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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.
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