Conclusion

This paper assessed the impact of increased immigration enforcement—measured by the number of ICE arrests—on the child care and maternal labor markets. Our results provide four main insights. First, foreign-born child care labor declined, particularly among high-education and Mexican immigrants. Second, certain groups of U.S.-born individuals also became less likely to work in child care, including those with low-education and those of Mexican descent. Third, we find that the reduction in child care employment was concentrated in the post-Trump time period, which in this paper spans from February to July of 2025. In other words, the estimates suggest that the impact of ICE arrests after President Trump’s inauguration was more negative for child care employment than it had been before he took office. Finally, increased ICE activity reduced the employment of mothers with preschool-aged children, particularly in the period after Trump became president.

Our results are consistent with those from Ali, Brown, and Herbst finding that the Secure Communities program reduced the supply of U.S.- and foreign-born labor to the child care market, particularly among Hispanics employed in the center-based sector.¹ The maternal employment results in this report are also consistent with those from East, Velasquez, and colleagues, as well as an additional paper from East and Velasquez, who find that the Secure Communities program had larger labor supply effects on high-skilled U.S. natives.² Finally, our maternal employment results are broadly consistent with previous work by Amuedo-Dorantes and Sevilla as well as economic researchers Patricia Cortés and José Tessada, who find that in response to increases in the supply of low-skilled immigrants, high-skilled women spend less time on basic child care tasks and more time on market work.³

An interesting feature of our results is that the reduction in child care labor is concentrated in the center- and home-based sectors. The private household sector, on the other hand, experienced an increase in employment, driven by foreign-born individuals in the period after President Trump took office. Therefore, it appears that some workers left the formal child care sector in order to provide informal caregiving services as a babysitter, nanny, or au pair. This pattern is consistent with the results from Ali, Brown, and Herbst, who find that Secure Communities reduced employment primarily in the center-based sector.⁴ The authors posit that center-based workers are more exposed to government agencies and officials through wage reporting as well as licensing and regulatory oversight. Such dynamics could be at play in the current environment. Given that a single center-based worker is able to care for more children than one in a private household setting, our results suggest that total caregiving capacity has declined.

Why would the employment of U.S.-born child care workers fall at the same time that immigrants became less likely to work in the sector? Two explanations seem plausible. First, the increase in ICE arrests had a chilling effect on some groups of U.S. native workers. Indeed, we find that U.S.-born Hispanics—and particularly those of Mexican descent—experienced the largest reductions in child care employment. Given that those with Mexican citizenship are heavily targeted by ICE agents, a “chilling effects” story seems reasonable. Second, a simple trade model allows for the possibility that immigrants and U.S. natives do not compete for the same jobs at child care businesses. Instead, they may possess complementary—or imperfectly substitutable—skills and work experience, so that changes in the demand for immigrant workers lead to similar changes in the demand for U.S. native workers. Therefore, it is possible that the recent increase in ICE arrests pushed foreign-born individuals out of the child care labor market, which in turn decreased the demand for their U.S.-born counterparts.

We end by acknowledging some limitations of this work. First, our work covers only the first six (full) months of the new Trump administration’s efforts to curtail the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Such efforts remain underway, and are growing increasingly aggressive. Indeed, the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act allots over $170 billion over four years to immigration enforcement, including $75 billion to ICE, a majority of which will be used to detain immigrants. Considerable new funding is also available to enable ICE to hire as many as 10,000 new officers to track down and arrest immigrants.⁵ Therefore, as ICE activity continues to intensify, we might observe additional departures from the child care and maternal labor markets. Second, the monthly CPS does not provide a measure of earnings, precluding us from estimating impacts on hourly wages. Such information is only available in the annual (March) demographic supplement to the CPS and the annual American Community Survey. Thus, future research should consider integrating these surveys into the analysis. Third, our analysis does not test for pre-trends in the employment outcomes, nor does it utilize the new class of event-study methods for continuous treatments. In future work, we plan to expand the analysis by incorporating such methods into our reports.