How do you explain ICE to your child? Immigrant families are having ‘the talk’
Lifestyle
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3:00 PM on Wednesday, April 1
By Candice Norwood for The 19th, Stacker
How do you explain ICE to your child? Immigrant families are having ‘the talk’
Ana is a Mexican American woman who, as a child, did not live in fear of immigration raids. She’s a U.S.-born citizen who grew up in Mexicantown, Detroit, a Southwest neighborhood that serves as a cultural hub for the city’s Latinx population.
Her grandparents immigrated to the United States with legal status from a small town in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Admittedly, Ana, 38, did not have much awareness about the experiences of undocumented immigrants until she started dating her now-husband in 2012. At 18, he entered the country without documentation, arriving from the same area of Mexico as Ana’s family.
“We started dating in the early fall, and I remember that he couldn’t take me out, and I was so distraught. Like, ‘Do you not want to take me out?’ But he couldn’t get a job because he didn’t have a Social Security Number,” said Ana, whose name has been changed by The 19th to protect her family.
When she imagined getting married and raising a family, her list of motherhood expectations definitely did not include one day preparing her elementary school-age children, all of them U.S. citizens, for an encounter with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): “Memorize our home address. Take daddy’s phone and hit record. Call mom.”
This is Ana’s reality during the second Trump administration. Her husband still does not have legal status. Together, they have three children who are 9, 7 and 5 years old, and the family speaks openly at home about the risks they face.
“I’m parenting in a political climate that could separate my whole family. It could break us apart,” Ana said. “It’s just one more thing; this emotional labor that we carry on as mothers — but this one’s with more stress.”
Across the country, immigrant mothers and mothers who are partnered with immigrants are teaching their children a lesson of survival as President Donald Trump continues his historic expansion of immigration enforcement. Over the last year, $75 billion — an unprecedented increase — has been approved for building new detention centers, hiring thousands of immigration officers and surging ICE operations.
The administration initially claimed it would focus on detaining and deporting people with criminal convictions, but independent analyses of ICE data show that about one-third of those arrested in 2025 had a criminal conviction. The rest included people without convictions — child care workers, high school honor roll students, parents heading to work and kids on their way home from school. Some are undocumented. Others have legal status or, in some cases, are U.S. citizens.
For generations of Black American mothers, preparing their children for interactions with police, including arrests or violence, is a difficult conversation known as “the talk.” Historically, it has served as an act of love, vigilance and desperation by mothers seeking to protect their kids in a world that often views them as suspects first and children second.
In the Trump era, a different version of “the talk” is emerging among immigrant parents who are living with the dread that their children could become targets as well.
A guide to talking to your children about ICE
Child development experts shared guidance with The 19th to help parents navigate this time of heightened stress and uncertainty as immigration enforcement expands.
As an Afro-Dominican woman living in North Carolina, Dania Santana is balancing multiple dynamics. Her youngest son, who is 11 years old, looks more like the stereotypical image people associate with Latinx children. Her middle son, who is 14, is a Black boy with afro-textured hair. Her 16-year-old daughter has a skin tone that is more of a mix between the two.
“I always get different reactions among different groups of people with my kids, of who is acceptable or cute and who is the opposite. It’s interesting because it’s different reactions from Black people, from Latino people and then from White people,” Santana said. “So I have different conversations with my children about how things can play out for them in this moment.”
Coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic at 25, Santana, now 48, had limited knowledge of U.S. racial dynamics until she began to witness the bias and discrimination firsthand. That understanding shaped the way she began to guide her children. When her older son, who has darker skin, was in middle school, Santana recalls hearing from his teacher that he and his friends were pulling small pranks in class.
Santana said that she took the incident as an opportunity to not only discourage her son from being disruptive in class, but also to share with him that he may not always receive the same level of grace as his White friends. “You need to learn this now before you’re out there,” she said.
With both ICE and local police on Santana’s mind, she feels on high alert all the time, questioning every aspect of where her children will be and who they will be with. This includes monitoring cell phone locations and sitting inside the nearby Starbucks while her kids hang at the mall. She has even considered moving her family to New York City, where she lived before North Carolina. At least in New York, her kids wouldn’t have to drive, she said. Or maybe they might flee the United States entirely if circumstances get worse.
“I have been very clear with them that the moment I see that things are turning, we will be looking into leaving the country,” she said. “So when my youngest son heard that the National Guard was coming, he thought it was that moment. He got really sad. He was like, ‘So we’re gonna have to leave everything behind?’”
For many households in the United States, “the talk” is a common method of racial socialization, a way for parents and caregivers to teach children about race and identity to both foster a sense of pride and to prepare them for societal inequities and police brutality.
Often, what prompts a parent to begin these conversations is a specific incident: a racist comment muttered under someone’s breath at the grocery store, a White mother on the playground instructing her child not to play with a Black child, said Dr. Leslie A. Anderson, an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences at Morgan State University.
As part of her research, Anderson analyzed how Black families with young school-age children navigated “the talk.” She and her team found that many parents gave their children specific directives on how to act when in the presence of law enforcement. This includes keeping their hands visible at all times, remaining calm and respectful to the officers, answering officers’ questions and directing the officers to their parents. In other cases, parents instruct their children to leave the situation and find them or another trusted adult, which could unintentionally escalate the interaction.
Research indicates that when done thoughtfully, with specific, practical directives, “the talk” can be beneficial for children, Anderson said. “But it’s also extremely stressful for the parent, primarily the mom, to have to navigate these conversations in the first place,” she said. “And what I found is that a lot of folks feel inept, like ‘I know I need to have this conversation. I don’t know how to do it.’”
Black and Brown people regardless of citizenship or immigration status face disproportionate risk of racial profiling and violence by law enforcement. Recent studies have also captured how the day-to-day lives of immigrants can be heavily shaped by the threat of immigration enforcement. One survey conducted among a representative sample of Latinx and Asian immigrants in California between 2018 and 2020 found that about 43% of Latinx immigrants and 13% of Asian immigrants knew someone who had been deported, said Dr. Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young, an immigrant health scholar and professor at the University of California, Merced.
About 16% of Latinx immigrants and 10% of Asian immigrants reported experiencing racial profiling, Young said. When it comes to speaking with children about ICE, conversations may start when children ask their parents specific questions based on what they’re observing. But many times, the conversations are not explicit, Young said.
Immigrant parents experience varying levels of comfort speaking directly about their status. They may instruct kids to avoid staring out from windows or going outdoors on certain occasions, which can be confusing, at least initially. Over time, the children may begin to pick up on their parents’ fears and any ICE presence in their communities — and they will connect the dots for themselves.
Many immigrant mothers feel that the country’s approach to immigration has intensified over the course of their lives. Some did not have to confront conversations about immigration enforcement until having to do so with their own children during the Trump administration.
Maya was born in India, spent her childhood in Australia and moved to the Seattle area when she was 12. The schools she attended in the United States were not diverse, so she often felt different from other kids. Immigration-specific conversations were never really on her radar until after she received a green card in high school and later began to face more explicit experiences with xenophobia as an adult, she said.
Her son was just 1 year old when Trump returned to Washington for a second time. The 35-year-old and her husband live in a predominantly White New Jersey town. The week Trump got elected, she said, an older White man walked up to her and her son at the grocery store and told her to go back to her country.
In the 15 months since, Maya, whose name The 19th has changed, has watched online videos of ICE agents storming playgrounds and posting up outside of elementary schools. She’s read the stories of what’s happened in Minnesota, including the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents, as well as the detention of 5-year-old Liam Ramos.
Maya has her green card and should be legally shielded from an ICE arrest or detention. Yet she has seen news reports documenting the apprehension of people with legal work permits, green cards or pending asylum cases.
Maya’s green card expires next year.
Her son is 3 years old now, and there’s only so much he can absorb, Maya said. She struggles with the balance between protecting his innocence and childhood and making sure he’s prepared should anything happen. His nanny is undocumented, which adds an extra layer of complication because ICE could come after her while she’s out with Maya’s son. Maya said there are days when her phone will ping with a text from the nanny saying she can’t make it to work because ICE agents are near her home.
For now, Maya tells her young son:
Do not go anywhere except with his nanny, mom and dad.
Do not walk away with any strangers.
If his nanny gets pulled over while he’s in the car, he needs to immediately say, “I want my mommy.” “I want my daddy.”
Maya also keeps a laminated card tucked into the backseat pocket of her car. It states, “If left unattended, please contact,” with her name and phone number, as well as her husband’s name and phone number.
Maya said she feels isolated in her town, which has few other women of color. She described encounters with other mothers in her area who appear confused by the fear she is experiencing. She also hasn’t been able to find any resources to help her navigate having age-appropriate conversations with her son about ICE and the political climate, which heightens the anxiety.
“I think that is the piece of motherhood that is changing so much, because when you are living a very different version of motherhood versus someone who is White, who has lived here for generations, who does not have this level of stress and anxiety on them at all times. It’s a very different experience,” she said.
In conversations with The 19th, immigrant mothers’ concerns in some ways mirrored those of the Black parents from Anderson’s research. Immigrant moms largely expressed feeling ill-equipped to handle conversations about ICE with their kids. They also struggled with the grief that their children will have to internalize adult problems at an early age.
Some studies suggest that Black children who received “the talk” report lower levels of stress related to the anticipation of police brutality. But general exposure to incidents with law enforcement has been shown to create psychological distress in Black and Brown children. For immigrants or children of immigrants, the more times a person comes into contact with immigration enforcement, the higher their risk for psychological distress and self-reported poor health outcomes over the course of their lives, Young said.
Black and Brown mothers are trying to balance all of these factors.
“No one should have to tell their children, first of all, that the streets might not be safe anymore. Like, as mothers, we don’t want to tell our children that they shouldn’t trust the police, that the police might get into their schools and try to detain kids like them,” said Linda López Stone, who came to the United States from Ecuador nearly two decades ago and has three children ages 12, 14 and 17.
She lives in Utah and has made a point to teach her kids their basic rights and, most importantly, to know when to stay quiet. “No digas nada,” she has told them. Don’t say anything to law enforcement about themselves, their immigration status, their parents or their friends. If there’s any silver lining, Stone said, it’s that she’s raising children who are engaged and active in their communities, serving as a language bridge for their classmates who cannot speak English and passing on the safety lessons they have learned to other kids.
“I have let them know everyone is an immigrant, and everyone that you know who is a person of color is under threat, even myself,” Stone said. “So you have to make sure that the people around you, your friends and your peers, are aware of what’s happening, and it’s important to take care of each other.”
This story was produced by The 19th and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
