It’s not just the 700,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients across the U.S. who stand to suffer harm should the Supreme Court side with the Trump administration in its decision to terminate the program. Researchers say that in California, the 72,000 U.S. citizen children of DACA recipients there would also stand to “suffer long-lasting health consequences” if the program ends for good.
“The imminent threat of losing DACA protection places children at risk of losing parental nurturance,” dozens of child advocacy and medical organizations said in a legal brief, “as well losing income, food security, housing, access to health care, educational opportunities, and the sense of safety and security that is the foundation of healthy child development.” While DACA is still in place as the Supreme Court makes its decision, the fact that parents enrolled in the program are in limbo has been enough to terrorize their kids.
“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,” researchers cited in the brief said, “not to mention the harm to them caused by the actual detention and deportation of their parents.” Researchers stated that kids as young as three years old have expressed fear of losing their mom or dad to deportation.
Nationally, a quarter of a million U.S. citizen kids have at least one parent who is a DACA recipient, and these families have been able to thrive here not just because mom and dad can now work and drive legally, but because the program has provided peace of mind. “Data gathered prior to the initial DACA repeal announcement in 2017, for example, found that children with moms eligible for the program had better mental health than those with immigrant moms not eligible for the program,” the news website California Health Report said.
But the Trump administration has sought to make the abuse of brown children regardless of immigration status official U.S. policy, implementing attacks on working families through the “public charge” rule change and jailing kids despite research showing that even short amounts of detention are incredibly harmful. “Consider the damage being done every day by allowing this alarming situation to continue,” United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said about our nation’s attacks on these kids earlier this year.
And consider the damage being done by the Trump administration every day as families wait for a decision on the DACA program. “This decision is one that has high stakes, not just for DACA recipients but for hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizen children who are critical to our nation’s future,” the Center for Law and Social Policy’s Wendy Cervantes said. “This is their home and we’re undermining their ability to achieve their full potential.”