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    The Guardian view on Trump and children: protect the innocent from this dark vision of the US soul | Editorial

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    “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children,” Nelson Mandela observed 30 years ago. Though the ugly heart of the Trump administration has hardly been hidden, there is an especially grotesque contrast between its vaunted family values and its treatment of the young.On the campaign trail, Donald Trump declared: “I want a baby boom.” JD Vance, his vice-president, says he wants “more happy children in our country”. Maga pro-natalists are pushing incentives for families to have more children.Yet Bruce Lesley, president of the advocacy organisation First Focus on Children, says that we may never have seen an administration “so laser-focused on targeting the nation’s children for harm”. Its dismantling of the Department of Education is on hold thanks to a judge. But it has already slashed staff at agencies overseeing key services such as child protection and the enforcement of child support payments. Mr Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget sacrifices the interests of babies for those of billionaires, slashing foundational programmes that provide healthcare and food to more than two-fifths of American children.One detail is telling: it would also deny the child tax credit to families with mixed immigration status. Mr Trump’s vision of the nation is the antithesis of Mr Mandela’s inclusivity. Unaccompanied migrant children as young as four are facing immigration hearings without lawyers. That’s unlikely to concern him: as many as 1,360 children separated from their parents at the border in his first term have never been reunited with them.An estimated 5.6 million US-citizen children live with at least one undocumented parent. Almost 4% are at risk of being left with no parent in their home in the event of mass deportation. Mr Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship makes explicit the belief that these children are not truly American either. They are what the historian Prof Mae Ngai has called “alien citizens”, whose standing is deemed suspect – if not denied – due to their race. Young US citizens have been deported alongside parents who say they were given no option to leave their children, one of whom had late-stage cancer. In another case, a two-year-old was sent to foster care when her parents were deported: this time, her mother was reportedly given no option to take her.The immigration crackdown will further encourage employers short of workers to turn to children – often those born to migrants – for badly paid, dirty and dangerous jobs. “Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts?” asked Florida’s governor, Ron deSantis. Child labour laws are already too frequently ignored, yet Republicans have loosened them further in 16 states in the last few years, and sought to do so in many more.Florida’s House of Representatives recently approved legislation allowing children as young as 14 to work overnight without breaks. Yet the state Senate chose not to move the bill – and overall more states strengthened than diluted labour protections last year. For now at least, the administration appears to have reversed course on eliminating the Head Start early education programme. Mr Trump and his allies are exposing their grim vision of a nation in which only some children deserve to be treated with care and basic respect. Others must continue to fight to protect the most vulnerable.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Has RFK Jr misdiagnosed America? – podcast

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      Archive: AP, ABC News, CBS News, Face the Nation, Fox News, PBS Newshour
      Read Alaina Demopoulos’s feature on Maha moms
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      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
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      Family of four-year-old who would ‘die within days’ fighting deportation from US to Mexico

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      The family of a four-year-old girl who is receiving life-saving treatment in the United States are fighting against deportation, as her medical team warns she will likely die “within days” if forced to return to Mexico.Deysi Vargas, her husband and their daughter – whom lawyers identified by the pseudonym Sofia – came to the US in 2023, receiving permission to enter the US on humanitarian grounds to seek medical care. Sofia suffers from short bowel syndrome, requiring specialized care that includes IV treatments for 14 hours a day. She has seen significant improvement since arriving in the US and obtaining care at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, her mother said.But in April, Donald Trump’s administration terminated the family’s legal status and ordered them to self-deport, which would have grave consequences for Sofia.“Sofia’s doctors have been clear she will die within days,” Gina Amato, the directing attorney of Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, which is representing the family. “Deporting this family under these conditions is not only unlawful – it constitutes a moral failure that violates the basic tents of humanity and decency.”View image in fullscreenThe family’s attorney has sought to have the administration reverse its decision and restore humanitarian parole, a temporary status granted to people on urgent humanitarian grounds, citing Sofia’s dire need for care. The family has not received a response.The legal status the family previously received saved Sofia’s life, her mother said at a press conference on Wednesday, as her curly-haired daughter sat nearby, feet dangling off a chair while she played with stickers. Sofia was born with her condition and, while in Mexico, was hospitalized constantly and did not improve, Vargas said.“Now with the help she’s received in the United States, my daughter has an opportunity to get out of the hospital, know the world and live like a normal girl of four years,” she said through a translator.Sofia currently receives nutrition intravenously as well as through a feeding tube, Amato said, but that treatment is not available abroad because the equipment cannot be taken outside the US. While her condition has significantly improved, Sofia cannot yet survive without the treatment she receives from the hospital, her mother said.Humanitarian parole was made for people like Vargas and Sofia, the family’s lawyer, Rebecca Brown, said, adding that she came to the US legally – applying to enter the country and waiting until her application was approved before entering. If the government conducted an individualized assessment, as required by law, they would see the need for Sofia to remain in the US, Brown said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmato argued the case was a symbol of “the recklessness of this administration’s deportation policies”.“To suddenly yank away that welcome mat, take away Sofia’s lifesaving care and quite literally risk her life is a cruel betrayal of our nation’s values and an affront to our shared humanity,” Amato said, adding that the government’s policies are endangering many immigrants seeking refuge. “These are people coming to us for protection and instead we’re sending them to die.” More

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      She compared motherhood in four countries. The US isn’t looking good

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      When Abigail Leonard saw the news that the Trump administration was considering handing out $5,000 “baby bonuses” to new mothers, she realized that she had already received one.A longtime international reporter, Leonard gave birth to three children while living in Japan, which offers a year of parental leave, publicly run daycare, and lump-sum grants to new parents that amount to thousands of US dollars. But it was not until moving back to the US in 2023 that Leonard grasped just how robust Japan’s social safety net for families is – and, in comparison, just how paltry the US net feels.Not only is the US the only rich country on the planet without any form of national paid leave, but an uncomplicated birth covered by private insurance tends to cost families about $3,000, which, Leonard discovered, is far more than in most other countries. The federal government also spends a fraction of what most other wealthy countries spend on early education and childcare, as federally subsidized childcare is primarily available only to the lowest earners. Middle-class families are iced out.View image in fullscreenLeonard traces the effects of policies and disparities like these in her new book, Four Mothers, which follows the pregnancy and early childrearing experiences of four urban, middle-class women living in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the US. Published earlier this month, Four Mothers provides a deeply personal window into how policy shapes parents’ lives. And it has emerged as an increasingly rightwing US seems poised to embrace the ideology of pronatalism and policies aimed at convincing people to have more kids.Pronatalism is deeply controversial, in no small part because its critics say pronatalists are more concerned with pushing women to have kids than with ensuring women have the support required to raise them.“Being ‘pronatal’ – designing policy to increase the birthrate – is not the same thing as being pro-woman,” Leonard notes in Four Mothers’ introduction. A $5,000 check would not have been enough to help any of the moms profiled in the book. Instead, the women relied on – or longed for, in the case of the US – extensive external support, such as affordable maternity care, parental leave and access to childcare.“The book is an implicit comparison of the rest of the world to the US, and parenthood is so much harder here in many ways,” Leonard said in a phone interview with the Guardian. “People are so accepting that things can be privatized and that government can be torn down and that there won’t be any repercussions to that. We don’t think about how integral government policy is to our lives, and for that reason can’t imagine how much more beneficial it could be.”View image in fullscreenIn the US, resistance to increasing government aid in childrearing has long gone hand in hand with a commitment to upholding a white, traditional view of the American family. At virtually every juncture, rightwing groups have been galvanized to stop sporadic efforts at expanding support. During the second world war, Congress allocated $20m to a universal childcare program that could help women work while men fought in the war effort. The program was so popular that people protested in the streets to keep it even after the war ended, according to Leonard. But the program was dismantled after political disputes over how to run the program, as southern states demanded that the daycares be segregated.In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national system of federally subsidized daycare centers. Inflamed by the idea that the bill would encourage women to work outside the home, church groups organized letter-writing campaigns against the bill. Rightwing pundits, meanwhile, claimed the bill was “a plan to Sovietize our youth”. Richard Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill, calling it “the most radical piece of legislation” to ever cross his desk.Today, Leonard writes, corporations have an entrenched interest in keeping childcare from becoming a public good in the US. Private equity is heavily invested in childcare companies. Wealthy corporations, especially big tech companies, can also use their generous paid leave policies to lure in the best talent.“I talked to a congressman who was telling me he was trying to get some of these companies on board to back a national paid leave policy, and they were saying: ‘We don’t want to do paid leave because then we give up our own competitive advantage.’ It’s so cynical,” Leonard said. “These are companies that have been able to create this image around themselves of being feminist and pro-family. Like: ‘They’re great places to work for women. They help fund fertility treatments!’”She continued: “They’ve feminist-washed themselves. They’re working against a national policy that would benefit everyone and that ultimately would benefit our democracy, because you wouldn’t have this huge inequality of benefits and lifestyles.”‘A grind’The US has become far more accepting of women’s careerist ambitions over the last 50 years – especially as it has become more difficult for US families to sustain themselves on a single income – but balancing work and family life is still often treated as a matter of personal responsibility (or, frequently, as a personal failing).View image in fullscreenTo improve mothers’ lives, Leonard found, a commitment to flexible gender norms – in the home and at work – must be coupled with a robust social safety net.Each of the women in Four Mothers struggled with male partners who, in various ways and for assorted reasons, failed to provide as much childcare as the mothers. Sarah, a teacher in Utah, was married to an Amazon delivery driver who got zero parental leave. Sarah was entitled to three months of leave, at partial pay, but only because her union advocated for it. Although Sarah and her husband chose to leave the Mormon church, she found herself longing for the community that the church provided because it offered some form of support and acknowledgment of motherhood.Finland perhaps fares the best in Leonard’s book. The country, which gives parents about a year of paid leave, invests heavily in its maternal care system and has some of the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world; it even offers mothers prenatal counseling where they can discuss their own childhoods and how to break cycles of intergenerational trauma. (The US, by contrast, has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country.) Finland is also the only industrialized nation on the planet where fathers spend more time with their children than mothers do. (The difference is about eight minutes, “about as even as it can be”, Leonard wrote in Four Mothers.) Parents are also happier than non-parents in Finland – which is routinely ranked as the happiest country in the world – while the inverse is true in the US.View image in fullscreenStill, the birth rate is on the decline in Finland, just as it is in Japan and the US. It is not clear what kinds of pronatalist policies, if any, induce people to have kids. Nearly 60% of Americans under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children say that’s because “they just don’t want to”.“The pronatal argument here – that’s really focused on people who make the choice not to have children. That is not only cruel and mean, but it’s also ineffective, because people who don’t want to have kids probably aren’t going to have kids and none of this stuff is going to make a difference,” Leonard said.That said, had she been building her family in the US rather than Japan, Leonard doesn’t know if she would have had three children. Given the cost of US childcare, “it would have been more of a grind”.“I just think it’s harder and more expensive here. So it was somewhat easier to have that third child there,” Leonard said. “It’s not because they gave me a $5,000 baby bonus.” More

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      Trump administration seeks to end basic rights and protections for child immigrants in its custody

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      The Trump administration is trying to end a cornerstone immigration policy that requires the government to provide basic rights and protections to child immigrants in its custody.The protections, which are drawn from a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, limit the amount of time children can be detained by immigration officials. It also requires the government to provide children in its custody with adequate food, water and clean clothes.The administration’s move to terminate the Flores agreement was long anticipated. In a court motion filed Thursday, the justice department argued that the Flores agreement should be “completely” terminated, claiming it has incentivized unauthorized border crossings and “prevented the federal government from effectively detaining and removing families”.Donald Trump also tried to end these protections during his first term, making very similar arguments.The move to end protections follows a slew of actions by the Trump administration that target children, including restarting the practice of locking up children along with their parents in family detention. Immigration advocacy groups have alleged in a class-action lawsuit filed earlier this month that unaccompanied children are languishing in government facilities after the administration unveiled policies making it exceedingly difficult for family members in the US to take custody of them. The president and lawmakers have also sought to cut off unaccompanied children’s access to legal services and make it harder for families in detention to seek legal aid.“Eviscerating the rudimentary protections that these children have is unconscionable,” said Mishan Wroe, senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law. “At this very moment, babies and toddlers are being detained in family detention, and children all over the country are being detained and separated from their families unnecessarily.”The effort to suspend the Flores agreement “bears the Trump administration’s hallmark disregard for the rule of law – and for the wellbeing of toddlers who have done no wrong”, said Faisal al-Juburi of the Texas-based legal non-profit Raices. “This administration would rather enrich private prison contractors with the $45bn earmarked for immigrant detention facilities in the House’s depraved spending bill than to uphold basic humanitarian protections for babies.”The Trump administration in 2019 asked a judge to dissolve the Flores Settlement Agreement, but its motion was struck down. During the Biden administration, a federal judge agreed to partially lift oversight protections at the Department of Health and Human Services, but the agreement is still in place at the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies.“Children who seek refuge in our country should be met with open arms – not imprisonment, deprivation and abuse,” said Sergio Perez, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.The settlement is named for Jenny Flores, a 15-year-old girl who fled civil war in El Salvador and was part of a class-action lawsuit alleging widespread mistreatment of children in custody in the 1980s.Since the settlement agreement was reached in 1997, lawyers and advocates have successfully sued the government several times to end the mistreatment of immigrant children. In 2018, attorneys sued after discovering unaccompanied children had been administered psychotropic medication without informed consent.In 2024, a court found that CBP had breached the agreement when it detained children and families at open-air detention sites at the US southern border without adequate access to sanitation, medical care, food, water or blankets. In some cases, children were forced to seek refuge in portable toilets from the searing heat and bitter cold. More

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      Key takeaways: RFK Jr’s ‘Maha’ report on chronic disease in children

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      Donald Trump’s health secretary and long-time vaccine skeptic, Robert F Kennedy Jr, presented a highly anticipated report on children’s health this week.The “Maha commission” report, referring to the “Make America healthy again” movement, was required by a presidential executive order in February. The report focuses on chronic disease among children.The 68-page report broadly summarizes five areas affecting children’s health, with a focus on ultra-processed foods, environmental chemical exposure, lack of physical activity, “overmedicalization”, and “capture” of regulatory agencies.It notably omits some of the most common causes of chronic disease and death in children, insinuates there could be harms where there is lack of evidence, and avoids discussing how Republicans have already changed the health system in ways researchers believe are harmful.Art Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, told the Guardian that the report has “interesting ideas about health and children’s health and crackpot fringe tin-hat-wearing nonsense – it’s got it all”.Here are five of the key takeaways from the report.1. The report ignores some common dangers to childrenThe most common causes of death among children are car crashes and firearm accidents. The report ignores these issues, as well as behaviors that often start in adolescence and lead to chronic disease in adulthood, such as smoking and alcohol use. It also criticizes water fluoridation, without mentioning its protective effects against cavities.Also, absent from the report is a discussion of how the administration has already changed the health department in ways that advocates argue will benefit industry and could exacerbate chronic disease.For instance, Kennedy eliminated two smoking prevention offices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in what one former regulator told Stat was “the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century”. He also eliminated a world-leading sexually transmitted infection laboratory.In another example, one of the nation’s leading researchers of ultra-processed foods quit his “dream job” after facing what he described as censorship from the administration (the health department reportedly asked him to return). In a similar vein, the Trump administration cut a program that delivered local whole foods to schools soon after taking office, in spite of Kennedy calling for healthier school meals.2. The report focuses on issues key to Kennedy’s view of healthThe report is roughly broken up into five sections focusing on ultra-processed foods, environmental chemical exposures, children’s mental health, “overmedicalization” and “corporate capture” of regulators by the industries they are supposed to oversee.Kennedy has harped on many of the issues listed in the report for months in public appearances and even though his defunct presidential campaign – especially including ultra-processed foods and obesity. Although some of these concerns may find bipartisan support – such as the focus on “forever chemicals” such as Pfas – it also pushes into areas where the science is unsettled.For instance, the report mentions that high levels of fluoride are potentially associated with reduced IQ, but does not mention its well-established protective effects against cavities – the most common chronic condition in children, according to the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research.Similarly, the report argues that the childhood vaccine schedule is causing concern among parents for,“their possible role in the growing childhood chronic disease crisis” – without citing evidence that vaccines are linked to any specific chronic disease.3. It’s likely to face diverse pushback – and create new alliancesEven before the report was published, congressional lawmakers were being bombarded by calls from agricultural and chemical lobbyists wary of how the report would criticize their products – and indeed it did.One of the report’s sections questions whether “crop protection tools” including “pesticides, herbicides and insecticides” could harm human health. It then specifically name-drops glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, and atrazine, a common herbicide. That is sure to make for strange political bedfellows and consternation within the Republican party. Similarly, the report cites synthetic dyes and ultra-processed foods are potentially harmful.Chemicals and food additives have been issues of concern for decades on the left. However, the Maha movement has also catalyzed opposition to them on the right.4. The report’s authors are not namedThe commission’s members are made up of the heads of intersecting agencies, including Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services, and the heads of the departments of agriculture, housing, education, veterans affairs and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.However, the exact authors of the report are unknown. This contrasts with Kennedy’s repeated promise at his confirmation hearing that his health department would practice “radical transparency”.The work of the “Maha” commission was reportedly spearheaded by senior Kennedy adviser Calley Means, a former food lobbyist and healthcare entrepreneur who rose to prominence as a Maha truth-teller. Means co-wrote a bestselling book with his sister, current US surgeon general nominee Casey Means, which blames many of America’s ills on sedentary lifestyle and poor diet.5. Changing any of the issues identified is likely to be toughOne of the key issues the report identifies is the influence of food, pharmaceutical and chemical companies on American policy. They are monied and powerful.As a result, getting real change through Congress is certain to be tough – especially in an administration devoted to reducing regulations. More

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      Republicans are attacking childcare funding. Their goal? To push women out of the workforce | Moira Donegan

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      Last month, the White House issued a proposed budget to Congress that completely eliminated funding for Head Start, the six-decade-old early childhood education program for low-income families that serves as a source of childcare for large swaths of the American working class.The funding was restored in the proposed budget after an outcry, but large numbers of employees who oversee the program at the office of Head Start were laid off in a budget-slashing measure under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. On Thursday, Kennedy said funding for the program would not be axed, but more cuts to childcare funding are likely coming: some Republicans have pushed to repeal a five-decade-old tax credit for daycare. The White House is entertaining proposals on how to incentivize and structurally coerce American women into bearing more children, but it seems to be determined to make doing so as costly to those women’s careers as possible.That’s because the Republicans’ childcare policy, like their pro-natalist policy, is based on one goal: undoing the historic gains in women’s rights and status, and pushing American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society – and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.The New York Times reported this week that the White House is now not only looking for ways to make more women have children, but to encourage “parents” to stay home to raise them. “Parents” here is a euphemism. Roughly 80% of stay-at-home parents are mothers: cultural traditions that encourage women, and not men, to sacrifice their careers for caregiving, along with persistent wage inequalities that make women, on the whole, lower earners than their male partners, both incentivize women, and not men, to drop out of the workforce and stay home when they have children.This state of affairs has been worsened by the dramatic rise in the cost of childcare, which is prohibitively expensive for many parents. The average cost of childcare per child per year in the US is now well north of $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, an industry advocacy group. In major cities such as New York, that price is significantly higher: from $16,000 to $19,000 per year. Existing tax credits need to be expanded, not eliminated, to reduce this burden on mothers and their families and to enable women to join the workforce at rates comparable to men and commensurate with their dignity and capacities. Currently, 26% of mothers do not engage in paid work, a figure that has barely budged in 40 years. Largely because of the unequally distributed burdens of childcare, men participate in the paid labor force at a rate that is more than 10% higher than women.One might think that the solution would be to invest more in high-quality childcare, so that providers could open more slots, children could access more resources, and women could go to work and expend their talents in productive ways that earn them money, make use of their gifts and provide more dignity for women and more stability for families. This is not what the American right is proposing: Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who promotes traditional family and gender relations, has called such policy initiatives “work-ist”. Conservatives are proposing, instead, that women go back to the kitchen.The Trump administration, and the American right more broadly, wants the rate of women’s employment to be even lower, because it is advancing a lie that women are naturally, inevitably, uniformly and innately inclined to caregiving, child rearing and homemaking – and not to the positions of intellectual achievement, responsibility, leadership, ingenuity or independence that women may aspire to in the public world. “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hardwired to bond with Mom,” says Janet Erickson, a fellow at the rightwing Institute for Family Studies, who once co-authored an op-ed with JD Vance calling on “parents” to drop out of the workforce to raise children. “I just think, why should we deny that?”This kind of vague, evidence-free gesturing toward evolutionary psychology – the notion that babies are “hardwired” to prefer mothers who are not employed – is a common conservative tick: a recourse to dishonest and debunked science to lend empiricism to bigotry. There is in fact no evolutionary reason, and no biological reason, for mothers, and not fathers, to abandon independence, ambition or life outside the home for the sake of a child. The only reason is a sexist one.Over the past decade, the left launched few vigorous defenses of a feminist politics that seeks to advance and secure women’s access to public life, paid work and fair remuneration. The American left has launched vigorous criticisms of the “girlboss”, a figure of malignant female ambition who seemed to make the exploitations of capitalism more offensive by virtue of her sex, and it has instead offered critiques of women’s ambition and romantic defenses of the labor of “care” that just happens to overlap with women’s traditional – and traditionally unpaid – roles in the home. This leftwing rhetoric has at times mirrored the similar romanticization of the unpaid housewife of yesteryear from the right, which has embraced tradwives, homesteading fantasies and an aestheticized rustic simplicity that aims to contrast feminist gains in the workforce with a fantasy of women’s rest. Together, these strains of rhetorical opposition to women in the workforce have made anti-feminism into a new kind of “socialism of fools” – a misguided misdirection of anger and resentment at the rapaciousness of capitalism towards a social justice movement for the rights of an oppressed class.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut what is on offer from the political right is not about the refashioning of work and life to be less extractive and exploitative for women, and particularly for mothers. It is instead about a sex segregation of human experience, an effort to make much of public life inaccessible to women. Combined with the right wing’s successful attack on the right to abortion, the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to Title X programs that provide contraceptive access, and the rescinding of federal grants aimed at helping working women, what emerges from the rightwing policy agenda is an effort to force women out of education, out of decently paid work and into pregnancy, unemployment and dependence on men.Theirs is an effort to shelter men from women’s economic competition, to revert to the regressive cultural modes of an imagined past, and to impose an artificially narrow vision of the capacities, aspirations, talents and desires of half of the American people.Murray Rothbard, the paleoconservative 20th-century economist whose ideas have had a profound influence on the Trumpist worldview, once vowed: “We shall repeal the 20th century.” As far as the Republican right is concerned, it seems to want to repeal the gains of 20th-century feminism first.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Republicans say they want more American babies – but which kind?

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      Some of the children were too young to stand on their own. Instead, they sat on their parents’ knees or in their parents’ arms, waving American flags. Many of them seemed confused about what, exactly, was even happening.But these kids were in the midst of making history: their families were among the first to take advantage of Donald Trump’s February executive order granting white South Africans refugee status in the United States, on the grounds that Afrikaner landowners – who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population yet, decades after the end of apartheid, control about half of its land – are facing persecution. While the doors to the US refugee program have been slammed shut to virtually everyone else, these Afrikaners showed up in the US earlier this week, their refugee status promising a path to US citizenship.Days later, the Trump administration took a far narrower view of who deserves access to the American polity. On Thursday morning, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued in front of the US supreme court that the 14th amendment does not guarantee citizenship to the American-born children of “illegal aliens” – a view contradicted by more than a century of legal precedent.This split screen raises a vital question: is the Trump administration really interested in helping children and families flourish – or only the “right” families?Over the last several months, the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, families, and children have been pockmarked by all kinds of contradictions. The administration is reportedly considering numerous policies to convince people to have more children, such as “baby bonuses” of $5,000 or medals for mothers who have six or more kids. The Department of Transportation has issued a memo directing the agency to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And JD Vance has proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”These moves are, in part, fueled by the growing power of the pronatalism movement, which believes that the declining birthrate in the US is an existential threat to its workforce and its future.Why, then, does the government want to exclude an estimated 150,000 babies born every year?“It’s hard to look at any of these policies and not believe that they’re created for the purpose of satisfying a political base that was promised some sort of notions of recreating a nostalgia for a white Christian nationalist nation,” said P Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School.If the fate of the US workforce is really of concern, experts say immigration could help grow it – but the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance against immigrants from the Global South and their children. The administration has not only reportedly turned the refugee agency responsible for caring for children who arrive in the US alone into an arm of Ice, but also slashed funding for legal representation of children in immigration proceedings. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are trying to block parents who lack Social Security Numbers – such as undocumented people – from benefiting from the child tax credit, even in cases where their children are US citizens.The Trump administration has also unveiled new screening protocols that make it far more difficult for undocumented people to “sponsor”, or take custody of, children who enter the US alone. Just last week, the National Center for Youth Law and the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration over the changes, which they say have forced kids to languish in government custody. Between December 2024 and March 2025, kids went from spending an average of two months in government custody to spending an average of six.“This administration has compromised the basic health and safety of immigrant children in egregious ways,” Neha Desai, managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, said in an email.In March, KFF, a charity that conducts health policy research, conducted focus groups of Hispanic adults who are undocumented or likely living with someone who is undocumented. Many spoke of the effect that the Trump administration’s policies are having on their families and kids.“I have a six-year-old child. Honestly, I’m afraid to take him to the park, and he asks me, ‘Mom, why don’t we go to the park?’” one 49-year-old Costa Rican immigrant woman told KFF. “How do I tell him? I’m scared.”“Even the children worry. ‘Mom, did you get home safely?’ They’re already thinking that something is going to happen to us on the street,” added a 54-year-old Colombian immigrant woman. “So that also makes me very nervous, knowing that there might come a time when they could be left here alone.”The supreme court arguments on Thursday centered not on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but on the legality of lower court orders in the case. Still, some of the justices expressed concerns about what the case could mean for children.Eliminating birthright citizenship, Justice Elena Kagan suggested, could render children stateless. The high court needed a way to act fast, she said.If the justices believe that a court order is wrong, she asked, “why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action?”Both the historical and legal record make clear that the 14th Amendment encapsulates birthright citizenship, Gulasekaram said. But, he said, predicting the supreme court’s moves is a “fool’s errand”.“There’s really no way of getting around the the conclusion that this is a call to some form of racial threat and racial solidarity as a way of shoring up support from a particular part of the of the of the Trump base,” Gulasekaram said. “Citizenship and the acquisition of citizenship has always been racially motivated in the United States.” More

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      Give birth? In this economy? US women scoff at Trump’s meager ‘baby bonuses’

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      In theory, Savannah Downing would love to be a mom. At 24, the Texan actor and content creator is nearing the age at which her mother had kids. Some of her friends are starting families. But having children in the United States is wildly expensive – and so when she saw the news that the Trump administration was considering giving out $5,000 “baby bonuses” to convince women to have kids, Downing was incensed.“Maybe people will want to have children more often if we weren’t struggling to find jobs, struggling to pay our student loans, struggling to pay for food,” she said. “Five thousand dollars doesn’t even begin to even cover childcare for one month. It just seems really ridiculous.”Trump officials have made no secret of their desire to make America procreate again. In his very first address as vice-president, JD Vance said at the anti-abortion March for Life: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Weeks later, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to focus on projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. Then, in late April, the New York Times reported that the administration was brainstorming policies to encourage people to get married and have kids, such as giving out those baby bonuses or awarding medals to women who have at least six children.All of these moves are evidence of the growing power of the pronatalist movement within US politics. This movement, which has won adherents among both traditional “family values” conservatives and tech-bro rightwingers such as Elon Musk, considers the falling US birthrate to be an existential threat to the country’s future and thus holds that the US government should enact policies designed to incentivize people to give birth.But many of the women who are, in theory, the targets of the pronatalist pitch have just one response: Have babies? In this economy?After the New York Times report broke, social media exploded with indignation at the proposed policies’ inadequacy. “Go ahead and tell Uncle Sam what he needs to give you to make him Daddy Sam,” a woman rasped at the camera in one TikTok with nearly 1m likes. “Universal – ?” she started to say, in a presumable reference to universal healthcare. “No. No. Where did you even hear that?”“Five thousand? That doesn’t go very far!” one 24-year-old stay-at-home mother of four complained in another TikTok, as her children babbled in the background. “It costs 200, 300 bucks just to buy a car seat for these kids. I just feel like it’s really just insulting. If you want people to have more kids, make housing more affordable. Make food more affordable.”Although the cost of raising a child in the US varies greatly depending on factors such as geography, income level and family structure, a middle-class family with dual incomes can expect to spend somewhere between $285,000 and $311,000 raising a child born in 2015, a 2022 analysis by the Brookings Institute found. That analysis doesn’t factor in the price of college tuition, which also varies but, as of last year, cost about $11,600 a year at an in-state, public university.The cost of merely giving birth is more expensive in the US than in almost any other country on the planet. An uncomplicated birth covered by private insurance. which is basically the best-case scenario for US parents, tends to cost about $3,000, according to Abigail Leonard’s new book Four Mothers.Paige Connell, a 35-year-old working mom of four who regularly posts online about motherhood, had a long list of pro-family policies she would like to see adopted. For example: lowering the cost of childcare, which runs to about $70,000 a year for Connell’s family. (An April Trump administration memo proposed eliminating Head Start, which helps low-income families obtain childcare, although the administration appears to have recently reversed course.) Or: preserving the Department of Education, as Connell has children in public school and some of them rely on specialized education plans. (Trump has signed an executive order aiming to dismantle the department, in an apparent attempt to get around the fact that only Congress can close federal departments.)“They want to incentivize people to have children. I don’t think they have a real stake in helping people raise them,” Connell said of the Trump administration. “Many women that I know – women and men – do want more kids. They actually want to have more children. They simply can’t afford it.”Lyman Stone, a demographer who in 2024 established the pronatalism initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies, argued in an interview last year that “most of missing babies in our society are first and second births” – that is, that people avoid having a second child or having kids at all. Pronatalism, he said, should focus on helping those people decide otherwise.“The misconception is this idea that pronatalism is about tradwives and giant families, when it’s really about, on some level, helping the girl boss, like, girl boss in her family life a little bit earlier and harder,” Stone said.Some Americans may indeed be having fewer children than they would like. Among adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children, close to 40% say that they are not doing so due to “concerns about the state of the world” or because they “can’t afford to raise a child”, according to a 2024 Pew survey. A 2025 Harris poll for the Guardian found that the state of the economy has negatively affected 65% of Americans’ plans to have a child.But to say that pronatalism is about helping the “girl boss” have one or two kids is not quite accurate, given that several prominent pronatalists are deeply interested in producing “giant families”. Malcolm and Simone Collins, who have become the avatars of the tech-right wing of pronatalism, have at least four children and show no signs of slowing down. (The Collinses were behind the medal idea reported by the Times; they called it a “National Medal of Motherhood”.) Musk, perhaps the most famous pronatalist on the planet, reportedly runs something of a harem and is believed to have fathered 14 children.Republicans are also currently exploring policies that would entice more parents to stay at home with their children, the New York Times reported on Monday, such as expanding the child tax credit from $2,000 to $5,000. While these potential policies do not specify which parent would stay at home, four out of five stay-at-home parents are moms.However, this goal is seemingly at odds with Republicans’ desire to slash the US budget by more than $1.5tn. Indeed, Republicans have proposed dramatically curtailing Medicaid – a proposal that would appear to hinder the pronatalism agenda, because Medicaid pays for more than 40% of all US births.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPronatalism has long been intertwined with racism, eugenics and authoritarian governments. Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union gave out medals to women who had large numbers of children, while in the United States, interest in pronatalism has historically surged in eras, such as the early 20th century, when women and immigrants were trying to participate more in public life. Today, fears about the consequences of the near record low US birthrate are often tied to concerns about the country’s shrinking workforce. Immigration could help alleviate those concerns, but the Trump administration is deeply opposed to it.All this leads to a fundamental question: do pronatalists want everybody to have children – or just some types of people?“What I’ve seen online of the pronatalist movement, it does seem very aligned with white supremacy, because it does seem like a lot of the conversation around it is more geared towards white couples having more babies,” said Madison Block, a product marketing manager and writer who lives in New York. She’s also leery of the Trump administration’s focus on autism, which could translate into ableism: “A lot of the conversations around pronatalism, in addition to being borderline white supremacist, I think are also very ableist.”Now that she’s 28, Block said that many of her friends were starting to get married and consider having babies. But Block is afraid to do so under the current administration. And when she thinks about potentially starting a family, affordable healthcare is non-negotiable.“I personally wouldn’t want to have kids unless I know for a fact that I am financially stable enough, that I can provide them with an even better childhood than what I have,” Block said. “I think, for a lot of younger millennials and gen Z, a lot of us are not at that point yet.”View image in fullscreenPerhaps the ultimate irony of the Trump administration’s pronatalist push is that it is not clear what pronatalist policies, if any, actually induce people into becoming parents.In past years, Hungary has poured 5% of its national GDP into boosting births, such as through exempting women who have four children or more children from paying taxes. This herculean effort has not worked: as of 2023, the country’s birth rate has hovered at 1.6, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. (For a country to maintain its population, women must have about two children each.) More left-leaning countries, such as those in Scandinavia, have also embarked on extensive government programs to make it easier for women to have kids and maintain careers – yet their birth rates also remain lower than the replacement rate and, in the case of Sweden, even dropped.It may be the case that, when access to technologies like birth control give people more choices over when and how to have children, they may simply choose to have fewer children. In that 2024 Pew survey, nearly 60% of respondents said that they were unlikely to have kids because they “just don’t want to”.Downing is not that concerned about pronatalism taking root among the general public. Personally, she doesn’t feel like there’s too much governmental pressure on her to have kids, particularly since she is Black and much of the pronatalism movement seems focused on pushing white women to have babies.“I feel like a lot of women are fed up. I think that’s why the birth rate is going down,” she said. “Women are realizing that they’re more than just birthing machines.”But images from The Handmaid’s Tale – the red capes, the white bonnets – haunt her.“I think $5,000 and a medal trying to coax women into having more kids is a start,” she said, “and I really am worried to see how far they will go to try to force women and have children”. More