Ruth Rodriguez was playing outside her Los Angeles neighborhood when she and other children spotted uniformed “ICE” officers across the street. It was 2006 and several nationwide demonstrations saw millions take to the streets to protest immigration policy and anti-immigrant rhetoric, yet the 6-year-old still felt unsafe.
Rodriguez ran back toward the apartment complex where she lived with her friends and hid under the dark stairs waiting for the agents to leave.
“I’ve never lived in a state of feeling safe and secure,” Rodriguez, now 22, told Reckon. “Being naive as a kid was never a reality for me.”
Rodriguez was born in Los Angeles to migrant parents from Guanajuato, Mexico. She and the other children who ran and hid were all U.S. citizens but their parents or other family members weren’t.
They belong to a small group — about 12 percent of all Americans — who have at least one undocumented family member, according to Patricia Gándara, a research professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and co-author of the book “Schools Under Siege: The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Educational Equity.” Gándara led a national study, which surveyed 3,600 educators from more than 700 schools across 13 states.
The study found that in 2019, 5 million children under 19 -– 7 percent of all kids in the country — lived in a mixed-status family. About 90 percent were born to undocumented migrants and are American citizens, but are nonetheless negatively impacted by a “broken” immigration system that touches everything from education to wellbeing, Gándara said.
“They’re U.S. citizens with all the rights and privileges, but as long as their parents are under the gun and don’t have citizenship themselves, as long as the family is at risk that way, then the kids are at risk,” she added.
The study’s update, which was published in early December, comes ahead of a “showdown” election year and amid reports of the Biden Administration
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