in my entire career,” said Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy.
…
Cervantes said she can’t pinpoint which of Trump’s immigration tactics have hurt kids most.
“You can’t rank them,” she said. “Experts in child development say that in order for children to thrive and become healthy adults, they need access to their parents, access to healthcare, nutritious food, housing, childcare and a quality education. And these are all things that are very specifically being targeted.”
…
“Basically every aspect of a child’s well-being is being undermined by this web of different policies,” Cervantes said.
…
Repeated attacks on childcare workers — some targeting much-needed preschool teachers and aides, particularly through Head Start — also have left children increasingly unprotected, Cervantes said.
Excerpt:
Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, says the anti-immigrant agenda is targeted intentional harm of children and families. “This kind of stress has long-term developmental harms on children and can really undercut their ability to do well in school, and that will also inhibit their ability to grow into healthy, thriving adults.”
CLASP and the National Women’s Law Center submitted a public comment opposing the Department of Health and Human Services’ proposed Head Start rule that would destabilize the program by overhauling the regulations that underpin Head Start’s effective, high-quality, wraparound services model. On top of eliminating approximately 90 percent of the performance standards that make Head Start strong, the rule introduces an English-only instruction requirement that would harm immigrant families, dual language learners, and Head Start staff.
By Stephanie Schmit
This blog is part of a series exploring a shared vision for universal child care and CLASP’s efforts, alongside partners, to turn this vision into a reality. The full series can be found here.
Every vision needs a strong foundation. That is why CLASP has engaged with partners through the Child Care for Every Family Network for many years to develop a strong foundation for universal child care rooted in a commitment to learning from one another’s perspectives and expertise, supporting all families, centering those with diverse lived experiences, and designed in a meaningful way.
This intentional effort created the shared policy principles that ground all our joint efforts: equity, access, guaranteed care, support for a thriving workforce, culturally and linguistically responsive, financially stable, well-governed, quality, and designed by those most impacted.
Together we envisioned a publicly funded universal child care system that:
| A universal child care system is one where every family who needs child care can access it. To create the supply needed to make care universal, providers must be adequately compensated and supported to stay in the field and provide high-quality care. Through fully funded public investment, a universal system ensures cohesive and clear availability and accessibility to care and learning for all families with children, regardless of race, immigration status, income, disability, geography, and other factors that have historically impeded access. A universal system also ensures that the child care workforce is well-paid, provided with benefits like health care and retirement, and has access to training or higher/continuing education if desired, advancement opportunities, and more. To achieve this vision, the lived experience of the families and providers who rely on and sustain the system is centered in policy design and implementation. Ultimately, a universal system ensures that child care is a public good, not a family’s private responsibility. |
The story of these principles is about the “what,” of course, but it’s also about the “how.” These principles were built in partnership with diverse perspectives and people who are directly impacted, including parents and providers, and have guided the Network’s collective efforts across partners. CLASP helped to draft these principles, but also strives to live in them in our day-to-day work as we create and analyze policy porposals and continue to build trusted relationships with those closest to the challenges of the sector.
These principles and the intentional design of the Network have built momentum for a very exciting moment. CLASP is proud to stand with our partners in the Child Care for Every Family Network to launch the Child Care for All campaign.
This campaign is a national movement of partners from across the country who have come together to win free, universal child care for everyone. We are working to create a world where every family has access to the care that they need, when and where they need it. It is an effort that will benefit everyone: families, child care providers, employers, and the economy.
All of the work that CLASP is engaging in to fight back against attacks at the federal level and push progress forward at the state level is in service of the universal child care vision we are trying to achieve and to help us to build the power and foundation for what’s necessary to make Child Care for All a reality.
Join us in this important effort!
To learn more about what it means to build a truly equitable universal child care system, please join us for CLASP’s next installment of Equity Matters, “What if the Current Fight to Protect Child Care is also an Opportunity to Transform it?” on October 22 from 1-2:30 pm ET. Register here.
CLASP submitted a comment opposing the United States Department of Treasury’s proposed rule change to reinterpret certain refundable tax credits as “federal public benefits” under the 1996 Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The proposed rule change would restrict access to the refundable portions of the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and the Adoption Tax Credit for those who do not meet the qualified immigrant definition under the PRWORA law. To claim these refundable tax credits, all tax filers would need to attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are a United States citizen, U.S. national, or a qualified immigrant under the PRWORA definition.
This proposed rule would threaten immigrant families’ financial well-being by revoking critical tax credits that lift millions of families out of poverty each year. It would create administrative complexity for all tax filers by mandating tax filers to attest they are a “qualified” immigrant under PRWORA under penalty of perjury. Finally, the change would cause administrative confusion for states that provide state tax credits tied to federal credit eligibility rules.
By Tyler Hicks
Excerpt:
Kaelin Rapport, a policy analyst for racial equity at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), calls this a “sharpening of the edges of inequality.” His colleague Isha Weerasinghe, director of CLASP’s Public Benefits Justice team, points out that higher prices are just one of many variables — including the loss of Medicaid benefits and food assistance cuts from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — deeply impacting Americans’ wallets right now.
“People who are living in poverty or who don’t have high wages or are unable to work are being hit from all sides,” she says. “They already have less purchasing power because of inflation caused by economic circumstances, and then on top of that, they do not have the safety net to be able to support them.”
…
Rapport and Weerasinghe, the colleagues at CLASP, share similar concerns about people in the US. Just as the fighting over the Strait of Hormuz contributed to price increases in various goods all over the world, so, too, could the shockwaves of this war affect Americans’ long-term financial and mental well-being.
A recent piece the pair wrote for CLASP points out that, according to the American Psychiatric Association, financial stability is a key determinant of mental health. They also note that HR 1 — the legislation commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill — will ultimately lead to more than $1 trillion in cuts to healthcare funding over the next decade, as well as $186 billion in cuts to food assistance programs.
“There’s billions of dollars being put into rounding up people instead of being put into the social safety net,” says Rapport. “The average person who lives in the United States, who makes less than $100,000 a year, isn’t going to be able to eat more ICE jails or a prolonged conflict in Iran, but they’re going to feel that in their checkbooks.”
In response to the Senate Finance Committee’s Request for Information to improve health coverage in the United States, CLASP provided comments focused on universal health care coverage for all, suggestions on health system design to improve access for communities of color, immigrant access to health care, and better access to mental health services.
On September 28, Wendy Cervantes spoke on “Holding Our Families Together in Uncertain Times,” an episode of Brazelton Touchpoints Somos Familias Latinas series.
On September 23, Jesse Fairbanks was a panelist at the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s Summer of IDEAS series event titled, “From Foster Care to Homelessness: A Film & Conversation on the Fight for Stability,”
On July 22, Suma Setty served as a panelist on a First Focus on Children congressional briefing titled “Collateral Damage: How HR 1’s ‘Adult’ Medicaid Cuts are Impacting Children & Families One Year In.”