Immigrant families are navigating profound challenges to their economic stability, children’s education, and overall health and well-being as the fear of immigration enforcement continues. Their experiences have been shaped by the current administration’s heightened immigration enforcement policies that have reverberated across the country.

Why This Matters

This brief highlights emerging strategies for supporting immigrant families in a heightened enforcement environment. As local decisionmakers consider trade-offs and assess programs to maintain, expand, or scale back in a context of limited resources, findings on how valuable assistance has been for mixed-status families and continuing service gaps can be informative.

Key Takeaways

In interviews, parents described strategies from stakeholders across several key sectors that supported their families’ well-being.

• Community members: Providing and verifying information on local enforcement activity, connecting isolated families to safe transportation options, and expressing kindness and shared belonging.
• Community-based organizations: Attending to food, housing, and health care needs resulting from enforcement-related hardships; conducting Know Your Rights and family preparedness trainings; and offering mental health services.
• Schools: Providing consistent resources, coordination support, and policies; supporting students’ mental health; and allowing flexibility with absences and remote learning.
• Health care providers: Providing free transportation to medical appointments, proposing flexible options for accessing care, and encouraging continued Medicaid enrollment for eligible family members.
• Local policymakers: Affirming support for immigrant communities, communicating clearly about immigration enforcement activity, and connecting to resources.

How We Did It

The Urban research team conducted 34 interviews with parents in Latino mixed-status families in Chicago and Charlotte in mid-2026, months after high-visibility enforcement operations in those cities subsided but as enforcement threats persisted. Parents were recruited with the assistance of community-based organizations.

All parents were living in households that included family members who were US citizens and one or more family members who were undocumented, most commonly the parent or their partner. The parents represented the experiences of 92 children, 82 of whom were US citizens. Nearly all parents had minor children under age 18 living with them. Most parents and their partners had lived in the US for decades.