DACA’s Effect on the Mental Health of U.S. Citizen Children

Guest blogger: Rachel Cefalu, University of San Francisco law student:

DACA has far reaching implications, not just on people with undocumented status, but for their U.S. citizen children. DACA was implemented in 2012, and now many Dreamers are young adults who have children of their own. Do the benefits of DACA get transferred to the recipients’ U.S. citizen children? A recent study, one of the first of its kind to confidently isolate the effect of DACA protection for mothers and their children, claims that DACA has major benefits on the mental health of U.S. citizen children. Children, who are the next generation of leaders in this country.

The report titled “Protecting Unauthorized Immigrant Mothers Improves Their Children’s Mental Health,” published in the Fall of 2017, was created by a team of researchers led by the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab and supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Ford Foundation. This study focused on the intergenerational effects of the DACA program, and whether the benefits of DACA are transmitted to recipients’ children. This study focused on Oregon’s Emergency Medicaid government program which covers labor and delivery health coverage regardless of documentation status. Emergency Medicaid is overwhelmingly used by undocumented women who give birth in U.S. hospitals. Because this program focused on data regarding births by women who were covered under Emergency Medicaid, it is very likely that the mothers covered under Emergency Medicaid were undocumented. Because these women gave birth to children in the state of Oregon, their children are U.S. citizens who are typically eligible to participate in Medicaid. As a result, the study was able to track the health of these U.S. citizen children through Medicaid claims. Further, they were able to look specifically at a particular subset of mothers who were born both days before and after the DACA program eligibility cutoff date to assess whether there was any difference between the health outcomes of children whose mothers were covered by DACA protections. The conclusion? The study found that mental health diagnoses were much lower in children whose mothers receive DACA protection.

Why am I sharing news of this study with you? The answer is simple. With everything that DACA policy decisions concern, I really want to emphasize how truly devastating this DACA limbo has been and continues to be for the tiniest humans among us. President Trump’s racist and harmful immigration policies create toxic stress for young children which has a devastating impact on their emotional and psychological development, and will continue to negatively impact them for the rest of their lives. Not just for the duration of this administration, but for the rest of their lives.  The toxic stress resulting from the uncertainty of their family’s future results in lower performance in school and lower earnings in the labor market.

Unless Congress acts, these children face the enormous stress of wondering when/if their parent/parents will become officially unauthorized and if they will face deportation. It is unacceptable to instill this type of fear in our immigrant communities. It is unacceptable for a child to go to school worrying that she may be separated from her family, or worrying that she may be taken away from everything she has ever known and brought to a land that she has never been. Even though many children of DACA recipients have U.S. citizenship, parents often times will take their U.S. citizen children out of the country with them so as to keep their family unit intact.

 Congress should make it a top priority to pass legislation to continue the DACA program, as well as to offer these Dreamers a path to legal citizenship. These results show that policies like DACA have a much broader effect than simply providing protections for its undocumented recipients. DACA deeply effects the next generation of children, of Americans. I beg the Congress to critically and thoughtfully consider what the true impact of a “mass deportation agenda” will have on all Americans, but especially on the littlest and most vulnerable among us. It is everyone’s duty to foster an environment of support for all children, regardless of their family’s immigration status. No child deserves to grow up thinking they are dispensable and unwanted. Our immigration system is broken and it is time we truly put our good faith effort into reforming it.

My hope in sharing this study is that immigrant rights advocates will continue to seek out partnerships with leaders both in the public and private sector, in the medical, legal, education, policy, and economic fields in order to build a diverse coalition of stakeholders to push for policy and legal changes that address the experiences and realities of children living in immigrant communities. Together, we can make a difference in addressing the issues facing the next generation of Americans.  

bh