Picture a working parent dropping a toddler off at a licensed daycare center before heading to the office. That center, like many across the country, may depend on immigrant caregivers to stay open and fully staffed. So what happens to that arrangement when immigration enforcement suddenly intensifies in the surrounding community?
A new study published in PNAS examines exactly that question. The researchers find that as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity climbed sharply in 2025, employment among foreign-born women fell in formal, highly visible childcare centers, while work in private households appeared to rise. In short, the enforcement surge seemed to change not just how many people work in childcare, but where and under what conditions that care gets delivered.
Why childcare is a useful place to look
Immigrants make up a large slice of the childcare workforce. The authors note that roughly one in five childcare workers are foreign-born, which makes the sector one of the most immigrant-heavy parts of the American labor market. Immigrant caregivers also tend to be relatively well-educated and bring language and cultural skills that help them serve diverse families.
The study was conducted by Erkmen Aslim of the University of Vermont, Janet Currie of Yale University, Chris Herbst of Arizona State University, and Erdal Tekin of American University. Their starting point is the idea that immigrant and native-born caregivers are not interchangeable. Because the two groups differ in training, experience, and language abilities, a drop in available immigrant labor can change both the size and the makeup of the workforce rather than simply being filled in by other workers.
The childcare sector also has a feature that makes it well suited to this kind of analysis: it contains settings that vary sharply in how visible and regulated they are. Center-based providers carry licensing requirements, payroll reporting, and steady contact with regulators and parents. Home-based family providers operate on a smaller scale inside residences. And private household caregivers, such as nannies and babysitters, work in the most informal and least visible arrangements of all. The researchers reasoned that enforcement might hit these segments differently.
A sharp shift in enforcement
The study centers on a specific moment. After President Trump’s inauguration in early 2025, ICE arrests rose quickly. The composition of those arrests also changed. Arrests made inside prisons and jails had been the larger share, but starting in early 2025, arrests made out in the community, at workplaces, traffic stops, and other public places, climbed sharply and soon overtook them.
The authors point out that community-based arrests are more visible to ordinary workers and families than arrests inside jails. The administration also rescinded a Biden-era policy that had directed officers to avoid enforcement near places offering essential services, including childcare centers. Public attention spiked too. The authors report that the average Google Trends index for searches of the term “ICE arrest” rose from 2.2 in January through July of 2024 to 34.8 over the same months in 2025.
How the study was built
To measure the effects, the team combined two data sources spanning September 2023 through September 2025. For employment, they used monthly samples from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a large government survey. Their sample included 666,666 women ages 22 to 64, of whom 116,667 were foreign-born. Men were left out because childcare is overwhelmingly a female occupation.
For enforcement, they used arrest records compiled by the Deportation Data Project, which obtains government immigration data through public records requests. The records contained 377,067 arrests. Many lacked a clear state location, so the researchers used a mix of ICE office jurisdictions, location landmarks, and AI-assisted text analysis to assign arrests to states. They focused on arrests made outside prisons and jails, building a state-by-month measure of enforcement intensity.
One important caveat the authors flag: the CPS does not record legal immigration status. So the study cannot separate undocumented workers from legally authorized immigrants or naturalized citizens. The results reflect responses across the whole foreign-born population.
The team then compared employment patterns before and after the early-2025 surge, using statistical models that account for differences across states and for nationwide trends over time. They also ran an event-study analysis that compared states with larger enforcement increases to those with smaller ones, tracing employment month by month.
What the analysis found
Even before 2025, higher levels of community-based ICE activity were linked to lower childcare employment among foreign-born women. That relationship grew stronger after the enforcement surge, and the sharpest changes showed up in center-based care.
For foreign-born women working in childcare centers, the post-inauguration period brought an additional decline in employment tied to rising arrests. The authors estimate that a 1% increase in community ICE arrests was associated with about a 0.44% drop in center-based employment during the Trump era relative to the earlier period. The effect was concentrated among more highly educated foreign-born women, which fits the fact that 66% of foreign-born women in center-based programs hold more than a high school degree.
At the same time, employment in private household care among foreign-born women moved in the opposite direction, rising as enforcement intensified. The authors interpret this as a reallocation rather than a wholesale exit from the sector. Workers appear to shift toward less visible, more flexible arrangements that may feel safer, even though such jobs tend to offer fewer protections and less stability.
For native-born women, the responses were muted. There were small increases in home-based care among Mexican-American women and in private household care among Hispanic women, but these were modest and inconsistent. The authors say the results offer little evidence that native-born workers broadly stepped in to replace foreign-born ones.
To put the numbers in perspective, the researchers estimated what a doubling of the arrest rate, roughly the size of the actual increase, would imply. Their point estimates suggest a loss of about 52,900 foreign-born women from center-based care and a gain of about 28,400 in private household care, for a net decline of roughly 24,500 foreign-born childcare workers. Overall employment in the sector stayed relatively stable, but its internal structure shifted.
The findings held up across several checks. Removing any single state at a time did not change the center-based results, and defining immigrant status by citizenship rather than birthplace produced similar patterns.
What it might mean, and what it doesn’t settle
The authors argue that enforcement reshapes childcare through behavioral responses, not only through direct removals. Fear and heightened visibility, they suggest, can push workers out of regulated settings even when relatively few are detained.
They note potential consequences for families. Center-based care supports parental employment, especially for dual-earner households with young children. Fewer staff could constrain capacity, raise costs, or reduce availability. A shift toward private household arrangements may put care further out of reach for lower- and middle-income families while moving the work into less regulated settings.
Several limits deserve attention. The CPS only captures people who remain in the survey, so workers who left the country or stopped responding are not counted, which the authors say likely means their estimates understate the full effect. The study also does not measure hours, wages, or job quality, and it covers only the short run during a period of rapidly rising enforcement and intense public attention. Longer-term effects on childcare access and quality, the authors write, remain open questions for future research.
