The phone calls began in February: “I’m not coming back.” “It’s not worth the risk.” “Erase my name from your records.” One person brought in a sheaf of vouchers and insisted on returning them.
All over the US, undocumented immigrants were calling the offices of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (Wic) and begging to drop out.
Since Donald Trump assumed office with promises of a fierce crackdown on unauthorized immigrants, the fearful response has spawned a hundred stories like these, of people withdrawing into the shadows to avoid unwanted detection.
But the defections away from Wic, a federal program that helps more than 8 million low-income children and mothers purchase formula and nutritious foods, offer some of the first concrete evidence of the far-reaching and potentially devastating consequences for the welfare of people at risk from Trump’s deportation promises.
Of the 90 local agencies that manage Wic, about a quarter have told the national association that undocumented clients are skipping appointments and foregoing benefits.
Many offices have recorded a sharp drop in caseloads. And in areas with a high proportion of immigrants, some clinics stand nearly empty.
“This is happening across the United States,” said Elisabet Eppes, a senior public policy associate at the National WIC Association. “We are extremely concerned.”
The benefits at stake are very modest; most participants receive roughly $ 45 in vouchers a month. But decades of research have linked the program to declines in early childhood obesity, low birth weights, premature births and infant deaths, and an increase in childhood immunizations.
The children and mothers who qualify for Wic are at risk of not only poverty but also malnutrition, because of a poor diet or a health condition.
Lanie Smith, a Wic dietitian in Kansas, recently treated a young boy with epilepsy, a condition that is made worse by a poor diet. As Smith sat with the boy, his mother, who has undocumented family members, debated with Smith whether to withdraw her son from the program.
“We’ve heard a lot of stories about people who either wouldn’t show up for appointments, or who wanted to withdraw from the program, cancel their benefits and be scrubbed from the record,” said Douglas Greenaway, the president and CEO of the National Wic Association. “We’ve had people offer to pay back any benefits they might have utilized: ‘Hang in there, I’ll find money to pay you back.’”
Wic agencies and employees first started having conversations like these in February, after rumors spread that the Trump administration would focus on deporting immigrants who accept public assistance.
The rumors were untrue. But the White House is considering executive action to make them a reality. In February, a draft leaked of an executive order that would encourage the removal of immigrants, including those with legal residency, who received public welfare.
That was enough for thousands of undocumented immigrants to question if Wic was worth the risk.
As fears have mounted, Wic agencies have desperately tried to convince undocumented participants to keep using the program. It is not against the law for undocumented immigrants to participate in Wic, they remind clients, and Wic doesn’t ask about or track its participants’ immigration status.
But panic can outpace policy. When fear of deportation runs high, research has found, unauthorized immigrants become less likely to use the public health benefits for which they’re eligible. Even immigrants with legal status will avoid entitlements if members of their family are undocumented.
Public health advocates worry that Wic may not be an outlier, but a bellwether for the potential consequences of driving undocumented immigrants into the shadows.
Other health and safety advocates are starting to measure similar trends. On Monday, the National Domestic Violence Hotline, the country’s most prominent resource for victims of intimate partner abuse, reported that it fielded more than 7,000 calls related to immigration status in 2016 – a 30% increase from 2015.
The hotline, which was established by Congress in the 1990s with federal funding, responded to 323,660 calls last year.
Supporters of Trump’s crackdown argue that undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be entitled to use public benefits provided on taxpayers’ dollars.
US law already bars immigrants from using many welfare programs designed to benefit the poor. The leaked executive order argues it is necessary to expand and enforce these exclusions because immigrants are more likely to rely on public assistance than legal residents.
But that claim is not backed up by the evidence, which suggests that immigrants are less likely than people born in the US to use welfare programs. The order also ignores the fact that many immigrants – undocumented or otherwise – have children who are US citizens but cannot access public benefits on their own.
If undocumented families continue to flee Wic, most of the consequences will probably fall on very young children, including an untold number who were born to undocumented parents but have US citizenship.
“As pediatricians, we should be trying to encourage families to access all the programs that they’re eligible for, regardless of their immigration status,” said Dr Lanre Falusi, the president of the Washington DC chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “It’s heartbreaking to hear a patient say that even if their child is entitled to use this vital program, even if their child was born here, is an American citizen … they are too scared.”
Smith, from the Wic agency in Kansas, said more than 100 people have stopped coming to her clinic in Kansas City – or, as many people as her clinic sees in a single day. Many of those clients called the clinic to say they were simply too scared.
The fears were even more pronounced in California, where numerous local agencies have received pleas from clients who want to be purged from Wic’s record-keeping system. At least one parent called an agency to ask if children on Wic would have to pay the government back someday.
“There are citizen children who aren’t going to receive benefits that they are entitled to because their mothers are too afraid to come in,” said Karen Farley, executive director of the California Wic Association. “Never mind that their parents contribute to the local economy – these are children and babies we’re talking about.”
Undocumented immigrants avoid vital nutrition services for fear of deportation
