There’s only one Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals beneficiary in the Ortiz household, but the entire family is anxious. Beneficiary Marlen says that her son, a U.S. citizen, is also struggling. “Ortiz stays strong for her son, but he can sense when she’s sad or anxious,” Teen Vogue reports. “At these times, she says that Jordan ‘doesn’t want to talk to people; he just wants to be near me.’”
As the Supreme Court decides DACA’s fate (a decision will come within the first half of 2020), researchers, children’s advocates, and parents have continued speaking out about the widespread repercussions should the program end. Already, “Even the threat of separation from their parents can cause children to suffer significant physiological stress that threatens their mental and physical health and their overall development,” a number of groups said in a legal brief last month.
Angelica Villalobos said that she’s been helping care for the children of a family member who was deported seven years ago. But now, with DACA up in the air, she’s struggling with the reality that not only could her own kids lose her to deportation, but the kids she’s caring for would also be further traumatized by yet another deportation. Reports Teen Vogue, “Her oldest kids vividly remember what happened to their aunt. ‘It’s always a constant reminder for them that this might happen to us,’ she says.”
Dr. Julie Linton, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health’s executive committee, told Teen Vogue that kids don’t have to understand policy or the ongoing court fight over DACA to understand its importance. “Certainly a three-year-old can’t articulate, ‘I’m scared that my mother will be deported as a result of the termination of DACA,’” she said. “But I can tell you that they will be able to sense that stress and they may manifest it through behavioral changes like tantrums or acting out. They may have regression in speech milestones and toileting, and have eating and sleeping problems.”
What should be infuriating everyone is that none of this has to be happening, because the House passed legislation that would put Angelica, Marlen, and 700,000 other DACA recipients on a path to citizenship and help ensure the well-being of 250,000 U.S. citizen kids months ago, but the Republican-led Senate refuses to bring it up for a vote. It adds on to the fact that state-sanctioned child abuse, regardless of immigration status, has become official U.S. policy under the Trump administration.
Dr. Linton said that there is something we can do to protect kids right now, and that’s to keep DACA in place. While it’s not a perfect program, it has been shown to provide much-needed security to hundreds of thousands of families across the U.S. “It’s really important to remember that the impact of these policies is not only on DACA recipients themselves. It’s on entire families and communities,” she said. “The kids we’re talking about are in our classes, in our neighborhoods, on our sports teams.”