By Lulit Shewan
May Day has always been grounded in a simple demand: workers should be able to go to work and return home safely. That demand carries particular weight this year. The scale of harm workers face remains high, and the conditions shaping that harm are shifting in ways that increase exposure and limit the systems meant to prevent it.
Risk is structured and disproportionate across the labor market. Latino workers experience the highest rates of fatal occupational injury, and Black workers also face elevated risks. Immigrant workers are overrepresented in industries with dangerous conditions, including construction, agriculture, warehousing, and manufacturing. Many workers in these sectors face barriers to reporting unsafe conditions, including language access, fear of retaliation, and immigration-related concerns. These factors shape who is most exposed to hazardous conditions and who is least protected when those conditions become dangerous.
Workplace harm is not limited to injuries or fatalities. Gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) are deeply embedded across low-wage and precarious work, shaping daily conditions of safety, dignity, and economic security. This includes sectors such as hospitality, domestic work, agriculture, and warehousing. Women—particularly Black women, immigrant women, and women in temporary roles—face heightened exposure to harassment, assault, and coercion on the job. Federal workplace safety frameworks provide limited proactive protections against these forms of harm. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does not offer a comprehensive standard that addresses GBVH as a workplace safety issue, and enforcement mechanisms remain limited. These gaps leave workers without consistent tools for prevention or accountability.
The most recent AFL-CIO Death on the Job report documents the scale of loss. In 2024, 5,070 workers were killed in traumatic incidents on the job, and an estimated 135,000 more died from occupational diseases. This amounts to more than 380 deaths each day tied to workplace conditions. These figures align with patterns documented in prior years. Fatalities remain concentrated in construction, transportation, warehousing, agriculture, and manufacturing. The leading causes of death continue to include falls, motion strain, equipment-related injuries, and exposure to hazardous substances.
Safety standards exist for many of the most common hazards, particularly in construction and manufacturing, but failures in enforcement, inadequate training, production pressures, and gaps in accountability allow these risks to persist. These failures are tied to how safety protections are implemented and enforced across workplaces.
Recent workplace tragedies reflect these patterns. In April 2026, a worker at an Amazon fulfillment center in Troutdale, Oregon, collapsed and died inside the facility. Reports indicated that work continued in surrounding areas during the emergency response. In October 2025, an explosion at an explosives manufacturing plant in Tennessee killed 16 workers and revealed dozens of safety violations. Construction sites continue to see fatal trench collapses and falls, even with established federal standards designed to prevent them. These incidents reflect conditions in which known hazards remain present and safeguards are inconsistently applied. A large share of these deaths are widely understood to be preventable, even if there is no single comprehensive estimate that captures the exact proportion. The AFL-CIO has consistently pointed to enforcement gaps and employer noncompliance as central drivers of workplace fatalities, noting that many incidents occur in violation of existing standards. OSHA investigations routinely identify preventable hazards after fatal events, particularly in blue collar industries.
Policy decisions made over the past year are shaping how these risks are managed. OSHA’s recent revised Heat National Emphasis Program is reflective of this, narrowing the list of industries prioritized for heat-related inspections. This change comes as heat exposure intensifies across sectors where workers spend extended periods outdoors or in high-temperature environments, including those who work in agriculture, construction, delivery, or warehouses. These workers all face prolonged exposure to high temperatures, often without guaranteed access to water or shade. Federal data shows that heat-related fatalities are often undercounted or misclassified. A narrower enforcement scope reduces the likelihood that unsafe heat conditions will be identified during inspections.
Cuts to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) affect the federal government’s ability to track workplace hazards and develop updated safety recommendations. NIOSH plays a central role in identifying emerging risks, including heat exposure, chemical hazards, and evolving workplace technologies. Staffing and funding reductions affect data collection, field investigations, and the development of evidence-based guidance that informs OSHA standards.
Enforcement capacity continues to shape how safety protections function in practice. OSHA is responsible for overseeing millions of workplaces with a limited number of inspectors; indeed, inspection rates have not kept pace with the growth and complexity of industries such as warehousing and logistics. These sectors include large facilities employing hundreds or thousands of workers under tightly managed production systems. The number of federal OSHA inspectors dropped from 900 in 2022 to 853 in 2023, while the number of workers and workplaces under OSHA’s jurisdiction continues to grow. Current staffing remains below historical levels relative to the size of the workforce OSHA is tasked with protecting.
Employer practices play a defining role in this context. Production targets, algorithmic management systems, and staffing decisions influence how safety measures are applied. In warehouse settings, workers are often expected to maintain continuous output, which affects whether work is paused during emergencies and whether workers feel able to report unsafe conditions. In construction, subcontracting structures distribute responsibility across multiple entities, which complicates enforcement. In manufacturing, pressure to maintain production intersects with hazardous materials and machinery.
The cumulative effect is a workplace safety system with limited capacity to prevent harm under current conditions. Oversight is narrowing, research capacity is constrained, and enforcement remains limited relative to the scale of workplaces. Forms of harm that fall outside traditional regulatory frameworks, including GBVH, continue without consistent intervention.
Addressing these conditions requires sustained federal action. Expanding OSHA funding would increase inspection capacity and strengthen enforcement of existing standards. Reinvesting in NIOSH would support the research infrastructure needed to identify emerging hazards and inform updated protections. Establishing a comprehensive federal heat standard would provide consistent safeguards across industries where exposure is widespread. Legislative action can clarify accountability within subcontracting structures and strengthen protections for workers who report unsafe conditions. Addressing GBVH at work requires integrating it into workplace safety frameworks through enforceable standards and proactive prevention measures.
May Day highlights the relationship between worker safety and power. Workplace conditions are shaped by policy choices, enforcement priorities, and the distribution of control within workplaces. Current policy directions influence how hazards are identified, protections are applied, and accountability is enforced. Worker deaths and injuries continue to follow patterns that have been documented over time. The systems designed to address those patterns are being shaped in ways that affect how widely harm continues.
By Wendy Cervantes
For over a decade, ICE’s parental interest directive has served as an important tool to ensure that parents impacted by ICE enforcement actions are able to make decisions about their children’s care. First implemented following significant advocacy from racial justice, children, and immigrant rights groups in 2013, the policy is intended to ensure that ICE’s enforcement actions do not unnecessarily infringe upon the legal parental or guardianship rights of individuals facing detention and deportation. In July 2025, Trump’s ICE issued a new “detained parent directive,” replacing the policy with similar but ultimately weaker protections for families.
In response to Trump’s weakening of parental protections, Congress must act to protect children and mitigate the harms of interior enforcement. The HELP Separated Children Act would help do that.
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Melissa Stek, Communications Consultant, melissa@mountgem.com
Tom Salyers, Director of Communications, tsalyers@clasp.org
Washington, D.C., April 16, 2026—Today, directly impacted educators and lead researchers released two new reports authored by the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) highlighting the impacts of the Trump Administration’s 2025 immigration policies on young children and early care and education providers in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington. The research reveals profound threats to children’s development and well-being, the mental health of caregivers, and the child care and early education industry.
Suma Setty, Senior Policy Analyst, CLASP: “We met over 100 people across the country who are experiencing the cruelty of harsh immigration policies. It is clear that these policies, along with attacks on early care and education programs, are tearing families apart and weakening our systems of support for all families with young children. Babies and toddlers have no concept of their parents’ immigration status, and yet it is being used to rob them of what they need to thrive. All children deserve the protection of adults, to live and grow in safety with their loving caregivers without fear. Policymakers have an opportunity to intervene and limit immigration enforcement’s harm on children and strengthen the tenuous scaffolding that keeps families with young children engaged in our society. Intervening now will have cascading benefits throughout the lives of young children and for our nation’s future.”
Kaelin Rapport, Ph.D., Policy Analyst, CLASP: “Immigrant communities and the early educators and caregivers who support them are struggling immensely. Current immigration policies and enforcement practices are leaving parents, providers, and children stressed, traumatized, and sometimes too afraid to leave the house—even to get basic necessities. Workplaces are being raided, people are being stopped in the street for speaking languages other than English, and children are seeing guns drawn on their parents while they’re on the playground. No child should have to worry about whether their parent will make it home from work or running errands. Caregivers and early educators should not have to worry about their own safety while preparing the next generation for a healthy future. Without immediate action from lawmakers to protect our children and immigrant communities, these policies will have rippling consequences that reach across American communities and national borders for generations.”
Elizabeth Gonzalez, Community Organizer, Congress of Communities in Detroit, MI: “Increased immigration operations have brought nothing but fear and harm to children, families, and care providers in Southwest Detroit. As director of Informal Childcaregivers Cohort, I’ve had to educate immigrant child care providers on their rights and how to remain calm if they encounter immigration agents. Over the past year, we’ve seen significant drops in enrollment in our programs and Head Start because families are scared. My own grandson now worries that his loved ones will be taken after his classmate’s parent was taken by ICE. When he sees a law enforcement officer, he asks, ‘is that a good guy or a bad guy?’ and I’ve honestly had to tell him that I don’t know. With our communities under attack, this country no longer feels like the United States of America—we’re just states. But to assure our children and staff at our centers, we say, ‘estamos unidos para proteger a nuestros niños,’ or ‘we are united to protect our children.’ We call on our elected leaders to unite with us to protect our early educators and the children in their care.”
Leah Cates, Executive Director, Second Street Youth Center in Plainfield, NJ: “Immigration enforcement doesn’t just stay out in the streets, it walks into our children’s classrooms. The impacts of this show up in children’s behavior, in their fear, and in their silence. We’re seeing increased anxiety, withdrawal, aggression, difficulty focusing, and developmental regression. Early childhood centers like ours have become more than just places of education. We have become safe havens, emotional support systems, and stabilizing forces. We are doing everything we can to ensure our families know that they can trust us and that they and their children are safe here. We are creating trauma-informed classrooms, providing Know Your Rights workshops, supporting families, and reassuring children they are safe, all while working to educate the youngest minds. But trust is always fragile when fear is constant. We cannot separate immigration policy from childhood development. Our lawmakers must take action now to enact policies that protect all children.”
Wendy Cervantes, Director of Immigration and Immigrant Families at CLASP and Director of the Children Thrive Action Network (CTAN): “The reports released today build off the research that CLASP published in 2018 and demonstrate how the Trump Administration’s immigration policies are once again undermining the well-being of our children and those who care for them. But this time, the scope of the harm is unlike anything we have ever seen, largely due to the historic increases in ICE funding to double down on detention and deportation, and the onslaught of policies to deny immigrant families the ability to meet their basic needs. Anti-immigrant policies that threaten our nation’s early educators, including the nearly 20 percent who are immigrants, further weaken the early care and education infrastructure that the administration has also attacked. Our policymakers must do everything in their power to halt the anti-child attacks, implement policies that will repair the harm, and protect the well-being of the youngest among us.”
Background: For this qualitative research project, the CLASP team conducted focus groups between June and December 2025 with 56 at-risk immigrant parents and family caregivers of 74 children ages six and under, and interviews with 67 early educators and child care providers, WIC staff, home visitors, health care workers, and community advocates in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington.
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The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) is a national, nonpartisan, anti-poverty organization advancing policy solutions for people with low incomes, with a focus on addressing systemic racism as the primary cause of poverty for communities of color.
The Children Thrive Action Network (CTAN) is a national network of children’s advocacy organizations and service providers committed to protecting and defending children in immigrant families, guided by policy principles to ensure that immigration policies safeguard children’s health, safety, and well-being. Since 2020, CTAN has urged federal and state officials to advance the “best interest of the child” in all policies and to reject policies that put children in harm’s way and undermine their safety.
The people who educate, care, and advocate for the nation’s youngest children are directly feeling the effects of federal immigration policies. “Caregiving in Crisis” details the findings from interviews with people who serve immigrant families with children ages five and younger in early care and education and related settings.
CLASP researchers conducted semi-structured interviews between June and December 2025 with 67 center and home-based early educators and child care providers, WIC staff, home visitors, health care workers, and community advocates in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington. While the majority of those interviewed work in early care and education, all of the interviewees provide vital services for and/or advocate on behalf of families.
Many people of those interviewed have parents, friends, or employees who have been arrested, detained, or deported. These arrests have happened just steps from providers; they have experienced uncertainty and threats to their livelihoods; and they have witnessed firsthand how young children are struggling with the stress of the adults who care for them. Their work undergirds the economy and the healthy development of over half of all children ages five and younger in the U.S. It is critical to the greater economy and the mental, physical, and emotional health of young children and their families that policymakers and funders take action to support early care and education services as well as the people who care for our youngest children.
By Suma Setty, Kaelin Rapport, and Emily Rodriguez
The people who educate, care, and advocate for the nation’s youngest children are directly feeling the effects of federal immigration policies. “Caregiving in Crisis” details the findings from interviews with people who serve immigrant families with children ages five and younger in early care and education and related settings.
CLASP researchers conducted semi-structured interviews between June and December 2025 with 67 center and home-based early educators and child care providers, WIC staff, home visitors, health care workers, and community advocates in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington. While the majority of those interviewed work in early care and education, all of the interviewees provide vital services for and/or advocate on behalf of families.
Many people of those interviewed have parents, friends, or employees who have been arrested, detained, or deported. These arrests have happened just steps from providers; they have experienced uncertainty and threats to their livelihoods; and they have witnessed firsthand how young children are struggling with the stress of the adults who care for them. Their work undergirds the economy and the healthy development of over half of all children ages five and younger in the U.S. It is critical to the greater economy and the mental, physical, and emotional health of young children and their families that policymakers and funders take action to support early care and education services as well as the people who care for our youngest children.
A companion report, “Even the Playground Isn’t Safe: How Immigration Policies are Harming Our Youngest Children,” focuses on findings from eight focus groups held in the same states with immigrant parents of children ages six and under. Together, these reports paint a comprehensive picture of the fear and terror that children in immigrant families, child care and early education providers, and the larger community are all living with.
>>Download Caregiving in Crisis
By Suma Setty, Kaelin Rapport, Emily Rodriguez, and Renato Rocha
Between June and December 2025, CLASP researchers conducted interviews and focus groups with 56 immigrant parents who have children ages six and under, and 67 people who provide services to immigrant families with young children, the majority of whom are child care and early care education providers. Through these conversations, which involved parents and providers from Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington, a clear picture emerged of just how dangerous the administration’s relentless attacks on immigrants are for individual families, entire communities, job sectors, and local and state economies.
“Even the Playground Isn’t Safe” focuses on the pervasive fear and uncertainty immigrant parents and their young children have been living with since the beginning of Trump’s second term.
Download the Executive Summary for “Even the Playground Isn’t Safe” in Spanish
Download the Executive Summary for “Even the Playground Isn’t Safe” in Wolof
By Teon Hayes
Founded in 2018 by Black Mamas Matter Alliance, this year’s Black Maternal Health Week invites us to imagine what it truly means for Black mothers to thrive in lives rooted in justice and joy.
Historically, systems and policies affecting Black women have too often been shaped without their voices and ideas from inception through implementation. The danger in this approach is clear: solutions that fail to meet the needs of those they claim to help because those solutions flatten lived experiences into statistics, headlines, or policy debates and ultimately miss the depth, nuance, and everyday realities that should shape those decisions. When Black mothers are not centered, their full humanity is reduced to simplified, incomplete, and inaccurate representations.
What would it look like to build a world where Black mothers are not only heard, but deeply listened to and respected? A world where systems and policies are built with their voices at the center?
My candid conversations with eight of the Black mothers in my life provide some of those answers. Their reflections and raw responses consider what joy feels like, what justice means, and what it would take to truly thrive. As one mother said:
“To feel truly safe, supported, and to experience justice would require something like a cosmic heart transplant in the soul of America. Even if I were given a magic wand and the power to enact sweeping legislative and societal change, it would still not be enough. Laws matter, but the deeper transformation must happen in the hearts and minds of people. So many things would need to change.”
By Wendy Cervantes
CLASP submitted this testimony on HB1870 HD2 SD1, Relating to Protected Community Locations, on April 7, 2026, to the Hawai’i Joint Committee on Ways and Means and Judiciary. In the testimony, CLASP supports the bill, which 1) establishes statewide standards limiting state and county agency participation in civil immigration enforcement in or near protected community locations, 2) requires agencies operating protected locations to adopt and post written policies, provide annual staff training, and maintain data privacy protections by January 1, 2027, and 3) appropriates funds for implementation by the Department of the Attorney General. If enacted, HB1870 HD2 SD1 could help protect children in immigrant families, including the more than 1 in 4 children in Hawai’i who live with at least one immigrant parent, and mitigate the harms associated with immigration enforcement.
By Elyse Shaw and Lorena Roque
As Women’s History Month comes to a close, we should reflect on how far women’s rights have come over the years. However, that’s difficult to do when the Trump Administration has spent the past year engineering a wholesale attack on women’s rights. This onslaught has included attacks on the federal workforce, gutting the Department of Education and the proposed loan caps and loan forgiveness changes, clawing back EEOC guidance on harassment and discrimination at work, canceling grants that support women and LGBTQ+ individuals, and attacks on DEIA and trans people. Taken together, this has allowed the conservative movement to use its authoritarian playbook to strip women of their rights, economic security, and health and well-being. These are not one-off issue areas or separate attacks: this is a coordinated campaign to exert power and control over every aspect of women’s lives.
Instead of promoting policies that support all working women, such as paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and equal pay, a new report from the Heritage Foundation outlines what type of women they actually want to support: cisgender straight white women who stay home to raise kids while their husbands work. Writers of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation have gone into detail about their pronatalist policy agenda for women in their latest report, Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. The Trump Administration has taken this playbook as its own and already begun to dismantle policies, setting women back half a century. All of these policy decisions are intentional and lead to the Trump Administration’s goal: restricting women’s autonomy and freedom in the United States.
Since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the conservative movement has been working to strip reproductive rights from women across the U.S. The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 through the Dobbs decision signified an opportunity for the conservative movement to further erode access to basic reproductive health care and control women’s lives. Since Dobbs, women have been denied basic reproductive health care, with the delay or denial of care even leading to death. Some Southern states have sought to criminalize and violate women in regards to their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. For example, a brain-dead woman in Georgia was forced to stay on life support against her family’s wishes, in an attempt to maintain her nine week pregnancy to viability and was forced to give “birth” while coma-induced. In another case, a Texas woman who suffered a miscarriage was charged with “abuse of a corpse” and jailed for five months. Just weeks ago, a sexual assault survivor in Tennessee, who was hours into pre-surgery preparation for sterilization, was denied that procedure at the last minute when hospital staff decided they had a “duty to protect her sacred fertility.”
These types of cases are part of a larger playbook for the right-wing movement on who should be given government support. In the new playbook, “Saving American Families,” the Heritage Foundation authors acknowledge the high cost of child care, but instead of investing in universal child care or funding Head Start, they instead focus on incentivizing women to leave the workforce and stay home to raise children. They recommend limiting child care credits, programs, and tax benefits to families with one working parent and one stay-at-home parent. The paper details many other policies aimed at increasing the U.S. birthrate by restricting women’s autonomy – such as limiting public benefits to heterosexual married couples and banning no-fault divorce – while punishing single women and mothers. The report recommends creating stricter work reporting requirements for single mothers who access basic needs programs, rolling back access to higher education, eliminating all government-run registered apprenticeship programs, and eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit. All of this would disproportionately impact single mothers, who are more likely to be women of color and paid low wages, further marginalizing them.
Postsecondary education is a key pathway to economic security for women, given that women with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, only slightly more than men with a high school diploma. At the same time, women rely on professional and post-baccalaureate programs for career advancement and economic mobility. In 2024, the Heritage Foundation made it clear that they believe education, especially higher education, is to blame for the nation’s declining birth rates. Their solution: restrict access to education for women. As a result, the Trump Administration is attempting to dismantle the Department of Education by restructuring departments and reassigning higher education grant programs to other federal agencies. In addition, the administration is threatening funding for colleges that maintain their commitment to DEI and proposing to overhaul student loans and loan forgiveness programs. These combined actions will make it much more difficult, if not impossible, for women to attend undergraduate or graduate degree programs.
On the first day of his second term, Trump launched an attack on DEIA and transgender and gender-nonbinary people, leading to the shuttering of federal offices and agencies, ending of programs and initiatives, and discontinuing of grant activities or entire grant programs that supported women. Across the federal government, even mentioning the term “women” was enough to get a project, program, or grant cancelled – from workforce development grants to grants for research into women’s health. And critical initiatives to advance women continue to feel these impacts. According to recent research, women scientists were disproportionately impacted by the NIH grant cancellations, as they were leading almost 60 percent of de-funded projects. These attacks will have long-lasting impacts on women’s health, well-being, and economic security.
These policy decisions by the Trump Administration are driving women out of the workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 455,000 women left the labor market from January to August 2025. For the rest of 2025, only 184,000 women re-entered the workforce compared to 572,000 men during the same time period. A national survey revealed that 42 percent of women who left the workforce last year did so due to caregiving responsibilities, 37 percent left due to inadequate workplace flexibility, and 18 percent left because of insufficient wages to meet the high cost of child care. Strikingly, Black women have been the hardest hit by the labor market in the past year. By December 2025, Black women’s unemployment rate hit 7.3 percent, double that of white women and the highest it has been since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Trump Administration’s shrinking of the federal government has had the biggest impact on Black women’s unemployment rate. That’s because Black women represent 6 percent of the labor force and 12 percent of the federal labor force. With almost 330,000 federal jobs cut in 2025, Black women represent 33 percent of those job cuts. The Trump Administration will only amplify these numbers by eliminating minimum wage and overtime protections for millions of home health care and domestic workers.
At the same time, women can’t achieve economic security without access to comprehensive health care. Abortion bans reduce women’s earnings and labor force participation, especially among Black and Latina women. In fact, when including in-state restrictive abortion policies, such as mandatory waiting times and unnecessary restrictions for providers, the U.S. economy has lost over $133 billion annually since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The economic cost of restrictive reproductive health care transcends abortion access because it also includes maternal mortality, the absence of cancer screenings and treatment, and the lack of access to pre/post-natal and doula care. Just to offer two examples: 81 percent of Black maternal deaths in Michigan are preventable and 40 percent of counties in Colorado are considered maternal health care deserts, meaning they lack a hospital, birth center, or obstetric care providers.
With Project 2025 as the playbook of the current Trump Administration, the newest Heritage Foundation’s report is alarming and should not be taken lightly. Additionally, with the rise of ‘tradwives’ and ‘princess treatment’ getting more traction on popular media platforms, the normalization of women’s subjugation hides what these conservative policies actually promote: the dangerous and violent reality of the government controlling women’s lives and bodies.