Deportation threat and infant birthweight in California, 2003–2012: The role of place and immigrant mothers’ legal status

Marci Ybarra, Youngjin Stephanie Hong and Angela S. García

Children and Youth Services Review, 2025, vol. 170, issue C

Abstract: Prior scholarship indicates that deportation threat significantly raises the risk of low infant birthweight for babies born to immigrant women. Extending this work, we differentiate mothers’ legal status and account for variations in interior immigration enforcement exposure by county of residence. Examining the influence of differential place-based deportation threat exposure during the third trimester of pregnancy, a particularly sensitive time for maternal stress, we analyze 2003–2012 California Health Interview Survey data (CHIS) using a pooled OLS regression model with year of birth fixed effects (N = 1181). We merge CHIS data with information on the implementation of 287(g) and Secure Communities, two federal interior immigration enforcement programs, and data on deportations from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) by month/year of the focal child’s birth and maternal respondents’ residential county at the time of the focal child’s birth. We find that exposure to deportation threat during the third trimester of pregnancy is significantly associated with lower infant birthweight among babies born to undocumented women, with the magnitude of this effect largest for these infants compared to groups with less vulnerable legal status. This suggests that exposure to interior immigration enforcement has significant negative consequences on infant health, with the largest effects occurring among babies born to undocumented women.

Keywords: Infant birthweight; Immigrant mothers; Deportation threat; Interior enforcement; Legal status; Place (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740925000015
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:170:y:2025:i:c:s0190740925000015

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2025.108118

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().