Lacking any guidance from the federal government on how to ban anyone without legal immigration status from a vital early childhood program, the Illinois Head Start Association told its hundreds of members Friday not to make any changes yet to their policies or programs.
The Trump administration on Thursday announced that it’s reinterpreting a 1996 law to shut off access to a series of federal programs to anyone who can’t prove they’re legal immigrants — including the Head Start early childcare and education programs for babies and toddlers — kids too little for kindergarten.
“We have never asked for [the] status of our children that we’re serving, and to do so creates fear and anxiety among our community,” said Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, head of the Illinois Head Start Association, which supports about 600 centers statewide serving the 28,000 students in Head Start in the state. “So we’re really worried that families will stop bringing their children, they won’t be able to go to work [and] children will be in unsafe places.”
The notice released Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services announced “a significant policy shift” in how Trump officials view a 1996 law defining which kinds of federally funded programs are “federal public benefits,” which require verification of immigration status to enroll.
The Trump administration skipped over the usual process of proposing policy changes and waiting to collect public feedback it announced it was seeking in a public notice. Instead, officials issued a news release announcing the change in the interpretation of the law.
These changes mark the latest of the president’s ongoing efforts to remove from the United States anyone without legal status — people the releases described using dehumanizing language.
In the news release, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said, “For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration. Today’s action changes that.” The change also targeted immigrants without legal status who use public community health centers, mental health services, substance abuse treatment centers and a range of other services.
A news release from the Department of Education on Thursday also cited a reinterpretation of the same law to claim that adult education and career and technical education programs that receive federal funds cannot serve students who lack legal immigration status. The department issued an “interpretive rule” making the change, but at the bottom of the release, it made clear that “Interpretive rules cannot have effective dates and are not binding on the public or the Department.”
Roxanne Garza, higher education policy director for the education advocacy nonprofit EdTrust said: “This isn’t legislation, so it doesn’t carry the weight of law.”
Garza said the department does not have a way to enforce the rule, but she still worries it will have a chilling effect on federally-funded programs.
Federal officials haven’t provided enough details to know how to proceed — no implementation guidance for Head Start providers, no definition about whether immigration status would apply to babies or to parents, said Katie Hamm, a former HHS official in the Biden administration and now a visiting professor at Chicago’s Erikson Institute. Also, she said, the federal government typically exempts nonprofit organizations from asking about immigration status — that’s about 70% of Head Start agencies.
“It overturns a 60-year approach in Head Start, which was to serve all children and to welcome all children, to provide them with a safe place to learn and grow and get ready for school,” Hamm said. “It’s not just a change in who gets served, it feels like a change in the mission of Head Start, because it really has always been bipartisan.”
The Illinois Head Start Association and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois have filed a lawsuit over what they say are a series of attempts to dismantle the program, as called for by the conservative blueprint Project 2025 that the president has been following.
The ACLU says it will amend its lawsuit “to fight back against this new attack on Head Start,” if the policy change notice takes effect.
Contributing: Lisa Kurian Philip, Selena Kuznikov