NASW Social Work Talks - EP 123: Mass Deportation: Unjust and Harmful to the Nation

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Wendy Cervantes is the Director of Immigration and Immigrant Families at the Center for Law and Social Policy. In this episode, she and Mel Wilson, NASW's Senior Policy Advisor focusing on social justice issues, discuss what mass deportation would look like under a potential Trump Administration and why such policies are harmful to children and families.

Hi, my name is Mel Wilson. I'm a Senior Policy Advisor for NASW, focusing on social justice issues. Welcome to our podcast, dealing with one of the most pressing threats to civil and human rights that could become imminent should former President Trump be re-elected on November 5th. That issue is Trump's near-certain initiation of a mass deportation program. soon after he takes office. This program will directly impact between 11 and 15 million people, which includes as many as 3 million children. Here to help us to discuss this ominous and potentially disastrous program is Wendy Cervantes. She's the Director for Immigration and Immigrant Families for CLASP. Wendy also facilitates the Children Thrive Network for CLASP. Welcome,

Wendy. Before we get started, could you just give us a background, first of all, on CLASP and a little bit of background on CTAN? Absolutely. Thanks, Mel. Happy to be here with you today. So yes, the Center for Long Social Policy, we're a national anti-poverty organization based in Washington, D.C., and we work on a range of policy issues from youth policy to public benefits policy, early childhood and immigration policy, as well as education, labor, and worker rights. And we work on behalf of communities with low incomes, as well as communities of color in the U.S., and work to advance federal and state policies to to advance their best interests. And the Children Thrive Action Network, which you flagged,

is one of the coalitions that we've run that's focused on protecting and defending children and mixed status families growing up in the U.S., including the millions that are U.S. citizens living in immigrant families. And it's primarily made up of children's advocacy organizations around the country that are working on a range of child-specific issues. And so we know that there is a lot at stake in this upcoming election and in the years to come. And the threat that you laid out of mass deportation is one that we are very concerned with and will be a priority issue for CLASP as well as for the CTAN network. Thank you, Brendan.

You know, we've talked about, there's many folks right now know that this is imminent and there's an impact. And it's going to focus on, mostly focus on undocumented individuals, but also, and families. But it's also including, as I understand it, could expand to folks who are here,

legally present as temporary protective status and other statuses, but may be roundup. And there has to be a roundup of going to folks' homes or other different places to get them. And could you talk a bit about how you organizationally feel about this, some of the processes that really deeply concern you? And feel free just to elaborate or talk as much as you want on this topic because it's very, very, very, very important.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think that what's really disturbing about this idea of mass deportation is not only the actual impacts of the deportations themselves, depending, you know, regardless of the scale to which they're carried out. What really worries me is the chilling effect from day one, potentially even after the election, if we're in a Trump 2.0 scenario, because the chilling effect will be immediate. it. In some ways, it doesn't even matter how they would try to do it or even how quickly they can do it, given the amount of resources it would take to do it, because the climate of fear in and of itself will have a damaging effect. We will once again see undocumented parents who will once again agonize or even avoid the most basic outings, such as going to the grocery store, dropping their kids off at school, or going to the doctor. And

We know that research has consistently shown that separation due to detention or deportation or even the fear of losing a parent results in developmental harm for children, particularly young children, due to the constant toxic stress. And, you know, I still recall the homes that I visited during the Trump administration and when they were really ramping up immigration enforcement around the country. And, you know, hearing about children as young as three years old, exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and then seeing the signs inside doors at children's eye level saying, no abre la puerta, don't open the door, and just thinking about what it must be like to live in that constant climate of fear. We know how damaging that is for a young child's development. And then I remember, you know, in the places that we went to visit where the dramatic worksite raids had been carried out, such as in Mississippi, where they were the where was the largest series of worksite raids in the U.S. history and where we, you know, there were still children weeks after that were showing signs of PTSD. And even several months following the raids, families were still struggling to pick up the pieces, having lost a primary breadwinner in many of those cases. And so we know that the impacts of deportation are really, really harmful, but so is the chilling effect leading up to them. And so is like the necessary detention that might be required before someone is deported. And so this has not only impacts for undocumented immigrants, but also their U.S. citizen family members. But I think another thing to remember here is that the reason why it's also so disturbing is because this mass deportation plan would go hand in hand with the plans to strip people away from having legal status.

So you mentioned people with temporary protected status. There are also folks who have, you know, who currently have the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or DACA, which is a program that we know is at risk of being a program that's at risk of being ended very soon based on litigation. and then we know that there's also other types of statuses that people have that are like temporary forms of deferred action and their goal is to strip that legal status from folks and and and they even want to go after birthright citizenship and so essentially grow the number of people that are undocumented and therefore potentially subject to mass deportation so that's part of the plan is to not only target all of those that are already undocumented, which has impacts for them and their families, but to also grow the undocumented population and subject them as well to deportation. Yeah, and that is a deep concern. One of the things I should add in here, and we

talk about mass deportation and the Trump administration plan, there's a couple of things that this is not new. Actually, Trump himself in his first administration explored the possibility of mass deportation. In my little research back in the 1950s, there was a major and unfortunate term, Operation Wetback, which is a very unfortunate racist term, but it was a policy that was a mass deportation and raids that impacted over a million people. So this is not something And there's enough evidence that there is not only an impact, but it's a long lasting, can be generational kind of impact on it. So we certainly should not take it lightly and we should not assume that there's a maybe to this. If the administration does get into office again, this is very likely to happen and we need to be prepared for it.

So I just wanted to add that. You mentioned something about detention, and one of the questions I had, and I'll kind of turn it around a little bit, because the whole issue of, first of all, detention for adults, and secondly, more importantly, detention of children and family detention. Historically, in recent histories, family detention in particular and children's detention has been very, very problematic in the facilities that children were placed in and facilities that families were placed in and the whole issue of how long they stayed there. People need to realize that when we're talking about this magnitude in terms of millions, this is not an easy task. This is really, really going to be something that there's going to be fumbles and mistakes and all kinds of situations of unsafe facilities. So I'm setting it up just to maybe you can elaborate. And I know you have a lot of experience in understanding how that has happened with the unaccompanied migrant children and some of the family separation stuff. So if you can want to touch on that.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think, yeah, as I mentioned before, I think an order for a mass deportation plan to be carried out has to be coupled with also use of detention for people that are held as they're awaiting deportation. Although I do think they're going to primarily utilize an expanded form of expedited removal in order to make it as quick as possible for people to be deported without a chance to go before a judge, which is very disturbing in and of itself. And they would have to use the existing detention capacity they have now, potentially grow it, which may take some time. And so there's a lot of concern because right now we know that there's a lot of complaints about current conditions in detention centers. And, you know, one of the things that this current administration has done is end the practice of detaining families, which we know is really, really problematic. And the Department of Homeland Security's own assessment of family detention by medical professionals and others found that there is simply no safe way to detain a child with or without their family. So it's very concerning to us that there could be a return of family detention, as well as just really problematic and even worse detention conditions than we already have.

And you mentioned the historical context for really harmful actions like this. And I think that you're absolutely right that we absolutely have a history of really racist policies that have been put in place specifically to scapegoat a population for bringing harm to this country, usually a population of color. and have used the political climate and rhetoric of that day to target these folks for really harmful policies that unfortunately have created a very sad, racist legacy in this country. You mentioned Operation Wetback, which was the effort under the Eisenhower administration to deport millions of Mexicans. Some of them were U.S. citizens, but, you know, to target them for deportation. And it was over around 1.3 million individuals that were deported through that program. And then with regards to detention and this concern that we have now about there potentially being camps put up to house families if they don't have enough detention capacity,

That is very similar to what was done during World War II when they rounded up Japanese nationals and their families and their U.S. citizen children in internment camps around the country. And so I think there is unfortunately some precedent for how this was done previously. And I think it's just it's it's almost it's really sad to see the similarities between the way racist, racist, xenophobic rhetoric is once again fueling these types of ideas. And this, you raise another good point about the capacity issue and some research also around that on this one. We do not have, right now, the capacity, no way, to absorb that many people that quickly. I know you were saying that there's a, I'll use the word rapid and use another term, expedited process. But even expediting, there has to be some beginning to attention. Folks have to be placed somewhere once they round them up. And the cost for that is going to be immediately in the billions.

So this is going to be pretty much a budget buster in whether or not that they can get authorization, they meaning the Trump administration, to do this. But it's going to take a massive, massive action and massive operation that's going to be very ugly. It's not going to be pretty. The other area that I know that all of us are concerned about is how the process itself of getting, I keep on using the word rounding up because that's what it just sounds to me, You're just like, they're going out there and you can use nice terms like arrest and all that. But that's what they're going to have to do. And I think you referred earlier to perhaps raiding schools or going to churches or public gathering.

Could you just elaborate more on that? Because I do think that's something that people need to hear, that in order to get to the numbers that they're trying to get to, this is not like folks will be just standing waiting for somebody to come. And with a bus, they're going to identify, which is another problem in itself, have to identify who the targets are, particular targets, and then they're going to have to go get them from somewhere. So if you don't mind, could you leverage a little bit more on that? sure so yeah i mean i think there's a couple different ways they could do that could do this i mean they're they're gonna say um most likely that they're going to be targeting people that are recently arrived that have been in the country for less than two years but being able to prove how long you've been in the country is obviously um not not not very easy to do um and especially

if you've been here for a shorter amount of time, even if it's like three or four years, or if you've been here for a really long time, but don't necessarily have the evidence, you're not walking around with evidence of how long you've been here. And so there's like a huge also risk of racial profiling. But one thing I think you were touching on about really, you know, like the safety of places like schools and hospitals and those types of locations, is that one thing that we're really concerned about as well, because of, along with this plan of mass deportation, is that it would be coupled with the rescission of a policy that's currently in place. It's called the Protected Areas Policy. It's formally been known as the Sensitive

Locations Policy, which is a policy that, within the Department of Homeland Security, which restricts immigration enforcement activities from being carried out in places that are really critical for children and families, like child care centers, like schools, like hospitals, health care clinics, places of worship, mass demonstrations, funerals, and gatherings of that sort. Those types of gatherings and those types of locations have historically been off-limits for enforcement activities so that families aren't chilled from carrying out like their basic, you know, like meeting their basic needs. But it is with already been part of the Project 2025 plan that that policy would be rescinded. And that is actually really scary because under the Trump

administration, when there was a lot of immigration enforcement, they were at least saying that they were abiding by that policy. We know that it wasn't consistently implemented around the country based on our own research, but we at least had something to hold them accountable to and something that was in their own guidance that said that you cannot, these places are supposed to be off limits. And then we did a lot of work back in those years on trying to educate headstart centers and other locations to let them know that they fell under the policy, how to enforce it, how to keep ice off of their, you know, out of their facilities and out of their parking lots to create a sense of security. And so we're really concerned that if that policy is rescinded, we're going to have

to try to look at what other rights and protections we can educate folks about to try to create some sense of security and try to limit the extent to which ICE is waiting outside of, you know, school parking lots or, you know, in healthcare waiting rooms. Like that's, that kind of environment is not only harmful to the families that would be, you know, scared to go access their basic needs, but it's not a healthy environment for anybody in this country. And so we're very, very, very concerned about that. And we're going to be keeping an eye on that because that is, once again, just another part of this, you know, this creation of a climate of fear. Yeah, I was going to ask a question about mixed status.

I want to get one question about race in there before I ask that question, because you touched on that. And again, me sort of looking into what the impact would be, there is clearly amongst advocates and immigration rights organizations that the focus, the perception, and we're really mostly dealing with Mexican and Central American individuals, But not looking at the immigrants from Africa and from the Caribbean, Haiti always comes up in this. And one little, almost a footnote, but I thought it was important, was that there is that concern that because the administration, the Trump administration, is really focusing on anyone who committed crimes. And I don't get into the detail, but that's one of the pretexts of deportation, that that is going to be similar to the way things happen in the United States, is that black and brown, but a lot of black immigrants will be rounded up on any pretext of crime and have to find it more difficult to, even if they're here legally, to sort of explain themselves out of that. So, and again, I know that you participate so much in these discussions year-round, so I just wanted your insight on what you thought about that, the broadening from a racial-ethnic standpoint. Yes. I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, I talked earlier about how our immigration system has strong racist foundations, unfortunately. And the way that deportation and immigration enforcement is carried out has a disproportionate impact on Black and brown immigrants, and in particular Black immigrants. I mean, we have we published a report in partnership with the Ohio Immigrant Alliance on the number of focus specifically on deported individuals and their experiences.

And the vast majority of the people that were interviewed were were black immigrants. And that report really is but one piece of evidence of how much of what we know, which is that the that black immigrants are more likely to be caught up in law enforcement. And through that law enforcement collaboration with immigration enforcement at times, then end up on a path to deportation and that when a black immigrant is put into removal proceedings, they're often removed much faster. than other immigrants. And so that's unfortunately not a surprise in this country and really unfortunate. And we have seen, even under this current administration, Black immigrants and Black migrants treated differently through our various systems, including those that are coming here to seek asylum. And so that I think is really problematic and I think will be exacerbated under an administration that's not shy about talking about its racist ideals. And I think

it's really problematic for the children in these families because we already have a country that's grappling with racial equity, with like trying to make sure that every child in this country has an equitable opportunity to thrive. But yet we have an immigration system and many systems that serve children specifically that are still deeply rooted in systemic racism. And so I think that there is, so there's a lot of concern about what we could see and what the impact will be to primarily brown and black immigrant children in an era of mass deportation and increased immigration enforcement. Yeah, thank you for that answer. Now I'll segue back to the whole issue of mixed-status families, which, again, is extremely important.

And there's a whole area of impact when you talk about a situation, and you'll explain it more in terms of what that is. But if you have a documented and undocumented heads of household and children in the family, there's a tremendous, obviously, disruption that's going to happen. I mean, as a social worker representing social work organizations and our members, there are many social workers involved with working with these families, and it's going to be really, really difficult to

not only track and see their needs, especially those who are not targeted for deportation, but their parents are. Now we have a situation of a child welfare crisis that greatly exacerbates not only detention, but then it's reunification or the possibility of re-invocation becomes a big issue. But I really would love if you can just talk about mixed status families. I know that with CETAN, that's a really big part of the conversation.

So if you could share on that. Yes. So there is, you know, there's one in four children in the U.S. that are part of an immigrant family. The vast majority of those kids themselves are U.S. citizens. Most of their parents actually do have some form of legal status, but they still face a lot of barriers because, you know, even lawful permanent residents can't easily access certain health care and other federal means tested programs. But then there are about 5.2 million children who have at least one parent who is undocumented and then about a half a million others who have a parent who has either a temporary protected status or DACA, which are two statuses that I mentioned earlier, are kind of precarious statuses that would be incredibly vulnerable under a future Trump administration. And so all of these kids who have a parent who might, you know, so these are kids who every day could be potentially, you know, could potentially lose a parent as a result of deportation or detention.

And there are several children who have lost a parent due to that. But as I mentioned before, there's also a lot of developmental harm that we know is done just by living with that daily fear of potentially losing a parent. So this is, you know, basically a situation that we're exposing children to and, you know, hindering their overall development, which is really harmful for us as a country. You know, I remember when I was doing some research in 2018 and 2019 under the Trump administration, and we were talking mostly to parents who themselves were undocumented and potentially at risk, and then to early childhood providers. But I remember when we were specifically not interviewing children because that wasn't we weren't prepared to do so. But when we were at a school in North Carolina and I remember we were we were going to leave. And one of the social workers at the school told me, you know, there is a there was a child here who actually found out that you all are here asking questions about immigration policy. He's eight years old and he really wants to talk to you. And we weren't prepared to talk to him.

We didn't know what to do. We didn't know if it was ethical. And so we said, okay, well, we're willing to come back tomorrow if he can get a permission slip from his parents to talk to us. And I was thinking there's no way that his parents are going to sign this. I mean, they're going to be like some people from D.C. are talking about immigration. but this kid not only got a permission slip signed to talk to us but he got a group of friends to pull together a permission permission slips and they there was a group of kids that were ready to talk to us the next day and i was really impressed even though it was one of the most heartbreaking conversations i i'd had during during that research project but these kids really wanted an opportunity to to to advocate for themselves, to advocate for their parents and to share what it was that they were experiencing and the fear that they were living with and wanting to communicate to someone, to any policymaker out there that all they wanted was

to be able to feel safe and to be with their mom and dad. It just I mean, I don't think anyone could have put it any better than the kids themselves about like how how wrong it is to create um to have a system of you know all these policies that make it harder for the for families just to function and for kids to feel secure with their with their family the the did you bring up the really the most insidious part about this is that because what you just described is this something almost as a process there. And with the plan that the Trump administration has and it ties it back into family separation, but there's total

suspension of due process and the discussions about, and I forgot the name of the law, but there's a 17-something law that allows for the president to make an arbitrary decision based on some notion of threat from folks present who pose a threat to the country, which is obviously a stretch. But in the Project 2025, there's a whole discussion around that because I think in an interview it came up to Stephen Miller and a couple other folks of how you would do this and get

around some of the existing federal laws that would protect any situation where there's a child welfare issue and there was a naturally a process available for them that that process gets ignored and they could find a legal grounding for that so and i'm almost getting into a sort of rhetorical discussion here but it is something that kind of concerned me and shocked me a little bit that if folks get caught up in that limbo how how does it get handled and maybe the question to you is that in your discussions with fellow CTAM members or with your colleagues at class or elsewhere, is there any pre-discussion going on as far as options? Because we're literally a few months away from that being a possibility or a reality.

Yeah, I mean, I think there is a lot of work being done across the civil rights community right now and across organizations that are working on restoring, I mean, protecting democracy around what are the strategies in particular. and this is sort of out of my area of expertise, some of the litigation strategies that can be utilized to try to prevent the administration from going, a future Trump administration from going too far and creating this, you know, basically threatening every aspect of our democracy. But I think the concerns that you're sharing are very real. And I do think that immigrant communities are going to be extremely at risk. But not only immigrant families, I mean, let's, I mean, the LGBTQ communities, other people of color, and I mean, in our entire democracy is going to be at risk. And so I think what does bring me some solace is that I know that there

has been a lot of planning done on the progressive side. But at the end of the day, we're going to have to do the best we can because it's going to be obviously just an overwhelming amount of work that will need to be done. And I don't think, as you mentioned, that they're going to waste any time to put their plans into action. So that's why so many of us have been planning so much on the side. And we'll be bracing ourselves to see what we're, if we indeed have to put those plans into action. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned, because I focus a lot on children because of CTAN and what class does, but that we are talking about single adults and not attached to families who are going to be directly and greatly. And that goes back to this whole notion of detention.

And we both know in the past that they've had private detention centers and they've not been the greatest conditions. If there is just a tremendous overloading, how are these folks? We know there's a possibility of internment camps and those kinds of things that do harken up the 1940s with the Japanese. and also to some degree with the 1950s of creating just temporary, so-called temporary detention. And those processes, again, are not in place to move folks quickly.

And a lot of these will be single individuals, some with maybe histories of minor crimes and wind up in a very difficult situation. So I'm glad you brought that up. It's not just obviously the children. And anecdotally, if you look at what even the Trump administration was talking about back when it was

an administration, they were projecting numbers up to somewhere you read 20 to 30 million. People are questioning where they got that number from, but you get a little scared because they may have some other folks in mind that gets it up to that

level. So it is a very, very significant amount of people, and it's going to be families, and it's going to be children. it's a related thing on that the next my my next and probably last question is the whole issue right now of and has been around access to public benefits like healthcare and and and education and all those things and again going back focusing on children that disruption

of those services. I'm asking you because I don't really know, I obviously don't know the answer, but how is that managed? What happens? Do the children just, there's no education, the education just simply stops or if they're having a health condition

at the time of being detained or separated, if the facility doesn't have the kind of capacity to treat serious illness? Is there any thought, or have you talked to anyone maybe who spent a little bit of time maybe talking about those kinds of contingencies? Because that does, from a social worker mindset, that does worry me. Yeah, no. There is, so I'm going to take that question in two parts. I'm going to first looking at like access to health care and public benefits and then looking at education, looking first at access to benefits. I mean, we know under the previous Trump administration, one of the most harmful things. Well, they did a lot of harmful things, but one of the harmful things they did was drastically expand something known as the public charge rule, which is the policy that could determine whether or not someone's eligible to enter the U.S. or qualify for a green card based on their how likely they are to become dependent on the government for their survival, for their subsistence.

And it was expanded to a point that was like so harmful and would make it hard for many people to actually meet the standard to be able to qualify for a green card and created a chilling effect from the moments that the rule was even just leaked into the news. And we saw immediately a significant decline in program enrollment, including programs that weren't even subject to this policy, from health care programs to SNAP and even assistance for pregnant women and infants. and that included a decreased enrollment of U.S. citizen children. Again, the majority of kids and immigrant families are U.S. citizens, so they're supposed to be able to access all those benefits. They couldn't actually put in to place an executive order that says that U.S. citizen children can no longer receive benefits, but they can do something similar to what they did when they issued the public charge rule back under the Trump administration, and that would then create a chilling effect and then make it harder for immigrant families as well as kids in

those families to access really critical benefits. I mean, we know even during the COVID pandemic that one in four immigrant adults cited avoiding health and nutrition assistance because they were concerned about public charge concerns. And so what's really troubling about the potential for there to be more barriers or a repeat of similar efforts that were done before is that we've been doing so much work over the past four years to rebuild trust in immigrant communities and convince them that it's okay now to enroll in healthcare. But a lot of folks don't even know about like the new Biden public charge rule that actually strengthens it so that it's even more clear about like what's, you know, what's safe for families to apply for and what's not. And there's

really not a lot that's unsafe to apply for, which is really important to remember. And, you know, and so it's really, it's really scary to think about once again, being in a place where not only are people afraid of being potentially deported but even for families that are lawfully present and are green card holders because we're talking about this policy is like specific to green card holders or for those who are trying to get a green card i should say um it's um we're you know we're already in a place of like trying to build back trust and we're just going to continue to to create an environment where people feel unsafe getting like the types of supports they need. So the other issue that we're concerned about is that actually regardless of the election

outcome, but in particular, if we have another Trump presidency, we're very concerned about the ability to uphold the constitutional right of children to access a K-12 education regardless of immigration status. I mean, this is something that we have historically in our country. We've educated all children as a matter of principle. But in 1982, there was actually a Supreme Court ruling that established that all children have a right to a K-12 education regardless of their or their parents' immigration status. But both as part of the Project 2025 proposals and what we know that this administration wanted to do but couldn't do when they were in office the first time, is they really did want to take away this constitutional right. And that taking away basic

education to any child population in the U.S. would be devastating. And it would do exactly what they were trying, what the Supreme Court was trying to prevent in 1982, which was create this, they did not want to see the creation of a permanent underclass in this country, which is what would happen because there is like an understanding that a basic education is necessary for someone to be able to survive and to create a living. And so that would actually have, you know, we're very concerned that there is a potential for that to go back to the Supreme Court. We know what the makeup of the Supreme Court is now and that we would unlikely be able to have a favorable ruling, and that, I think, I don't even, I think it goes without saying that

the consequences of taking away that right to a K-12 education would be catastrophic. Yeah, that's really important, and you mentioned post-election, no matter who's in, gets to office, we certainly do not want a Trump administration, but this is not something that It's just because Trump doesn't get elected, that doesn't end the problem. There is a process in motion, especially with Project 2025 around immigration, that will still stay in motion. Before we get into our call to action, there's one little piece I do need to mention in terms of how this is going to be managed as far as rounding people up. And one of the really ominous things is the use of military and the planned use of military to achieve that. This really is a constitutional issue, whether using the military in a domestic situation.

And that doesn't mean that they wouldn't use the military where children are involved. So that's one of the battles and one of the sort of to support ICE recognizing that ICE doesn't have any capacity to do this massive job, it would be the local police that would be almost become surrogate ICE agents and also the state and national guards or the states that certainly agreed to have that national guard used for that. So just just make we should all make a note of that, that this is not going to be some process where there's a lot of gentleness in it, that this is going to be to get the job done. And that's that always turns out to be very harmful to folks who are targeted for it. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Now we can sort of wrap this up with a call to action. And I'll let you go first and I'll add some things to that. Clearly, you touched on it that, you know, after November 5th, then there has to be groups really saying some strategy and then some action. So what are you guys thinking? Yes. Well, and I just wanted to add one thing to what you said about the potential use of military, because that reminded me a lot of the fact that in the raids that happened in Mississippi were carried out.

many people talked about how it felt like a terrorist attack that we're witnessing them there were helicopters there were these huge white vans where they were shoving people um handcuffs like in rows into cars and into huge vans kids were watching this because the poultry plants are often located very close to the school building um again this was on the first day of school and so a lot of people felt like it was it felt like a military attack and i also want to flag that most home raids when they happen um there is armed individuals that come into a person's home and it's usually at three to five in the morning so can you imagine being a child and waking up to an armed man in your home um taking away your parents it's like literally a child's

worst nightmare come true so yeah and the trauma that creates so i just want to say that like i i'm glad you raised that because i think the idea of um inflicting that kind of trauma and the use of military and like also just like the kind of force that's being used against people who are our neighbors who are parts of our members of our community is something that we're um that is that is that is a reality that that that could be ours depending on what happens um and that's really really troubling so what we're doing through um as i mentioned before the children thrive action network we're a network um that does a lot of federal and state policy advocacy work in partnership with children's advocates and providers around the country.

We have the National Association of Social Workers as a member, and we have educators and pediatricians that are also part of our membership. And these are, you know, the folks that are going to be on the ground working to support families, regardless of what happens with the election. But in particular, if there is in, you know, there's going to be a lot of work that needs to be done if we're in a negative scenario. So we, one, want to be able to engage both advocates and providers in the advocacy work that needs to be done. We believe that providers in particular have an important role to play in being spokespeople on this issue and about why these types of policies are harmful to kids and families and being able to share from your own expertise and your own experiences why we can do better and what kinds of policies we actually do need.

And also to try to put an end to really harmful policies. And then we also are going to be working on making sure that we have resources for providers and advocates on whatever new policies are implemented, making sure that folks have resources that explain the new policies, resources to help support families. Like, for example, on how to make a deportation plan and how to create a guardianship for a child. And so we encourage folks to just, you know, sign up for our newsletter and join the network if you have the capacity to do so. Or at the very least, go to the CTAN website at childrenthriveaction.org to get the latest updates and resources that we will be making available. And as I said earlier, you'll have an opportunity to put a list or some kind of information once this goes out to the public. You know, as far as NASW goes, we're certainly going to be very, and will remain very much involved. I actually had a presentation, a presentation discussion with a board, one of our board committees dealing with equity issues, not focus it on mass deportation and the impact and that social workers need to be prepared to

get involved in that kind of response and call to action and vetting your members of Congress. We both know that if this does start happening, there's going to be mobilization across the country of most of the progressive groups are going to have some kind of mobilization and that we need to be committed. And we're saying that to our members, at least, to prepare for that. And I had mentioned to you in the past

that I'm writing a social justice brief on mass deportation just as an information item, just getting information out there that this could very much happen. And again, emphasizing your point that the election of Donald Trump or non-election of Donald Trump, because this is on the table, we're proud of 2025.

We just have to be vigilant and stay involved with it. So having said that, Wendy, thank you so much. This was really great. I thought we had a really good discussion. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks. a production of the National Association of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts

to enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. Don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us.

We look forward to seeing you next episode. Thank you.