Enforcement Policy Effects on Children, Families, and Communities

From the Center for American Progress:

How Today’s Immigration Enforcement Policies Impact Children, Families, and Communities     

By Joanna Dreby

What happens to children when their parents are deported? How do these deportations, now more numerous than ever, affect families and the communities in which they live?

We argue in this report that deportations break families up and have a wider effect on the community as a whole, not just the individual and the family involved.

Deportations leave children in foster care and create a large number of single mothers struggling to make ends meet. But even families who do not directly experience the detention or deportation of a loved one feel its effects: children and parents live in constant fear of separation, children routinely conflate the police with immigration officials and begin to associate all immigrants with illegal status, regardless of their own identity or legal status.

Read more and download this report here.

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