When Immigrant Caregivers Disappear
Immigrant enforcement tactics have driven many caregivers into hiding or out of the U.S. altogether. The ripple effects on parents are enormous.
For Anna Stahlmann, Jan. 7, 2026 started like any ordinary morning: She drove to her 2-year-old son’s Spanish immersion daycare in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis to drop him off before going to her job as a registered nurse care coordinator. But as she maneuvered her way into the parking lot, it was clear that something was very wrong. “There was a crowd by the front door,” she recalled. “Teachers were crying and it was like, ‘Oh no, what’s happening here?’” She quickly got her son into his classroom, then asked other parents what happened.
Stahlmann learned that one of the school employees had been pulled out of her car by armed ICE agents in riot gear vests with black balaclava face masks. The teacher, who is also a mother, was in the U.S. legally on asylum from Mexico. She had her work permit inside the daycare facility, but wasn’t given the chance to retrieve it. Instead, she was sent directly to a detention center in Texas while her family and the school scrambled to get her legal support; she was held at the detention center for the next four weeks until she was released.
Meanwhile, a few miles away on that same day, Renee Nicole Good — a mother of three — was murdered by an ICE agent, an event the Department of Homeland Security first tried to cover up. Among other things, they blamed the victim, hid evidence and blocked local investigators, all of which prompted widespread protests in Minnesota and across the country.
“I have so much maternal rage,” Anna Stahlmann told me, about what happened at her son’s preschool. “Why would they try to disrupt our children’s lives in this way — and for what? Our kids have been left wondering, ‘Where is my teacher? Is she ever coming back?’”
'I have so much maternal rage. Why would they try to disrupt our children’s lives in this way — and for what?'
ICE’s tactics, such as the sudden seizure and detention of a teacher who was in the U.S. legally, are taking their toll on working moms, too. “We can’t do our jobs without childcare,” says Stahlmann. Sometimes, I wonder if the administration is deliberately trying to get mothers to stay home by taking away all our childcare providers.”
A devastating effect
The impact of ICE and its brutal actions has been far reaching and well-documented. The effect on childcare workers, a group largely made up of women, along with working mothers who need them, has also been devastating. Immigrants comprise nearly 20% of childcare workers in the U.S., according to census data, a number that is likely undercounted.
Even more telling statistically: From January to July of 2025, before ICE was making the news on a near-daily basis, about 39,000 foreign-born child care workers and 77,000 U.S.-born working mothers with preschool-aged children dropped out of the workforce due to the increase in ICE activity, according to a report from The Better Life Lab from New America.
The report provides new evidence on how the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics are spreading fear and forcing childcare workers to stay home or leave their jobs entirely. That, in turn, is forcing many of the working moms who depend on their care to leave their jobs as well, according to Chris Herbst, the co-author of the New America report and a professor of public policy at Arizona State University.
The report’s findings estimate that with every doubling of the ICE arrest rate, there will be a 10% reduction in child care employment among foreign-born women, according to Herbst.
Stories like Stahlmann’s have become more commonplace, despite the fact that since 2011, during the Obama administration, daycares were designated “sensitive areas,” along with places of worship and hospitals, meaning they were supposed to be off-limits to ICE.
But on his second day in office, Trump revoked that policy. An April 2026 report by the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) confirms that ICE is making it harder for childcare workers to do their jobs while also preventing working parents from getting the help they need.
“The environment of fear is destabilizing an already precarious industry and threatening childcare supply for all families, whether or not they’re documented citizens,” says Suma Setta, senior policy analyst at CLASP.
The researchers interviewed early childhood care providers and educators in seven states, and confirmed that the number of no-shows at day care and schools increases when there are reports of ICE activity nearby. From a New Jersey childcare director interviewed: “We might as well just close because of who we are and where we’re located and our demographic [because] we won’t have students.”
A decade of fear
"I felt like a nobody, a shadow."
Those were the words of our former nanny, Jazmin, when I spoke to recently over FaceTime. She used to live in Brooklyn, NY, a subway-ride away from my apartment in Manhattan. Now, she lives in Budapest, Hungary.
Back in the winter of 2017, when she was still working for my family and Trump had been inaugurated for the first time, I could sense her confidence and presence shrinking. She had been our trusted caregiver for two years by then, coming over every weekday to take care of our baby, so my husband and I could go to our jobs.
She was far from a shadow to us. To me, my husband, and our young son, Jazmin felt like family — though she had left her own family at the age of 17, walking to the U.S. from El Salvador in 2006 along with her sister and cousin. Like so many before her, she told me that she had come to the U.S. to escape financial instability.
Shortly after crossing the border, Jazmin had her first encounter with ICE. It was 2006, George Bush was in power, and that year, ICE conducted its then-largest enforcement action in U.S. history. Around 1,300 illegal immigrants were arrested, and nearly all “expedited removals” occurred at locations along the Southwest border, including in Phoenix, Arizona — the state where Jazmin had landed.
She was put in jail as a minor (along with her older sister) then released with a court date, which the two girls never attended out of fear. Eventually, they made their way to New York, where they had some family, and Jazmin began her first babysitting job. “I’m not proud or ashamed of the circumstances under which I came to the U.S. But I sometimes wish it could have been different,” she shared with me. “I always wanted to do things right after crossing that border illegally. I always thought I had broken the law enough.”
I now know that early in 2017, when Trump ordered the first round of ICE raids in New York, Jazmin was rethinking her decision to remain in the U.S. It was just the beginning of her slow, painful departure.
Emma Haslett
The disappearance of caregivers at home
As a working mom who relied on an undocumented immigrant worker for childcare, I experienced the chilling effects of Trump’s policies myself. Yes, my husband and I knew about Jazmin’s undocumented status, but I was so in need of help that we hired her anyway. When she started with us in the summer of 2015, I was a new mother and suffering from severe postpartum Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and depression, struggling so much that I wasn’t at all sure I would be able to go back to my job at a fast-paced startup.
But with Jazmin in place, I did go back, which was one step toward recovering my mental health. Because she took such good care of our son, I didn’t have to worry about him while I was at the office. She was only 26 and not even a mom herself, but she knew a lot more about taking care of an infant than I did, and her guidance felt invaluable.
I write this not because my story is unique, but because it’s so common.
I write this not because my story is unique or to defend my family’s decision to hire Jazmin, but because it’s so common.
A 2025 report from The American Immigration Council found that of the one in five foreign-born childcare workers in the U.S. (with even higher numbers in metropolitan areas) more than half are non-citizens, and nearly one-third are undocumented. While being undocumented is illegal, to many, the risks of remaining in the U.S. without papers may feel preferable than going before a judge and being arrested, or risking being sent back.
This was the case with Jazmin. And, it must be said, undocumented caregivers are hired by Democrats and Republicans alike, by families who are rich and poor, by people who are sometimes even in government themselves, a sign of how difficult it can be for any family to get good, reliable childcare.
The reason is simple: Childcare is increasingly unaffordable, and childcare centers are often few and far between, or overbooked, or have inconvenient hours that don’t allow for a full workday. This leaves working mothers feeling stressed, strapped and overwhelmed, but they can’t just quit their jobs and stay home. In most American households, both parents must work. If there isn’t a close-by family member willing to step in, where can parents turn?
And so, in 2017, when I’d just confirmed that I was pregnant, and Jazmin started openly talking about wanting to leave the country, I asked if she would consider staying through the baby’s birth. She agreed, but ultimately left the U.S. in 2018.
Meanwhile, my growing family relocated to New Jersey, where my mom came to live with us after retiring from her own job as a teacher so she could help with the kids, now that Jazmin was gone.
“When the number of immigrant caregivers declines, there may not be a sufficient number of U.S.-born workers to immediately fill in the gap,” Herbst told me. “And because parents rely so heavily on childcare being accessible for their own employment, anytime there’s a disruption, there will be spillovers to the labor market of parents with young kids,” he explains.
Sometimes, as in the case of my own family, that spillover affects grandmothers, too. In fact, the labor force participation of mothers with young children — which depends on the availability of childcare — has now fallen to its lowest level since 2021.
Caroline Fairchild
Working moms step up
Meanwhile, at Anna Stahlmann’s son’s daycare, ICE agents continued their surveillance, as Stahlmann and her fellow parents formed a task force; set up a Signal chat group to keep each other apprised of ICE’s movements; rotated shifts standing guard during drop off and pick up to ensure that teachers could safely get inside; and raised money to help pay for employees’ groceries and rent. Besides being a “lead observer,” Stahlmann also volunteered to drive teachers to and from their homes.
“These aren’t a bunch of criminals sitting in circle time teaching our kids their A, B, C’s,” Stahlmann says. “So many of these workers came here through legal channels, filing mountains of paperwork and showing up for every immigration appointment.”
And while Stahlmann drew hope from how her community came together, she and her fellow-parents were “stretched really thin,” she says. “It was surreal,” she says. “Mothers who should have been at work were standing outside of daycare making sure ICE didn’t show up.”
The childcare crisis continues
In some states, including New Jersey, where I live, lawmakers are fighting back: Governor Mikie Sherrill has signed three bills, which, among other things, prohibit ICE agents from entering non-public areas of state property. “We are … strengthening our protections, banning ICE agents from wearing masks, and protecting residents’ privacy from federal overreach,” she recently said.
But the impact of ICE and the culture of fear it perpetuates is only deepening. “I want to help as much as I can to keep things going for the daycare staff, but realistically, it’s not sustainable,” says Stahlmann, who chose to testify in front of the Minnesota House and Senate in March, lobbying for greater protection for childcare centers against ICE’s tactics. “The thing is, none of this is going away any time soon.”
And as is so often the case in America, the moms are there, left to pick up the pieces.
Francesca Donner
