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During President Trump’s first term in the White House, Nadene Casteel’s students at an elementary school near Houston lamented that his border wall, as they understood it, would prevent them from seeing their grandmothers and other relatives in Mexico.
These days, she said, they are terrified that immigration agents will take away their parents.
“I have had kids coming to school saying, ‘Daddy’s gone — Daddy can’t come home,’” she said.
Mr. Trump focused his immigration crackdown on the southern border during his first term. His administration separated thousands of migrant children from their parents after they had crossed into the United States. The policy was intended to discourage family migration, and it set off public outrage as images surfaced of weeping toddlers pulled from their mothers’ arms.
This time, Mr. Trump has shifted his attention to the interior of the country, as he seeks to fulfill his pledge to carry out mass deportations — a goal that has drawn relatively broad support. And teachers, parents and other caregivers say the very public detention and deportation effort is taking a particularly heavy toll on young people in immigrant families.
“Every day I worry they could take my mom,” Ximena, 11 — who was born in California and whose Mexican mother has lived in the United States for decades — said before breaking into tears.
Nine million children, 17 percent of all 5- to 17-year-olds, live in a U.S. household with at least one noncitizen adult who could be affected by immigration enforcement, according to a report released this month by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The share is one in three children in California and about one in four in Nevada, New Jersey and Texas.
