When she saw the Trump sign in the yard, Camila knew she had to be careful.
It was February 2025, and Camila* showed up at her North Texas home to meet the new family she will become a nanny.
The 22-year-old college student has no legal documents, but that was never a problem. In her experience, many families like to pay childcare workers in cash. Still, this new family has posed an interesting challenge. The interior of the house was filled with more playing cards tools. “All Trump, anywhere,” says Camila. It turns out his father is working for Fox News.
“It was very ironic,” Camilla told Al Jazeera. “If I said, ‘Hey, this is my legal situation,’ it might have done one of two ways. Maybe they didn’t care, or maybe they told me to leave.
She ultimately decided not to talk to them and focused on her job of caring for their children. The unpleasant encounter and the “coldness” it gave Camilla a major problem.
In the United States, migrant workers, including undocumented workers, have long supported the childcare, home care and the elderly care industry. But amidst the anti-immigration policy and stance in President Donald Trump’s second administration, including the threat of “massive deportation,” the disease industry faces a new threat that experts will have a “rip-over effects” on millions of Americans.
“People are not appearing at work because they are worried about attacks happening at work,” said Lori Smetanka, executive director of National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care.
And the kids were “really worried about whether they would come home with their parents or not at the end of the day,” she added.
“Attacked from all angles.”
Economists have documented the devastating economic effects of mass deportation, with organizations like the American Council of Immigration Map trillions of dollars of immigration as contributing to the United States in tax and payout.
However, some industries are uniquely vulnerable to changes in immigration policy.
For example, about one in five U.S. childcare workers are immigrants, and some studies have shown that almost 30% of direct care workers are immigrants. As several experts highlighted Al Jazeera, these roles have a widespread impact on communities across the country.
“There’s a ripple effect based on some policies we think are being implemented,” Smetanka said. She continues, “not only does it come to this country, it has an impact on the ability of immigrants to gain citizenship, to stay and work in this country, to provide the services they need in those communities.”
Earlier in his second term, Trump retracted the “sensitive area” guidance that prevented immigrant raids from occurring at schools, churches and employment locations. The government has also denied or delayed the H-1B visa grant. This continues a decade-long trend that reduces access to programs that help immigrants find jobs.
“By the way, we want people to come to our country, but we want them to come in through legal procedures,” President Trump said in his April 2 tariff announcement. “We need people to run these plants and to support auto workers and teamstars, non-union people and everyone else, but we need people.”
Despite this rhetoric, the presidential administration has restricted legal routes by freezing resettlement programs for US refugees. Then, in an interview on April 15, Trump proposed a new route in which “great people” could re-enter the United States and gain permanent citizenship status if they first leave the country and qualify for sponsorship from their employers.
The president has also proposed creating a “gold card” visa that costs applicants $5 million.
Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst at the Institute for Immigration Policy, said the central purpose of the policy is to “bring wealth to the United States.”
To assess whether the legal pathway for immigration is becoming stronger, we must look not only at the number of visas granted, but also at the people reaching the visa if they strengthen the legal pathway, reduce irregular travel, or reduce the time frame in which the visa is processed.
In other words, allowing more immigration through the “legal process” Trump mentioned in his April 2 speech involves facilitating his failure in his first term.
Furthermore, the temporary revocation of protected status is what school administrators, nursing home leaders and daycare operators wonder who they can hire and how they can protect them.
Wendy Cervantes says these changes have been made to ensure that immigrant families are “attacked from all angles.”
Cervantes is the director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, and her team recently held a webinar providing technical assistance to childcare providers across the United States. She said more than 1,000 people have emerged, driven by the “stress and fear” created by the new administration’s approach to immigration.
“People aren’t just worried about their parents anymore. They’re worried about their staff too,” she told Al Jazeera.
As a result, managers in fields like childcare are learning about the complexity of warrants. What kind of document is required and information that immigration officers must provide to be legally permitted on the premises.
“This knowledge gives them at least some measure,” she said. “But it’s a really scary place.”
“I want to stay”
One of Cervantes’ goals is similar to that of an economist, tracking the effects of deportation. She wants people to understand how well their lives are being formed by immigration.
This is especially true for those whose families have some connection to childcare, home care, or the elderly care sector. Approximately 20% of all seniors in the United States live in rural communities, and over the past five years, 40 new counties have become the desert of nursing homes.
According to Smetanka, when nursing homes close, there will be a huge hole in the community. Dozens of people have lost their jobs and patients who have had few options from the start are scrambling to find a new home. Just as it is difficult for Cervantes to quantify the damage done to a child’s mind when they fear being deported, it is difficult to quantify the economic and psychological effects this has on families and communities as a whole.
Despite all this, Smetanka says it’s important to remember that immigrants want to stay in the US and continue working in places like nursing homes. The average hourly wage for direct care workers increased by less than $3 between 2014 and 2023, but the healthcare sector is widely popular among immigrants.
Sarah Valdes, an immigration lawyer based in Austin, Texas, candidly say, “I replaced you with 10 American-born workers (you can’t).”
A nanny in northern Texas, Camila is one of those people willing to work long hours without complaints and with little pay. Nanny may not be her long-term career, but she chose the field because she has to pay for school and loves to work with her kids.
Often, it feels like she spends as much time with her clients as her parents. On her typical day, she wakes up at 6am and works until around 10pm, finds time for class work and finds research in her free time she can manage. She helped multiple children deal with family divorce and sudden deaths in many other life situations.
“It’s all going on in the world, so for me I don’t know what’s next,” she said. “I take it every day, every week. But I know I want to stay. I’m happy to be here now.”
*Camila’s name has been changed to protect her identity.