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Thousands of children in San Antonio are affected by the country’s immigration policies, according to a new analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 6,000 school-aged children in Bexar County are without legal status, and 38,000 parents of minor children are at risk of deportation.
The report also found that Texas ranks second in the country for the number of children impacted by immigration enforcement, with nearly 1 million children across the state living with a parent who is in the United States without legal status.
“These are children of all statuses. Some are U.S. born. Some are immigrants,” said Valerie Lecarte, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute who helped put the report together.
Lecarte also authored a recent report on the impact immigration enforcement has on the health of children. She said the threat of deportation impacts children’s mental wellbeing and ability to concentrate in school and can also impact babies in utero through premature births and low birth weights.
“The threat of enforcement in itself, not just actual enforcement has negative impacts on the health of communities,” Lacarte said. “It doesn't have to be just the people who are actually experiencing enforcement. It's really at a community level.”
“We know that just being Latino, even if you have a secure citizenship status, the fact that you're belonging to this group, and that you're in an environment of high enforcement, and the type of rhetoric that we're seeing now — that's enough to trigger a lot of the mental and physical health impacts that have been studied,” she said.
Lecarte said the Migration Policy Institute created its population estimates comparing the 2023 American Community Survey from the U.S. Census with other publicly available datasets, like refugee admissions.
According to the report, nearly 5% of Bexar County residents are in the U.S. without legal status. Nearly 70% of those residents have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade.
Statewide, about 2 million Texas residents are undocumented.
Across the country, MPI estimates there are 13.7 million people in the U.S. without authorization as of 2023, up from 10.7 million in 2019.
“There's been an increase in the size of the immigrant population overall, but close to half of them have been living in the country for more than 20 years,” Lecarte said. “So, that's a lot of people who have real ties to the country in different ways, and who are anchored in their communities.”
Lecarte said more than a quarter of the 13.7 million unauthorized immigrants in MPI’s count have what they consider limbo status: either DACA, or humanitarian parole, or a pending asylum application.
“We either call them limbo status or twilight status. We have different names, but they're essentially statuses that are temporary,” Lecarte said. “They give some type of protection from deportation and / or work authorization, but they're not on the path to a (full) legal status.”
For instance, Lecarte said at the time of the count in 2023, many Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, and Venezuelans had Temporary Protective Status. But now, the Trump Administration has ended TPS for many of those immigrants.
“Those were people who likely felt some type of relief at some point, and who, now, most of them have lost their status or are on their way to losing it,” Lecarte said. “That's a lot of people who have lost their footing.”
The analysis released this month is an update. MPI last published an estimate of the number of immigrants in the U.S. without legal status using data from 2019.
Lecarte said MPI publishes the population estimates in order to give policymakers and service providers an accurate count of the people in their communities.
“It's not tied to the current narrative or the current circumstances around immigration,” Lecarte said. “It's just that, overall, there's plenty of studies that show that the census in itself — the way that people respond to the census on a regular year — it tends to have an undercount of the foreign-born population.”
