Mel Wilson:
Hi, my name is Mel Wilson. I'm a senior policy advisor for NESW focusing on social justice issues. Welcome to our podcast, dealing with one of the most pressing threats to civil human rights that could become imminent. Should former President Trump be reelected on November 5th, that issue is Trump's near certain initiation of a mass deportation program. Soon after he takes office, this program will directly impact between 11 and 15 million people, which includes as many as 3 million children. Here to help us to discuss this ominous and potential disastrous program is Wendy Cervantes. She's the director for Immigration and Immigrant Families for Clasp. Wendy also facilitates the Children Thrive Network for class. Welcome, Wendy, before we get started, could you just give us a background, first of all on CLASP and a little bit of background on CTN?
Wendy Cervantes:
Absolutely. Thanks, Mel. Happy to be here with you today. So yes, the Center for Law and Social Policy. We're a national anti-poverty organization based in Washington DC and we work on a range of policy issues from youth policy to public benefits policy, early childhood and immigration policy, as well as education, labor and worker rights. And we work on behalf of communities with low incomes as well as communities of color in the US and work to advance federal and state policies to advance their best interests. And the Children Thrive Action Network, which you flagged is one of the coalitions that we've run that's focused on protecting and defending children and mixed status families growing up in the us, including the millions that are US citizens living in immigrant families. And it's primarily made up of children's advocacy organizations around the country that are working on a range of child specific issues. And so we know that there is a lot at stake in this upcoming election and in the years to come. And the threat that you laid out of mass deportation is one that we are very concerned with and will be a priority issue for clasp as well as for the CTN network.
Mel Wilson:
Thank you, Brenda. We've talked about there's many folks right now know that this is eminent and there's an impact and it's going to mostly focused on undocumented individuals but also and families. But it's also including, as I understand it, expend to folks who are here legally present as temporary protective status and other statuses, but maybe Roundup in and there have to be a roundup of going to folks' homes, other different places to get them. And could you talk a bit about how you organizationally feel about this, some of the processes that really deeply concern you? And feel free just to elaborate or talk as much as you want on this topic because it's very, very, very, very important.
Wendy Cervantes:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think what's really disturbing about this idea of mass deportation is not only the actual impacts of the deportations themselves, depending regardless of the scale to which they're carried out. What really worries me is the chilling effect from day one, potentially even after the election if we're in a Trump 2.0 scenario. Because the chilling effect will be immediate in some ways, it doesn't even matter how they would try to do it or even how quickly they can do it, given the amount of resources it would take to do it because the climate of fear in and of itself will have a damaging effect. What we will once again see undocumented parents who will once again agonize or even avoid the most basic outings, such as going to the grocery store, dropping their kids off at school or going to the doctor.
And we know that research has consistently shown that separation due to detention or deportation or even the fear of losing a parent results in developmental harm for children, particularly young children, due to the constant toxic stress. And I still recall the homes that I visited during the Trump administration and when they were really ramping up immigration enforcement around the country and hearing about children as young as three years old, exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and then seeing the signs inside doors at children's eye level saying, don't open the door. And just thinking about what it must be like to live in that constant climate of fear. We know how damaging that is for a young child's development. And then I remember in the places that we went to visit where the dramatic work side rates had been carried out, such as in Mississippi where it was the largest series of work site rates in the US history and where there were still children weeks after that were showing signs of PTSD and even several months following the raid, families were still struggling to pick up the pieces, having lost a primary breadwinner in many of those cases.
And so we know that the impacts of deportation are really, really harmful, but so is the chilling effect leading up to them. And so is the necessary detention that might be required before someone is deported. And so this has not only impacts for undocumented immigrants, but also their US citizen family members. But I think another thing to remember here is that the reason why it's also so disturbing is because this mass deportation plan would go hand in hand with the plans to strip people away from having legal status. So you mentioned people with temporary protected status. There are also folks who currently have the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or daca, which is a program that we know is at risk of being a program at risk of being and did very soon based on litigation. And then we know that there's also other types of statuses that people have that are temporary forms of deferred action, and their goal is to strip that legal status from folks and they even want to go after birthright citizenship. And so essentially grow the number of people that are undocumented and therefore potentially subject to mass deportation. So that's part of the plan is to not only target all of those that are already undocumented, which has impacts for them and their families, but to also grow the undocumented population and subject them as well to deportation.
Mel Wilson:
And that is a deep concern. One of the things I should add in here, and we talk about mass deportation and the Trump's administration plan, there's a couple of things that this is not new. Actually. Trump himself and his first administration explored the possibility of math deportation. In my little research back in the 1950s, there was a major, and unfortunately turn operation went back was a very unfortunately racist term, but it was a policy that was a mass deportation and raids that impacted over a million people. So this is not something new and there's enough evidence that there is not only an impact, but it's a long lasting, can be generational kind of impact on it. So we certainly should not take it lightly and we should not assume that there's a maybe to this if the administration does get into office, again, this is very likely to happen and we need to be prepared for it.
So I just wanted to add that you mentioned something about detention and one of the questions I had, and I'll kind of turn it around a little bit because the whole issue of all of detention for adults, and secondly, probably more importantly, detention of children and family detention. Historically in recent histories, family detention in particular and children's detention has been very, very problematic in the facilities that children were placed in and facilities that families were placed in and the whole issue of how long they stayed there. People need to realize that when we're talking about this magnitude in terms of millions, this is not an easy task. This is really, really going to be something that there's going to be fumbles and mistakes and all kinds of situations of unsafe facilities. So I'm setting it up just to, maybe you can elaborate, and I know you have a lot of experience and understanding how that has happened with the unaccompanied migrant children and some of the family separation stuff. So if you can want to touch on that.
Wendy Cervantes:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think as I mentioned before, I think an order for a mass deportation plan to be carried out has to be coupled with also use of detention for people that are held as they're awaiting deportation. Although I do think they're going to primarily utilize an expanded form of expedited removal in order to make it as quick as possible for people to be deported without a chance to go before a judge, which is very disturbing in and of itself. And they would have to use the existing detention capacity they have now potentially grow it, which may take some time. And so there's a lot of concern because right now we know that there's a lot of complaints about current conditions in detention centers. And one of the things that this current administration has done is end the practice of detaining families, which we know is really, really problematic.
And the Department of Homeland Securities own assessment of family detention by medical professionals and others found that there's simply no safe way to detain a child with or without their family. So it's very concerning to us that there could be a return of family detention as well as just really problematic and even worse detention conditions than we already have. And you mentioned the historical context for really harmful actions like this. And I think that you're absolutely right that we absolutely have a history of really racist policies that have been put in place specifically to scapegoat a population for bringing harm to this country, usually a population of color, and have used the political climate and rhetoric of that day to target these folks for really harmful policies that unfortunately have created a very sad racist legacy in this country. And you mentioned Operation Web back, which was the effort under the Eisenhower administration to deport millions of Mexicans, some of them are US citizens, but to target them for deportation.
And it was over around 1.3 million individuals that were deported through that program. And then with regards to detention and this concern that we have now about their potentially being camps put up to house families if they don't have enough detention capacity, that is very similar to what was done during World War II when they rounded up Japanese nationals and their families and their US citizen children in intern camps around the country. And so I think there is unfortunately some precedent for how this was done previously, and I think it's really sad to see the similarities between the way racist xenophobic rhetoric is once again fueling these types of ideas.
Mel Wilson:
You raised another good point about the capacity issue and some research also around that. On this one, we do not have right now the capacity, no way to absorb that many people that quickly. I know you were saying that there's, use the word rapid use another term expedited process, but even expediting yet there has to be some beginning detection. There has to be folks have to be placed somewhere once they round them up and the cost for that is going to be immediately in the billion. So this is going to be pretty much a budget buster in whether or not that they can get authorization, they meaning the Trump administration to do this, but it's going to take a massive, massive action and massive operation that's going to be very ugly. It's not going to be pretty. The other area that I know that all of us are concerned about is how the process itself of getting, I keep on using the word rounding up because that's what just sounds to me, just like they're going out there and you could use nice terms like harass and all that, but that's what they're going to have to do.
And I think you referred earlier to perhaps rating schools or going to churches or public gathering. Could you just elaborate more on that because I do think that's something that people need to hear that in order to get to the numbers that they're trying to get to. This is not like folks will be just standing for somebody to come with a bus, they're going to identify, which is another problem itself, have to identify who the targets are, particular targets, and then they're going to have to go get them from somewhere. So if you don't mind, could you leverage a little bit more on that?
Wendy Cervantes:
Sure. Yeah. I mean I think there's a couple of different ways they could do that could do this. I mean, they're going to say most likely that they're going to be targeting people that are recently arrived that have been in the country for less than two years. But being able to prove how long you've been in the country is obviously not very easy to do. And especially if you've been here for a shorter amount of time, even if it's three or four years or if you've been here for a really long time, but don't necessarily have the evidence, you're not walking around with evidence of how long you've been here. And so there's a huge also risk of racial profiling. But one thing I think you were touching on about the safety of places like schools and hospitals and those types of locations is that one thing that we're really concerned about as well, because along with this plan of mass deportation, is that it would be coupled with the rescission of a policy that's currently in place.
It's called the protected areas policy. It's formally been known as the Sensitive Locations policy, which is a policy that within the Department of Homeland Security, which restricts immigration enforcement activities from being carried out in places that are really critical for children and families like childcare centers, like schools like hospitals, healthcare clinics, places of worship, mass demonstrations, funerals and gatherings of that sort, those types of gatherings and those types of locations have historically been off limits for enforcement activities so that families aren't chilled from carrying out their meeting their basic needs, but it is already been part of the Project 2025 plan that that policy would be rescinded. And that is actually really scary because under the Trump administration when there was a lot of immigration enforcement, they were at least saying that they were abiding by that policy. We know that it wasn't consistently implemented around the country based on our own research, but we at least had something to hold them accountable to and something that was in their own guidance that said that you cannot, these places are supposed to be off limits.
And then we did a lot of work back in those years on trying to educate headstart centers and other locations to let them know that they fell under the policy, how to enforce it, how to keep ice off of their facilities and out of their parking lots to create a sense of security. And so we're really concerned that if that policy is rescinded, we're going to have to try to look at what other rights and protections we can educate folks about to try to create some sense of security and try to limit the extent to which ICE is waiting outside of school parking lots and healthcare waiting rooms. That kind of environment is not only harmful to the families that would be scared to go access their basic needs, but it's not a healthy environment for anybody in this country. And so we're very concerned about that and we're going to be keeping an eye on that because that is once again, just another part of this creation of a climate of fear.
Mel Wilson:
I was going to ask a question about miss status, Sam. I wanted to get one question about race in that before I asked that question because you touched on that and again, and me sort of looking into what the impact would be, there is clearly amongst advocates and immigration rights organizations that the focus people, the perception, and we were really mostly dealing with mass can perhaps central American individuals, but not looking at the immigrants of Africa and from the Caribbean. Haiti always comes up in this, and one little, almost a footnote, but I thought it was important was that there is that concern that there, because the administration, the Trump administration is really focusing on anyone who committed crimes. And I don't get into the detail, but that's one of the pretexts of deportation that that is going to be similar to the way things happen in the United States is that black and brown, but a lot of black immigrants will be rounded up on any pretext of crime and have to find it more difficult to, even if they're here legally, to get explain themselves out of that. And again, I know that you participated so much in these discussions year round, so I just wanted your insight on what you thought about that, the broadening from a racial ethnic standpoint.
Wendy Cervantes:
Yes, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, I talked earlier about how our immigration system is has strong racist foundations unfortunately, and the way that deportation and immigration enforcement is carried out has a disproportionate impact on black and brown immigrants and in particular black immigrants. I mean, we published a report in partnership with the Ohio Immigrant Alliance on the number of focused specifically on supported individuals and their experiences, and the vast majority of the people that were interviewed were black immigrants. And that report really is one piece of evidence of what we know, which is that black immigrants are more likely to be caught up in law enforcement. And through that law enforcement collaboration with immigration enforcement at times then end up on a path to deportation and that when a black immigrant is put into removal proceedings, they're often removed much faster than other immigrants.
And so that's unfortunately not a surprise in this country and really unfortunate. And we have seen even under this current administration, black immigrants and black migrants treated differently through our various systems, including those that are coming here to seek asylum. And so that I think is really problematic and I think we'll be exacerbated under an administration that's not shy about talking about it's racist ideals. And I think it's really problematic for the children in these families. We already have a country that's grappling with racial equity with trying to make sure that every child in this country has an equitable opportunity to thrive, but yet we have an immigration system and many systems that serve children specifically that are still deeply rooted in systemic racism. And so I think there's a lot of concern about what we could see and what the impact will be to primarily brown and black immigrant children in an era of mass deportation and increased immigration enforcement.
Mel Wilson:
Yeah, thank you for that answer. Now I'll segue back to the whole issue of mixed status families, which again is extremely important and there's a whole area of impact when you talk about a situation and you'll explain it more in terms of what that is. But if you have a documented and undocumented heads of household and children in the family, there's a tremendous obviously disruption that's going to happen. I mean, as a social worker and representing social work organizations and our members, there are many social workers involved with working with these families. And it's going to be really, really difficult to not only attract and see their needs, especially those who are not the targeted for deportation, but their parents are. Now we have a situation of child welfare crisis that greatly exacerbates not only detention, but then it's reunification or the possibility of reunification becomes a big issue. But I really would love if you can just talk about mixed status. I know that with that's a really big part of the conversation, so if you could share on that.
Wendy Cervantes:
Yes. So there's one in four children in the US that are part of an immigrant family. The vast majority of those kids themselves are US citizens. Most of their parents actually do have some form of legal status, but they still face a lot of barriers because even lawful permanent residents can't easily access certain healthcare and other federal means tested programs. But then there are about 5.2 million children who have at least one parent who is undocumented and then about a half a million others who have a parent who has either a temporary protected status or daca, which are two statuses that I mentioned earlier, are kind of precarious statuses that would be incredibly vulnerable under a future Trump administration. And so all these kids who have a parent who might, so these are kids who every day could potentially lose a parent as a result of deportation or detention.
And there are several children who have lost a parent due to that. But as I mentioned before, there's also a lot of developmental harm that we know is done just by living with that daily fear of potentially losing a parent. So this is basically a situation that we're exposing children too and hindering their overall development, which is really harmful for us as a country. I remember when I was doing some research in 2018 and 2019 under the Trump administration, and we were talking mostly to parents who themselves were undocumented and potentially at risk and then to early childhood providers, but I remember we were specifically not interviewing children because that we weren't prepared to do so. But we were at a school in North Carolina, and I remember we were going to leave and one of the social workers at the school told me there was a child here who actually found out that you all are here asking questions about immigration policy.
He's eight years old and he really wants to talk to you. And we weren't prepared to talk to him and we didn't know what to do. We didn't know if it was ethical. And so we said, okay, well, we are willing to come back tomorrow if he can get a permission slip from his parents to talk to us. I was thinking, there's no way that his parents are going to sign this. I mean, they're going to be like, some people from DC are talking about immigration, but this kid not only got a permission slip sign to talk to us, but he got a group of friends to pull together permission slips. And there was a group of kids that were ready to talk to us the next day. And I was really impressed, even though it was one of the most heartbreaking conversations I'd had during that research project.
But these kids really wanted an opportunity to advocate for themselves, to advocate for their parents and to share what it was that they were experiencing and the fear that they were living with and wanting to communicate to someone, to any policymaker out there that all they wanted was to be able to feel safe and to be with their mom and dad. I mean, I don't think anyone could have put it any better than the kids themselves about how wrong it is to create, to have a system of all these policies that make it harder for families just to function and for kids to feel secure with their family.
Mel Wilson:
Could you bring up the, really the most insidious part about this is that what you just described, there's an assumption as a process there and with the plan that the Trump administration has, and it ties it back into family separation, but this total suspension of due process and the discussions about, and I forgot the name of the law, but there's a 17 something law that allows for the president to make an arbitrary decision based on some notion of threat from folks president who are posed a threat to the country, which is obviously a stretch, but in the project 2025, there's a whole discussion around that because I think in an interview it came up to either Steven Miller and a couple other folks of how you would do this and get around some of the existing federal laws that will protect a situation where there's a child welfare issue and there was naturally a process available for 'em. That process gets ignored and they could find a legal grounding for that. And I'm almost getting into a sort rhetorical discussion here, but it is something that kind of concerned me and shocked me a little bit that if folks get caught up in that limbo, how does it get handled? And maybe the question to you is that in your discussions with fellow CA members or with your colleagues at class or elsewhere, is there any pre-discussion going on as far as options because we're literally a few months away from that being a possibility or reality?
Wendy Cervantes:
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of work being done across the civil rights community right now and across organizations that are working on restoring, protecting democracy around what are the strategies in particular, and this is sort of out of my area of expertise, some of the litigation strategies that can be utilized to try to prevent the administration, a future Trump administration from going too far and creating this and basically threatening every aspect of our democracy. But I think the concerns that you're sharing are very real. And I do think that immigrant communities are going to be extremely at risk, but not only immigrant families, I mean let's L-G-B-T-Q communities, other people of color, and I mean our entire democracy is going to be at risk. And so I think what does bring me some solace is that I know that there has been a lot of planning done on the progressive side, but at the end of the day, we're going to have to do the best we can because it's going to be obviously just an overwhelming amount of work that will need to be done. And I don't think, as you mentioned, that they're going to waste any time to put their plans into action. So that's why so many of us have been planning so much on this side, and we'll be bracing ourselves to see what if we indeed have to put those plans into action.
Mel Wilson:
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned because I focus a lot on children because of CA and what class does, but that we are talking about single adults not test to families going to be directly and greatly. And that goes back to this whole notion of detention. And we both know in the past that they've had private detention centers and that not been the greatest conditions. If there is this a tremendous overloading, how are these folks, we know there's a possibility of internment champs and those kinds of things that do harken up the 1940s with the Japanese, and also to some degree with the 1950s of creating just temporary. So-called temporary detention, and those processes, again, are not in place to move those quickly. And a lot of these will be single individuals, some with maybe histories of minor crimes and wind up in a very difficult situation.
So I'm glad you brought that up. It is not just obviously the children. And anecdotally, if you look at what even the Trump administration was talking about back when it was an administration, they were projecting numbers up to somewhere you read 20 to 30 million people are questioning where they got that number from, but you get a little scared because they may have some other folks of mine that gets it up to that level. So it is a very, very significant amount of people and it's going to be families and it's going to be going to be children. It is a related thing on that. My next and probably last question is the whole issue right now of and has been around access to public benefits like healthcare and education and all those things. And again, going back, focusing on children, that disruption of those services, I'm asking you because I don't really actually know, obviously don't know the answer, but how is that managed? What happens? Do the children just, there's no, the education just simply stops or if they're having a health condition at the time of being detained or separated if the facility doesn't have the kind of capacity to treat serious illness, is there any thought or have you talked to anyone maybe who actually spent a little bit of time maybe talking about those kinds of contingencies that does from a social worker mindset? That's worrying me.
Wendy Cervantes:
Yeah, no. So I'm going to take that question in two parts. I'm going to first looking at access to healthcare and public benefits and then looking at education, looking first at access to benefits. I mean, we know under the previous Trump administration one of the most harmful things, well, they did a lot of harmful things, but one of the harmful things they did was drastically expand something known as the public charge rule, which is the policy that could determine whether or not someone's eligible to enter the US or qualify for a green card based on how likely they are to become dependent on the government for their survival, for their subsistence. And it was expanded to a point that was so harmful and would make it hard for many people to actually meet the standard to be able to qualify for a green card and created a chilling effect from the moments that the rule was even just leaked into the news. And we saw immediately a significant decline in program enrollment, including programs that weren't even subject to this policy from healthcare programs to snap and even assistance for pregnant women and infants.
And that included a decreased enrollment of US citizen children. Again, the majority of kids and immigrant families are US citizens. So they're supposed to be able to access all those benefits. They couldn't actually put in to place an executive order that says that US citizen children can no longer receive benefits, but they can do something similar to what they did when they issued the public charge rule back under the Trump administration. And that would then create a chilling effect and then make it harder for immigrant families as well as kids in those families to access really critical benefits. I mean, we know even during the COVID pandemic that one in four immigrant adults cited avoiding health and nutrition assistance because they were concerned about public charge concerns. And so what's really troubling about the potential for there to be more barriers or repeat of similar efforts that were done before is that we've been doing so much work over the past four years to rebuild trust in immigrant communities and convince them that it's okay now to enroll in healthcare, but a lot of folks don't even know about the new Biden public charge rule that actually strengthens it so that it's even more clear about what's safe for families to apply for and what's not.
And there's really not a lot that's unsafe to apply for, which is really important to remember. And so it's really scary to think about once again, being in a place where not only are people afraid of being potentially deported, but even for families that are lawfully present and are green card holders, we're talking about this policy is specific to green card holders, or for those who are trying to get a green card, I should say, we're already in a place of trying to build back trust and we're just going to continue to create an environment where people feel unsafe getting the types of supports they need. So the other issue that we're concerned about is that actually regardless of the election outcome, but in particular if we have another Trump presidency, we're very concerned about the ability to uphold the constitutional right of children to access a K to 12 education regardless of immigration status.
I mean, this is something that we have historically in our country, we've educated all children as a matter of principle. But in 1982, there was actually a Supreme Court ruling that established that all children have a right to a K to 12 education regardless of or their parents' immigration status, but both as part of the project 2025 proposals. And what we know that this administration wanted to do but couldn't do when they were in office the first time is they really did want to take away this constitutional and that taking away basic education to any child population in the US would be devastating and it would do exactly what they were trying, what the Supreme Court was trying to prevent in 1982, which was create this. They did not want to see the creation of a permanent underclass in this country, which would happen because there is an understanding that a basic education is necessary for someone to be able to survive and to create a living. And so that would actually have, we're very concerned that there is a potential for that to go back to the Supreme Court. We know what the makeup of the Supreme Court is now, and that we would unlikely be able to have a favorable ruling. And that I think it goes without saying that the consequences of taking away that right to a K 12 education would be catastrophic.
Mel Wilson:
Yeah, that's really important. And you mentioned post-election, no matter who's in gets to office, we certainly do not want a Trump administration, but this is not something that just because Trump doesn't get elected, that doesn't in the problem, there is a process in motion, especially with project 2025 around immigration that will still stay in motion before we get into our call to ask. And there's one little piece I do need to mention in terms of how this is going to be managed as far as rounding people. And one of the really ominous things is the use of military and the planned use of military to achieve that. This really is a constitutional issue, whether using the military, any domestic situation. And that doesn't mean that they wouldn't use the military where children are involved. So that's one of the battles. And to support ICE, recognizing that ICE doesn't have any capacity to do this massive job, it would be the local police that will be almost become surrogate ice agents, and also the state national guards or the states can certainly agree to had that National Guard used for that.
So we should all make a note of that, that this is not going to be some process where there's a lot of gentleness in it that this is going to be to get the job done, and that always turns out to be very harmful to folks who are targeted for it. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Now we can sort of wrap this up, what they call to action, and I'll let you go first and then I'll add some things to that. Clearly, you touched on it that after November 5th, then there has to be groups really saying some strategy and then some actions. So what are you guys thinking?
Wendy Cervantes:
Yes. Well, and I just wanted to add one thing to what you said about potential use of military, because that reminded me a lot of the fact that in the raids that happened in Mississippi were carried out. Many people talked about how it felt like a terrorist attack that were witnessing them. There were helicopters. There were these huge white vans where they were shoving people, handcuffs in rows and to cars, and it's into huge vans. And kids were watching this because the poultry plants are often located very close to the school building. Again, this was on the first day of school, and so a lot of people felt like it felt like a military attack. And I also want to flag that most home raids when they happen, there is armed individuals that come into a person's home, and it's usually at three to five in the morning.
So can you imagine being a child and waking up to an armed man in your home, taking away your parents? It's like literally a child's worst nightmare come true, and the trauma that creates. So I just want to say that I am glad you raised that because I think the idea of inflicting that kind of trauma and the use of military and also just the kind of force that's being used against people who are our neighbors, who are parts of our members of our community, is something that is a reality that could be ours depending on what happens. And that's really, really troubling. So what we're doing through, as I mentioned before, the Children Thrive Action Network, we're a network that does a lot of federal and state policy advocacy work in partnership with children's advocates and providers around the country. We have the National Association of Social Workers as a member, and we have educators and pediatricians that are also part of our membership.
And these are the folks that are going to be on the ground working to support families regardless of what happens with the election, but in particular if there's going to be a lot of work that needs to be done if we're in a negative scenario. So we one want to be able to engage both advocates and providers in the advocacy work that needs to be done. We believe that providers in particular have an important role to play in being spokespeople on this issue and about why these types of policies are harmful, harmful to kids and families. And being able to share from your own expertise and your own experiences why we can do better and what kinds of policies we actually do need. And also to try to put an end to really harmful policies. And then we also are going to be working on making sure that we have resources for providers and advocates on whatever new policies are implemented, making sure that folks have resources on that, explain the new policies, resources to help support families, like for example, on how to make a deportation plan and how to create a guardianship for a child.
And so we encourage folks to just sign up for our newsletter and join the network if you have the capacity to do so. Or at the very least, go to the CTAN https://childrenthriveaction.org/ to get the latest updates and resources that we will be making available.
Mel Wilson:
And as I said earlier, you'll have an opportunity to put a list or some kind of information once this goes out to the public. As far as NASW goes, we are certainly going to be very, and will remain very much involved. I actually had a presentation, a presentation discussion with one of our board committees dealing with equity issues, not focused it on mass deportation and the impact. And that social workers need to be prepared to get involved in that kind response and call to action and writing your members of Congress. We both know that this does start happening. It's going to be mobilization across the country of most of the progressive groups are going to have some kind mobilization and that we need to be committed. And we're saying that to our members at least that to prepare for that. And I mentioned to you in the past that I'm writing a social justice brief on mass deportation and just as an information item, just getting information out there that this could very much happen. And again, emphasizing your point that the election of Donald Trump or non-election of Donald Trump, because this is on the table with Project 2025, we just have to be vigilant and stay involved with it. So having said that, Wendy, thank you so much. This is really great. I thought we had a really good discussion.
Speaker 3:
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