This month’s top chart shows how immigration enforcement in the second Trump administration has shifted away from its earlier focus on people with criminal convictions.
This edition was written by Tara Watson and Sasha Snyder.
💡 New from us: The children of ICE detainees, the cost of attending college, and the debate over family policy priorities
The second Trump administration has detained more than 68,000 individuals and removed 350,000 immigrants—many of them parents of U.S. citizen children. In a recent Newsweek piece, CESO director Tara Watson and co-author Maria Cancian examine what happens to the children of ICE detainees. If detention and deportation continue at current levels, the number of citizen children experiencing parental separation could exceed one million during the administration, with hundreds of thousands potentially left without a parent at home—enough to overwhelm an already strained child welfare system. The authors argue that family caregiving responsibilities should be factored into deportation decisions; the Department of Homeland Security should ensure that deported parents can plan for their children’s care, and the child welfare system should have the capacity and resources to care for children left without parents.
Americans view higher education as among the least affordable components of a middle-class lifestyle, but public perception is often based on the sticker price, which, due to financial aid, few students actually pay. In this update to previous analyses, Phillip Levine documents trends in net prices at four-year colleges and universities for families with different incomes. He finds that the net price of attending a four-year college or university is either stable or declining for all income levels other than the top category, and even for that group, net prices today are less than they were in the late 2010s when adjusted for inflation.
The Heritage Foundation recently released a 164-page report, “Saving America by Saving the Family,” urging Americans to get married and have children. CESO non-resident fellow Abby McCloskey unpacked this report in a paywalled opinion column for Bloomberg. She argues that the report is overly concerned with government overreach and overlooks areas where government action could better protect families, like enforcing age limits on social media, improving public school outcomes, or extending periods of paid maternity leave. She also criticizes the report’s proposal to offer cash bonuses to people who marry before age 30 and highlights what she sees as a tension in its messaging between encouraging mothers to work and encouraging them to stay home.
📖 What we’re reading
In what ways do declining birth rates and longer life expectancies represent a challenge to maintaining current living standards?Melissa Kearney and Luke Pardue present evidence examining the effects of demographic shifts on the environment, the labor force, the U.S. federal budget, and the operation of state and local governments. They refer to findings that depopulation will not benefit the environment; instead, climate change mitigation will depend on human ingenuity, technological innovation, and tax capacity. In the labor force, they point to the congestion of older workers in high-paying leadership positions and the decrease in opportunities for younger workers to find promotions. Kearney and Pardue also emphasize the rise in old-age entitlement spending and highlight the issue of declining enrollment in schools.
How do citizenship questions on household surveys affect the responsiveness of households with undocumented immigrants?J. David Brown and Misty Heggeness use administrative records and household-level data from a randomized control trial to examine how including a citizenship question on the census affects both overall response rates and household roster omissions. They find that the question significantly lowers self-response rates and causes the number of omitted persons to double in households with likely undocumented members. Their findings show that including sensitive questions in surveys can exacerbate the differential undercount of vulnerable populations.
How are women’s outcomes in the labor market linked to their childcare responsibilities? A rich body of literature shows that women’s career paths are more likely to be interrupted by childbirth and caregiving responsibilities than men’s. Chloe Gibbs, Esra Kose, and Maria Rosales-Rueda study how single mothers of young children respond to access to affordable early childhood care and education. They examine the effects of a 2016 federal funding initiative that expanded full-day programming of Head Start, freeing up hours in the day for mothers to work. They found that the policy raised single mothers’ employment by 1.9%, increased their hours worked by 2.5%, and their earnings by 6.5%.
📊 Top chart: Trends in ICE arrests and the criminal conviction status of those arrested
This month’s top chart, from a working paper by Chloe East, Caitlin Patler, and Elizabeth Cox, shows how the second Trump administration compares to other recent administrations in its immigration enforcement outcomes. Before Trump’s second inauguration, ICE averaged 204 daily arrests, but between January 20 and October 15, 2025, arrests rose to 821 per day, an increase of 170%. Notably, the start of the second Trump administration was also characterized by a decline in the portion of arrests of individuals with criminal convictions. In the year preceding Trump’s second term, 52% of arrests were of those with a criminal conviction, but after his inauguration, that figure dropped 15 percentage points (or 28.8%) to 37%.
➡️ Worth a click
Check out this piece on the difficulty of scaling child welfare innovation.
Tune into this new podcast on the U.S. immigration system and policy.
Take a look at this report on community-based organizations and local social service infrastructure.
About the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at Brookings
The Center for Economic Security and Opportunity (CESO) produces data-driven, nonpartisan analysis to address the United States’ most challenging social policy questions. In a noisy and polarized world, the Center is a trustworthy source for the information and tools policymakers need to build an economy that works for everyone.
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