When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations come to town it can create a landscape of fear, chilling commerce and school attendance, and now, new research shows it affects childcare workers.
A team from the University of Vermont, Yale University, Arizona State University, and American University examined how changes in ICE tactics between 2023 and 2025 has influenced the childcare workforce—a vital sector of the economy that employs nearly one million workers across the country and generates $7.2 billion in quarterly wages and is comprised of roughly 20% immigrant labor. The study will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy on May 22.
"When ICE enforcement intensified, the formal childcare sector lost capacity: centers reduced enrollment, closed classrooms, and in some cases shut down entirely," says lead author Erkmen Aslim, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Vermont. "That has real consequences for American families, particularly working mothers, who rely on stable, affordable childcare to hold down jobs."
The study finds that increased ICE activity led to significant declines in employment among immigrant women, particularly those working in more regulated and publicly visible settings, such as childcare centers. This population is more likely than their native-born peers to hold advanced certifications, and the researchers found limited evidence that immigrant workers are being broadly replaced by native-born workers.
The team also found that significant labor shifts among childcare workers towards private household childcare—sites that are less regulated and typically have fewer protections for workers and more volatile wages. According to the researchers, this may negatively affect both childcare workers and the families who rely on them.
"Reallocation into less-regulated household care likely reduces the average quality and stability of care, given that center-based settings are subject to licensing, staff-to-child ratios, training requirements, and curricular standards that home-based arrangements typically are not," Aslim explains. "This is an industry that already operates with high turnover and chronic staff shortages, so it has very little slack to absorb a shock of this kind."
Overall, the results show that immigration enforcement reshapes not only the size but also the structure of the childcare workforce, with important potential implications for families, childcare workers, and labor markets.
To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed monthly Current Population Survey reports, comparing them with ICE arrest records from the Deportation Data Project. The data showed upticks in enforcement activity coincided with employment drops in childcare centers and increases in employment in private households. These effects strengthened markedly after early 2025, a period characterized by a sharp rise in ICE arrests and heightened public attention to immigration enforcement. Areas previously considered off-limits become targets, including schools and daycare centers.
The authors of the study, including Janet Currie, the David Swensen Professor of Economics at Yale, write it may also drive up the cost of care as centers lose staff and potentially children from mixed status homes whose families pull them from care. Moreover, the families least able to afford to make private arrangements could bear the brunt as center-based classrooms shrink. And the study likely represents a conservative undercount of the impacts of ICE enforcement on the childcare sector since it relies on some of the people most at risk of being detained by ICE officials to fill out a survey.
Aslim stresses that changes in the childcare sector have a ripple effect across the labor market, particularly for lower- and middle-income parents who are less able to absorb the impact of rising costs and day-to-day uncertainty. In short, problems in the childcare sector are problems for everyone.
"The workforce that cares for young children in this country is deeply intertwined with the foreign-born labor force, and disruptions to that workforce show up as fewer childcare slots, higher prices, and harder choices for parents," Aslim says. "The takeaway is that immigration policy is, in a very practical sense, also childcare policy and family policy."
