WASHINGTON — Not long after President Donald Trump took office in January, the staff at bilingual preschool CentroNía began trying to figure out what to do when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials came to the door. As ICE became a regular presence in their historically Latino neighborhood this summer, teachers stopped taking kids to nearby parks, libraries and playgrounds that were once considered an extension of the classroom.
And in October, the school canceled its popular Hispanic Heritage Month parade, when immigrant parents typically dress their children in costumes and soccer jerseys from their home countries. ICE began detaining the employees, all of whom have legal status, and school officials feared they would draw more unwelcome attention.
All of this happened before ICE officials arrested a teacher at a Spanish preschool in Chicago in October. The event has left immigrants who work in childcare, along with the families who rely on them, scared and vulnerable.
Trump’s push for the largest mass deportation in history has had an extraordinary impact on the child care field, which is heavily dependent on immigrants and already strained by worker shortages. Immigrant child care workers and preschool teachers, most of whom work and live in the U.S. legally, say they are plagued by anxiety over possible encounters with ICE officials. Some have left the field and others have been pushed out by changes in immigration policy.
CentroNía CEO Myrna Peralta said all employees must have legal status and work authorization. But the presence of ICE and the fear it instills has changed the way the school operates.
“That really dominates all of our decision-making,” Peralta said.
Instead of taking children for walks around the neighborhood, staff push children in strollers down the hallways. And staff turned the classroom into a miniature library when the school canceled its partnership with the local library.
Schools and child care centers were once off-limits to ICE officials, in part to keep children out of harm’s way. But those rules were lifted not long after Trump’s inauguration. Instead, ICE officials are encouraged to use “common sense.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, defended ICE officials’ decision to enter the Chicago nursery. She said the teacher, who had a work permit and was later fired, was a passenger in the car pursued by ICE officials. She got out of the car and ran into the daycare, McLaughlin said, stressing that the teacher was “arrested in the lobby, not in the school.” The man driving drove into the daycare, where officials detained him.
About one-fifth of American child care workers were born outside the United States, and one-fifth are Latino. In some places, especially big cities, the immigrant share is much higher: In the District of Columbia, California and New York, about 40% of child care workers are foreign-born, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley.
Immigrants in the field tend to be better educated than those born in the United States. Those from Latin America are helping to meet the growing demand for Spanish-speaking preschools like CentroNía, where some parents are enrolling their children to enable them to begin learning another language.
In 2021, the American Immigration Council estimated that more than three-quarters of immigrants working in early care and education were living and working in the US legally. Preschools like CentroNía perform rigorous background checks, including verifying that employees have work authorization.
There is evidence that the toll on labor is increasing. Since January, the number of immigrant child care workers has fallen by an estimated 39,000. message New America, a left-leaning think tank, published on Wednesday. This, in turn, made it more difficult for mothers of US-born children under the age of 6. Researchers estimate there are 79,000 fewer in the workforce due to the increase in ICE arrests.
In addition to deportation efforts, the Trump administration has stripped hundreds of thousands of immigrants of their legal status in recent months. Many of them fled violence, poverty or natural disasters in their homes and received temporary protected status that allowed them to live and work legally in the U.S. But Trump ended those programs and drove many out of work — and out of the country. Last month alone, 300,000 immigrants from Venezuela lost their protected status.
CentroNía lost two employees when they lost TPS, Peralta said, and a Nicaraguan immigrant working as a teacher left on his own. Tierra Encantada, which operates Spanish preschools in several states, let a dozen teachers leave when they lost TPS.
At CentroNía, one employee was apprehended by ICE while walking down the street and held for several hours, failing to contact colleagues to tell them where she was. She was released that evening, said principal Joangelee Hernández-Figueroa.
Another staff member, teacher Edelmira Kitchen, said she was pulled over by ICE on her way to work in September. Officers demanded she get out of the car so they could question her. Kitchen, a U.S. citizen who immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child, said she refused and was eventually let go.
“I felt like I had my rights violated,” Kitchen said.
Hernández-Figueroa said the increased ICE presence during the federal crackdown in the city took a toll on the mental health of employees. Some went to the hospital with panic attacks in the middle of the school day.
When the city sent mental health consultants to the school earlier this year as part of a partnership with the Department of Behavioral Health, school officials had them work with teachers rather than students, worried their anxiety would spill over into the classroom.
“If the teachers aren’t good,” Hernández-Figueroa said, “the kids won’t be either.”
It’s not just adults who feel more anxious. At the Guidepost Montessori School outside Portland, Oregon, teachers watched preschoolers change in the weeks after ICE arrested the school in July. After pulling over a father who was driving his child to school, officers encountered him in the school parking lot and attempted to arrest him. In the ensuing commotion, the school went into lockdown: Children were pulled from the playground and teachers played loud music and had children sing to drown out the screams.
Amy Lomanto, the school’s principal, said teachers have seen more outbursts among students and more students have retreated to what the school calls a “control station,” an area in the main office with clumsy toys that children can use to calm themselves.
She said what happened at her school underscored that even wealthy communities like the one the school serves are not immune to these events.
“In the current situation, more and more of us are likely to experience this kind of trauma,” she said. “This level of fear is now much more pervasive throughout our society.”
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