CLASP
The Center for Law and Social Policy
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.
>> Read “Even the Playground Isn’t Safe”
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.”
Please click here to read the entire piece on Medium.
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.
>>Download testimony here
>>Download 2025 Impact Report
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.
Controlling Women’s Lives: The Pronatalist Movement
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.
Limiting Access to Higher Education
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.
Federal Attacks on DEI/Gender Ideology
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.
Economic Impacts
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.
Updated March 23, 2026, by Priya Pandey; Spanish version added September 2025 (see link below)
Originally published in 2019 by Rebecca Ullrich, updated in February 2022 by Alejandra Londono Gomez, and updated further in January 2025 and March 2026 by Priya Pandey.
Early childhood programs play an important role in the lives of young children and their families. But in our current political climate, families across the country are questioning whether it’s safe to attend or enroll.
In January 2025, the Trump Administration rescinded the Biden Administration’s guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection enforcement actions in certain “protected areas.” Immigration enforcement actions had previously been restricted at or near these locations, which include early childhood programs such as licensed child care, preschool, pre-kindergarten, and Head Start programs.
In response to the administration’s actions in January 2025 and since, we have updated “A Guide to Creating ‘Safe Space’ Policies for Early Childhood Programs,” which gives practitioners, advocates, and policymakers information and resources to design and implement “safe space” policies that safeguard early childhood programs against immigration enforcement, as well as protect families’ safety and privacy. The guide also includes sample policy text that early childhood providers can adapt for their programs.
CLASP submitted this statement for the record in response to the March 18, 2026, House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government for the hearing entitled, “Immigration Policy by Court Order: The Adverse Effects of Plyler v. Doe.” The statement makes the case for the importance of upholding Plyler v. Doe’s constitutional protections that guarantee all children access to K-12 education regardless of immigration status. The statement uplifts the importance of immigrant students to our nation’s future workforce and demonstrates how denying access to a basic education will have long-term harmful consequences for immigrant students, U.S. communities, and the economy.
>>Download Statement Here
By Elyse Shaw
Since January 2025, the Trump Administration has embarked on a wholesale attack on transgender individuals. Under the guise of “protecting women,” the administration has been simultaneously marginalizing transgender people and rolling back women’s rights. I saw both of these actions firsthand during my time in the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Women’s Bureau (WB). On the first day of his second term, Trump launched his attacks on DEIA and transgender and gender-nonbinary people, forcing the WB to strip any mention of the word “gender” from its website. Denying services to transgender and gender-nonconforming people was also the rationale used by the administration for cancelling 25 of the WB’s active grants, cutting vital funding for all women. These actions have only intensified and gained momentum.
On February 18, 2026, the Kansas state legislature overrode Governor Kelly’s veto of SB 244, a sweeping anti-transgender measure that restricts access to bathrooms and locker rooms in public buildings based on sex assigned at birth, with criminal and civil penalties for using the “wrong” facility. The bill also allows for bounty-style lawsuits that individuals can file against those they believe are breaking the bathroom laws, and invalidates all Kansas driver’s licenses and birth certificates with updated gender markers.
Overnight, Kansas sent letters to all trans individuals stating that their licenses are invalid and must be surrendered. This has effectively blocked transgender Kansans from being able to drive to work, pick up kids, get groceries, or even to go to the DMV to surrender their ID in compliance with the new law. In order to get a corrected ID, trans Kansans are also required to pay the fee associated with replacing their license. Invalidating a driver’s license not only leaves transgender individuals unable to drive to and from work and maintain employment, it also means they cannot open a new bank account, apply for a loan, rent an apartment, start a new job, fly on commercial airlines, or vote. Invalidating IDs and stripping access to public restrooms denies trans people the right to exist in public space and have their voices heard in elections.
One week later, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission continued this anti-trans agenda by reversing its long-standing position that trans federal employees have the right to access bathrooms and other sex-segregated facilities consistent with their gender identity, denying them the ability to safely access bathrooms while at work. This is especially concerning given the removal of all gender-neutral bathrooms at the DOL under the Trump Administration, a policy I can only assume was implemented across the federal government.
These inhumane measures will only further push transgender people out of public spaces and limit already constrained job prospects. Research has found that transgender individuals experience either harassment or violence when attempting to access public restrooms, or are outright denied access. These situations are worse when trans people are required to use bathrooms according to their sex assigned at birth. Such policies leave transgender people few options: trying to avoid using the bathroom at school, work, or in public; limiting their food and water intake (at the detriment to their physical health); or meticulously planning their days around access to safe bathrooms. As a result, 58 percent of trans survey respondents reported avoiding going out in public due to a lack of access to safe bathrooms, with 38 percent saying they actively avoid places without such access. If a place of employment is not one of those safe spaces, transgender individuals will have even more limited employment opportunities, negatively impacting their economic security.
These attacks on transgender rights will have long-standing detrimental economic impacts on transgender individuals. In 2021, transgender people were almost twice as likely to live in poverty compared with straight cisgender people (21 percent versus 11 percent). Every single transgender person interviewed for a 2020 study said they’d had a hard time finding and holding stable employment due to bias and discrimination. Economic insecurity also leads to increased experiences of food and housing insecurity: half of transgender men and two-thirds of transgender women reported not having stable housing or experiencing homelessness. The attacks and threats coming from the administration will only create more hardship.
All of these policies have been enacted under the guise of “protecting women,” but this administration, which has long been plagued by accusations of sexual assault and misconduct, does not truly care about women’s health or safety. While the impacts of these measures are felt most acutely by transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals, they also increase violence against cisgender women. Cisgender female athletes, especially women of color, have dealt with numerous accusations that they are transgender in an effort to invalidate and undermine their progress. Women are increasingly being accosted in bathrooms, with the demand that they “prove” they are women: one teen had to go so far as to unzip her hoodie and show she had breasts before being allowed to leave a restroom. Another cisgender female Walmart employee was fired after a man followed her into the bathroom and shouted anti-trans threats at her.
The fight for transgender rights is the fight for all of our rights. The administration and Republican state leaders are setting a dangerous precedent and assuming that cisgender individuals will not step in to defend trans rights. This precedent can then be used against other marginalized groups, slowly chipping away at our collective power and rights, including our rights to exist safely and freely in public spaces and to vote.
In these moments, I return to these wise words from Audre Lorde: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” Our rights are inextricably linked, and cannot be separated.