Two Moms and Trump’s Head Start Rule: Child Care Shortages Meet Anti-Immigrant Politics

Solangel, a Venezuelan immigrant, is the mother of a 7-year-old who blossomed at the Head Start preschool program he attended in a Denver suburb.

He received therapy for his speech delay, came out of his shy shell, and grew to love books.

Her son is a U.S. citizen. But Solangel fears the Trump administration’s plan to bar undocumented children from the federally funded preschool program will hurt other children.

“They are little ones,” she said. “They need their education.”

But Carmit Poyras, a Sacramento mother, supports the new Head Start policy. She believes undocumented immigrants may be taking seats from citizens like her 7-year-old son, who spent around two years on Head Start waitlists when he was younger.

Poyras sees providing Head Start to undocumented children as irresponsible largesse.

“Are you going to go out and treat all of your coworkers to lobster and champagne … and come home and tell your child, ‘Oh sorry, I don’t have food for you’?” she said.

The two mothers represent opposite sides of a debate that came to a head in July, when the Trump administration unveiled a new policy barring undocumented children from Head Start. The announcement upended 60 years of precedent and played up a message that resonates with many Americans, including Trump’s base: Undocumented immigrants are taking scarce resources from citizens.

But in practice, the new Head Start policy may free up relatively few spots. And some providers fear that it will become harder to serve the most vulnerable children and families due to new logistical hoops.

The new policy, which is currently blocked by injunctions in two separate lawsuits, comes after the White House made a short-lived push to cut all Head Start funding and disrupted the program in other ways. The administration has also pushed to make life in the U.S. more uncomfortable or wholly untenable for certain immigrants.

Advocates say that barring certain immigrant children from Head Start could keep them from learning English, getting developmental screenings, and preparing for kindergarten. But the ripple effects might not stop there.

“A lot of these attacks on public benefits, they are branded as being about … immigrants that supposedly are taking from the native-born population,” said Valerie LaCarte, a senior policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “But really what they do is that they are weakening the social safety nets for low-income people overall.”

Head Start Historically Enrolled All Kids

Since it was established by the federal government in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Head Start has never required families to prove citizenship or divulge immigration status.

In fact, Migrant and Seasonal Head Start, which serves about 25,000 young children, is specifically designed to serve the children of migrant farm workers, many of whom are immigrants.

Even when a landmark 1996 welfare reform law barred undocumented immigrants from getting most forms of government assistance, including child care subsidies, nothing changed for Head Start.

Walter Gilliam, executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, said the 1996 law treated the two programs differently because they have different histories and goals.

Child care subsidies, which help low-income families pay for child care, were “designed specifically and solely to support the employability of the parents,” he said.

In contrast, Head Start focuses on child development. Edward Zigler, one of the architects of Head Start, drew heavily from his own experiences as an immigrant child who benefited from the services offered by settlement houses, said Gilliam, who counted Zigler as a mentor.

There’s no solid data on how many Head Start seats are occupied by undocumented children.

On the low end, Trump administration officials have estimated that 12,000 of 719,000 Head Start participants, or 1.7%, are undocumented. On the high end, their estimate is 115,000 participants, or 16%.

Lisa Stone, executive director of Tri-County Head Start in southwestern Colorado, said she doesn’t know how many of the 275 children served by her program may be undocumented.

“If a child is living in the United States of America and they are income eligible, there’s no questions asked” about immigration status, she said. “I think that’s been a beautiful part of this program.”

U.S. Health and Human Services officials said in a press release the new rule barring undocumented participants from Head Start would take effect immediately and provide an additional $374 million annually worth of Head Start services to Americans.

But the government’s own analysis, and legal and regulatory filings suggest a much more modest impact.

For example, two-thirds of Head Start are programs run by charitable nonprofits, which are exempt from verifying immigration status under the 1996 welfare reform law. And Head Start is still open to some noncitizens, including immigrants who have been granted asylum, refugees and six other categories of “qualified aliens.”

Even for Head Start programs that are subject to the new rule — those run by public schools, cities and counties — government lawyers wrote in court filings that there’s no danger of “sudden and major disruption.” That’s because students who are already enrolled in Head Start can stay enrolled through the year.

But some Head Start families and providers are already reacting out of fear.

Parents in multiple states have taken their children out of Head Start or declined services to avoid providing their home address, according to a recent court filing. In addition, some nonprofit Head Start providers are already trying to verify immigration status by checking birth certificates even though they’re exempt from the rule.

Although the rule technically took effect in mid-July, the government has yet to issue instructions explaining how to implement it.

Nationwide, there are far more children eligible for Head Start than available Head Start seats. But the new rule alone won’t solve that problem.

In fact, the Trump administration’s own analysis finds that verifying immigration status will cost providers money, reducing some new seats made available by excluding undocumented children. Some U.S. citizens may also struggle to provide the right documents.

Meanwhile, providers with low enrollment could be forced to close.

Two Mothers, Two Different Paths

Poyras, the Sacramento mother, was eager to get her son into Early Head Start when he was 2.

“I was so excited,” she said. “I heard so many good things about the program from the beginning.”

But her son, who has a speech delay and learning disabilities, never got off the Early Head Start waitlist. When he turned 3, he started on a new waitlist for Head Start. When he finally was offered a seat, Poyras turned it down because her son, then 4, would have had a long bus ride to a neighborhood she didn’t consider safe.

Poyras, a single mother, now homeschools her son. She doesn’t know for sure that undocumented children are the reason he waited so long for a spot.

But she’s heard people in her school district, San Juan Unified, say things like, “The school has so many immigrant children … and like, the schools are full and the waitlists are long.”

Solangel, the Colorado mother, took a plane to the United States with her family in 2018 and sought asylum. Water and electricity outages were routine in her native Venezuela, and there were always long lines for food and gas. Speaking out often led to political persecution, she said.

“You don’t have any lifestyle,” she said. “It’s just like doing lines and just waiting.”

The youngest of her three children, the one who participated in Head Start, was born here in 2019. Solangel, a single mother, is now a citizen.

Today, Solangel runs a maternal mental health program in the Denver area. She always recommends Head Start to her clients, who include many immigrant mothers. (Chalkbeat is not using Solangel’s last name due to privacy concerns.)

“If you start segregating immigrants like me, that is so bad,” she said. “It’s a fact that the migrants, they contribute a lot [to] this country,” she said.

Head Start’s Future in Doubt

Polls show that many Americans oppose allowing undocumented immigrants to access public benefits, though they don’t ask specifically about preschool. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reflected that sentiment when he announced the rule change.

“For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration,” he said in a July press release.

In reality, there’s little evidence that migrants are uprooting their lives for Head Start or other programs, said Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, an immigration policy analyst at the center-right Niskanen Center.

“To suggest that it’s a pull factor for migrants I think is pretty ridiculous,” she said.

Rather, the rule change on Head Start represents “low-hanging fruit” that can make Trump’s base feel like they’re getting a win, she said.

Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, agreed with Zimmer-Wong that Head Start and other welfare programs are not the main draw for immigrants. That said, he cited a famous quote from the economist Milton Friedman: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Conservatives who have the president’s ear have long called for getting rid of Head Start entirely. In a draft budget proposal earlier this year, the Trump administration proposed cutting all Head Start funding, before backpedaling and proposing level funding at $12.3 billion.

But the new rule is among a host of recent disruptions, including sudden funding freezes, mass layoffs of federal workers and closures of five regional Head Start offices, that are undermining the program.

“They’re not eliminating the program at the federal level, but it’s like, community by community by community,” said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, senior vice president of national policy at Start Early, a Chicago-based Head Start grantee.

But McCluskey, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, said that Head Start is “not something the federal government should be doing.”

To Gilliam, the new Head Start rule would send negative effects rippling beyond undocumented children to their families and the broader community.

Amid the “national debate over who is entitled to what,” he said it’s easy to lose track of what the nation gains from programs like Head Start.

“It’s important to all of us to have families that are well functioning, to have children who are growing up succeeding and are likely to be contributing members to the American society,” Gilliam said.