To thrive, all children need to grow up in their communities surrounded by loving and caring adults, and families need access to basic programs and services so they can meet their needs and participate fully in their communities. Government plays an important role ensuring each of these conditions is met.
But the details that emerged this week about Congress’s massive tax and immigration bill underscore how this Congress and Administration are violating government’s most basic commitments and undertaking a concerted attack on children and families—decimating government programs that families rely on every day and upending longstanding legal protections that safeguard the well-being of vulnerable children and families.
If lawmakers move forward with this callous agenda, children and families across the country will be harmed—and none more than children in mixed-status and immigrant families.
Just consider a few of the proposals that have emerged this week:
- In a bill that extends enormous tax cuts to the wealthy, lawmakers have proposed a modest expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for families with moderate and high incomes. But the bill would do nothing to help the 17 million children who currently do not receive the full CTC because their families’ incomes are too low, and it goes further to strip the CTC from an additional 4.5 million children who are citizens or lawful permanent residents but have an immigrant parent without a Social Security Number.
- The bill pays for these tax cuts in no small part through cuts to Medicaid, including counterproductive and burdensome new work reporting requirements, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will lead 8.6 million people to lose their health coverage. While directly taking away health coverage from millions, the bill goes a step further and attempts to coerce states to restrict health coverage as well. It does this by financially penalizing the 14 states that do the right thing and use their own state dollars to provide coverage to immigrants who are ineligible for federally-funded health coverage—cutting the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) for the expansion population in those state and putting even more children and families at risk of losing their health coverage.
- The bill further threatens children and families by radically overhauling immigration law and funding draconian immigration enforcement measures that disregard people’s most basic rights. Together, the provisions will lead to family separation, as parents’ lawful status is revoked, as well as the indefinitely detention and jailing of children who arrive in the United States unaccompanied—in direct violation of the Flores settlement agreement and child welfare best practice. As the National Immigration Law Center has summarized, the bill “would essentially rewrite the legal regime governing the care and custody of unaccompanied children.”
Children are children, and families are families. We owe the same basic dignity to each, regardless of the place of their birth or the balance in their bank accounts. Rather than enacting these proposals that will harm children and families, increase inequality, and harden divisions amongst us, we should protect and expand policies and programs like the CTC and Medicaid that help families meet their needs and bolster legal protections put in place to safeguard the health and well-being of children and families. Doing this is absolutely essential so that we can each contribute to our communities. It is the foundation for a healthy and thriving democracy.
