A briefing paper prepared by Bethany L. Letiecq for the Council on Contemporary Families symposium Policies Affecting Families: What We Know, and What to Expect in the Second Trump Term
Immigrants have never had an easy welcome to the United States (US). However, in recent decades, the criminalization of immigrants has intensified through the enactment of US laws and policies targeting immigrants for incarceration and mass deportation. Although Democratic and Republican leaders have supported these efforts to varying degrees, Donald Trump has mastered the use of the “Immigrant Threat Narrative” to motivate his supporters and justify his punishing, anti-immigrant policy priorities. In both his 2016 and more recent 2024 presidential campaigns, Trump portrayed immigrants as a threat to the American way of life, to American values and customs, and to public safety—even falsely accusing Haitian residents in Ohio of eating pets. On the campaign trail in 2015, Trump famously and falsely asserted: “The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists.” At the time, such falsehoods drew public outrage and led to breakups with his corporate partners, yet Trump overcame these public rebukes and went on to win the 2016 election.
Early in the 2017 Trump presidency, his administration executed many of his immigration priorities, including the Muslim travel ban, a ban on temporary work visas, efforts to limit the admission of refugees and asylum-seekers, and the expansion of the public charge rule. In 2017, Trump directed a wall to be built along the Mexico-United States border. Under a “Zero Tolerance” approach, Trump also moved to separate children from their parents or guardians as a deterrent for migration, an idea that came from Tom Homan, a long-time border patrol agent who was appointed to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration. In 2024 Trump announced that Homan would serve as the “Border Czar” in his new administration.
I was conducting research in partnership with Central American immigrant mothers in the Washington, DC area during Trump’s 2017 ascension to the White House. At the time, Trump’s threatening, anti-immigrant, and nativist campaign rhetoric served to heighten the fears of an already fearful community. Indeed, the 134 undocumented immigrant mothers that we surveyed expressed significant anxiety and worries about detention, deportation, and family separation. Once Trump took office, the immigrant community went into hiding, forced to operate in the shadows while living under threat of ICE actions—or worse—enduring immigration raids and the subsequent separations and deportations of family and community members.
In the US, an estimated 16.7 million people, including roughly six million children, share a home with at least one family member, often a parent, who is undocumented. Studies show that children, like their parents, also experience significant physical, emotional, developmental, and economic repercussions due to immigration enforcement actions, such as raids and arrests of parents and family and community members. Forcibly separating children from their parents causes serious trauma and lasting harm, which can persist into adulthood.
To counter the anti-immigrant harms perpetrated by the first Trump administration, immigrant rights and legal justice organizations mobilized across the nation, offering countless “Know Your Rights” trainings focused on what to do if confronted by ICE agents. The trainings reminded individuals of their rights (e.g., the right to remain silent) and what papers to carry with them (and not carry) at all times. In the community where my colleagues and I worked in partnership with Central American immigrant families to carry out our research and action plans, we also joined with immigration attorneys to offer family preparedness planning sessions, where families developed child care plans, including legal guardianship plans, should parents be detained and separated from their children.
In the summer of 2017, the US government began separating families at the border. By mid-2018, under the “Zero Tolerance” policy, the Trump administration had separated over 5,000 children, including infants, from their families, with no tracking process or record keeping that would allow for reunification. After horrific pictures of children in cages and significant national and international criticism of these practices, on June 20, 2018, Trump signed an executive order to end this practice of family separations. However, the administration provided little support to reunify the separated children with their families, necessitating nonprofit organizations and their volunteers to drive reunification efforts.
Beginning in 2021, the Biden administration did reverse many of the Trump administration’s strictest anti-immigrant policies, but deportations and removals of newly arrived immigrants at the border and those with serious criminal records remained a feature of the government’s immigration practices. In 2021, the Biden administration also established the Family Reunification Task Force to identify and reunite separated children with their families. Although more than 3,200 children have been reunited, it is estimated that at least 1,400 children have yet to be reunified.
A Brief History of Immigration Laws
It is important to place this recent immigration history in context. For hundreds of years, the border between the United States and Mexico was a permeable line that allowed for movement of peoples and the exchange of goods and services across borders with little concern or governmental oversight. Among the first significant laws to restrict immigration into the United States was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. This act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US, was the first federal law that prohibited entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the public good. Between 1942 and 1964, another significant immigration labor law, called the Bracero Program, imported some 4.5 million Mexican workers into the US as temporary workers. At its height in the late 1950s, over 400,000 immigrants worked in the US per year under the Bracero Program, which officially ended in 1964. Yet this pattern of “circular migration” continued for decades, where Mexican migrants entered the US to work, stayed for relatively short periods of time, and returned to Mexico to live with their families until the next wave of seasonal work. It is estimated that, between 1965 and 1986, some 28 million undocumented immigrants, mainly from Mexico, were drawn into the US to work seasonally to meet labor demands.
Immigration has since been restricted under both Republican and Democratic administrations. In 1986, to stem the flow of unauthorized immigration, Congress passed and President Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). While IRCA provided for the legalization of more than three million people, it also made it illegal for the first time in US history for employers to knowingly hire an undocumented immigrant. Congress followed IRCA with the passage of the 1990 Immigration Act, signed by President G. H. W. Bush, that created various immigration work categories (e.g., H-1B Visas), the Temporary Protected Status program, and limited the number of legal “unskilled worker” immigrants to just 10,000 people per year, despite the continuing high demand for immigrant labor. The shortage of visas to work and live in the US incentivized “irregular migration.” In response, President Clinton signed into law the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). The IIRIRA included a series of laws that centered imprisonment and punishment as core components of the nation’s immigration system and led to massive growth in immigrant detention centers and the criminalization of immigrants in the US.
Today, the United States finds itself in an immigration quagmire, with its decades of legal remedies failing to stem the pushes and pulls of immigration into the US. Indeed, since IRCA, the population of undocumented immigrants in the US is much larger, more settled, and more integrated into US society. And many employers if not entire industries remain heavily reliant on their labor. The policies and enforcement practices of the 1990s that disrupted circular migration have had the unintended consequences of dramatically increasing the number of settled migrants who are “long-term stayers” with their families. Yet, the criminalization of immigration, or what sociologists call “illegality,” has caused heightened fear, insecurity, and unpredictability among people in vulnerable legal statuses and their family members, including US citizen children. Living in this context of illegality and fearing incarceration, deportation and family separation have contributed to employment insecurity and exploitation, housing instability, educational disruptions, less uptake of nutrition assistance and medical care for children, and poor physical and mental health outcomes for parents and their children.
The Era of Illegality
Prior to this modern era of illegality, deportations were less common, hovering around 10,000 to 30,000 annually, depending on the decade. However, post IRCA and IIRIRA, deportations began rising swiftly. By 2012, the US was deporting upwards of 400,000 immigrants annually. By the end of his administration, President Obama was dubbed, “Deporter-in-Chief.” Indeed, mass deportations have continued to the present, criminalizing and punishing unauthorized immigrants—especially men from Mexico and Central America—and creating high levels of stress and anxiety among immigrant families with undocumented members.
My research with colleagues and community partners has documented these stressors. In our survey research with undocumented Central American immigrant mothers, we found that 50% of mothers experienced depression in the range for clinical concern and over 80% expressed significant worries about deportation and family separation. In our more recent research in the same community using in-depth interviews with 22 undocumented Central American immigrant mothers, we found that the structural forces bearing down on immigrant communities to create a hostile landscape and familial hardships deprive these mothers of economic and other resources, exposing them to precarious, overcrowded housing, and toxic, abusive power relations within their families and with others in the community (e.g., employers, landlords). These oppressive structural forces also position women as dependent on men and their wages, limiting their opportunities to leave unhealthy or dangerous relationships, live independently, and/or earn a living wage to support their children. Familial circumstances can be ruinous if men are deported. In our study, several mothers rearing young children described losing their housing, enduring food insecurity, and managing an accumulation of hardships after losing their mates to deportation.
The current immigration policy context has taken decades to take shape and certainly evolved across Republican and Democratic administrations. However, since 2016, Americans’ views on immigration have become more polarized politically, fomented by xenophobic, anti-immigrant hate-mongering. Although a majority of Americans (55%) in 2023 said the growing number of newcomers from other countries strengthens American society, four in ten (40%)—harkening the Immigrant Threat Narrative—said newcomer immigrants threaten traditional American customs, values, and public safety. Although nearly 60% of Americans polled in 2023 supported a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants provided they meet certain requirements, Democrats were more supportive than Republicans. Nearly half (48%) of Republicans in 2023 said all immigrants living in the US illegally should be deported. This is an increase from 32% in 2013 and 44% in 2021.
Immigration under President Trump’s Second Term
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump again deployed his anti-immigrant rhetoric to spur voter support among his followers, yet this time he centered his rhetoric on promises to deport the nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants and their children, many of whom are US citizens, currently residing in the US. After winning the election, Trump wasted no time moving his anti-immigrant agenda forward. He appointed Stephen Miller (architect of anti-immigration policy during Trump’s first administration) as his Deputy Chief of Staff and Tom Homan as the “Border Czar” in charge of immigration and border security. Homan, the early promoter of family separation under “Zero Tolerance,” has asserted that family detention centers are “on the table” and that US citizen children may be deported with their parents or guardians in what portends to be the largest deportation operation in US history.
Since taking office on January 20, 2025, President Trump and his administration have issued numerous executive orders and initiatives related to immigration enforcement, including the suspension of entry of aliens at the southern border, increased and militarized border security, suspension of refugee resettlement, increased immigration raids in the interior of the US, and challenges to birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. To carry out his mass deportation plans, Trump has engaged the US military and is seeking to send upwards of 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo Bay, the detention facility on the US naval base near Cuba. As ICE conducts raids and escalates deportations, many of Trump’s orders are being contested in the courts. And, as in 2017, immigrant rights and legal justice organizations (and our community-based research collaborative) are once again mobilizing Know Your Rights campaigns to support immigrant communities and solidarity networks as they work to resist and survive the most significant anti-immigrant movement in decades.
About the Author
Bethany Letiecq is a Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University, President of the National Council on Family Relations, and long-time member of the Council on Contemporary Families. She can be reached at bletiecq@gmu.edu. Follow her on Bluesky at @bletiecq.bsky.social.
