COMMENTARY
By J. Glenn Hopkins, President/CEO, Hopkins House
On July 4, 2025, Congress approved $170.7 billion for immigration enforcement — the largest allocation in U.S. history for detention and deportation. This unprecedented budget surpasses the combined law enforcement budgets at many federal, state, and local levels.
Immigrants play a vital role in our economy and communities. Roughly 31 million immigrants make up 19% of the U.S. workforce, providing essential services in agriculture, construction, education, health care, and more. In early childhood education (ECE) alone, nearly 500,000 professionals are immigrants, representing almost one in five of the nation’s ECE workforce.
Impact on the ECE Field
The Trump administration’s vigorous enforcement efforts have already had a chilling effect. Families fearful of deportation have withdrawn children from preschool programs across the country, while many educators report feeling unsafe in their own classrooms. Some centers have taken protective steps such as removing bilingual signage, changing documentation policies, and establishing clear protocols for responding to immigration officials who come knocking at their doors. Hopkins House is among the programs that have implemented such measures to protect our Preschool Young Scholars and their families, and our staff.
With the newly expanded federal enforcement budget, communities — including Northern Virginia — are already seeing increased presence of immigration officials, accompanied by heightened fears of racial profiling, more family separations, and a climate of uncertainty that affects everyone, immigrant and non-immigrant alike.
Local Consequences
These fears are already visible close to home. One of Hopkins House’s two preschools is experiencing significantly lower enrollment compared to historic trends. Other programs in the area report similar declines. The long-standing Flagstone program, for example, which served families in the City of Alexandria for more than 60 years, recently closed due in part to a steep drop in enrollment. Another veteran local childcare provider has quietly put her program on the market for the same reason.
Educators are also feeling the strain. Regardless of their own immigration status, many ECE professionals now face the risk of layoffs and wage reductions, as programs dependent on enrollment struggle to stay afloat.
A Growing Crisis in Early Education
The early childhood field was already under pressure, with high turnover and low pay making recruitment and retention difficult. These new enforcement measures will only worsen those challenges. Ultimately, the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement, supported by this significant increase in funding from Congress, will affect not only immigrants and the families who rely on them, but also the entire ECE sector — and the communities it serves nationwide.
