Nearly 1 Million Children Across Texas Affected by Immigration Enforcement

Thousands of children across North Texas and Houston are affected by U.S. immigration policies, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The MPI estimates that 44,000 children in Collin, Dallas, Denton and Tarrant counties, and another 70,000 in Fort Bend, Harris and Montgomery counties, are without legal status. The report also found that 218,000 parents of minor children in North Texas and 283,000 in the Houston area are at risk of deportation.

Nationwide, 6.3 million children under age 18 live with at least one parent who is in the United States without legal status. Of those, 1 million are in Texas, the report found. About 2 million Texas residents overall are undocumented.

“These are children of all statuses. Some are U.S. born. Some are immigrants,” said Valerie Lecarte, a senior policy analyst.

Lecarte said the threat of immigration enforcement affects children’s mental health, academic performance, and even physical wellbeing. “The threat of enforcement in itself, not just actual enforcement, has negative impacts on the health of communities,” she said.

According to the report, nearly 12% of Dallas County residents and about 10% of residents in the Houston area live in the U.S. without legal status. More than 60% of those residents have lived in the country for at least a decade.

Nationwide, MPI estimates there are 13.7 million people in the U.S. without authorization as of 2023, showing an increase from 10.7 million in 2019. Lecarte said nearly “half of them have been living in the country for more than 20 years.”

More than a quarter of the undocumented population holds what Lecarte described as “limbo status,” such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), humanitarian parole, or pending asylum applications.

MPI’s estimates were developed using data from the 2023 American Community Survey and other publicly available datasets. MPI report’s goal is to help policymakers and service providers better understand their communities.

“It’s not tied to the current narrative or the current circumstances around immigration,” Lecarte said. “It’s just that, overall, there’s plenty of studies that show that the census … tends to have an undercount of the foreign-born population.”