The anti-Latino agenda behind Trump wanting Americans to have more kids

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This is the Year of the Fire Horse in the Chinese zodiac — but for the White House, it’s more like the Year of Babies.

No, not the ones in the Trump administration. Actual babies.

Parents can take advantage of a larger child tax credit. July 5 will see the launch of $1,000 stock investments funded by the Treasury Department for children born in this country during President Trump’s reign. He has mulled offering $5,000 “baby bonuses” and creating a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children.

All this is happening even as birthrates have plummeted in this country for decades, reaching their lowest point ever in 2024. A reduced population tends to relegate countries to economic and demographic doom — look at Japan and Russia. That’s why one of Trump’s big campaign promises was to Make America Fertile Again.

“I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s OK,” he boasted last spring during a women’s history event at the White House.

But even as this administration urges families to grow and single people to marry and welcome little ones into their lives, it’s persecuting children in the name of Trump’s deportation deluge.

In the age of Trump-endorsed Menstruation 101, the goal is to teach girls and women how to get pregnant.

While the president told a crowd last October, “We want more babies, to put it nicely” while announcing cheaper in vitro fertilization drugs, the New York Times found his administration was keeping an average of 175 children a day in immigration detention — a 700% increase from the end of the Biden administration.

As Vice President JD Vance bragged during a March for Life rally in January that he “practices what he preaches” by expecting a fourth child this year, 5-year-old U.S. citizen Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos was adjusting to life in Honduras along with her deported mother.

On the same day last month that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on social media, “My greatest job is being a dad to my nine kids and family will always come first,” a federal judge ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, an Ecuadorean preschooler grabbed outside his Minneapolis home along with his father in what the jurist described as a “perfidious lust for unbridled power.”

Just last week, Alaska resident Sonia Espinoza Arriaga and her sons, ages 5 and 16, were dumped in Tijuana by la migra even though the family had an active case to determine whether they qualified for asylum. And Trump’s campaign against undocumented children is just beginning on multiple fronts.

The Supreme Court has scheduled hearings in April for Trump’s lawsuit seeking to end birthright citizenship for people born to parents who aren’t citizens or permanent residents. U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi is suing to end policies that protect immigrant children in custody.

Thousands more agents are expected to storm our streets in the coming weeks while the Department of Homeland Security spends billions of dollars to build or retrofit warehouses to stuff with the people they grab. Reports are already emerging from the South Texas Family Residential Center an hour south of San Antonio, which ICE uses to house children slated for removal from this country, of rancid food and overcrowded cells.

Trump’s apologists will claim there’s nothing racist or heartless about removing youngsters in this country illegally — or if their parents are in the U.S. without documentation — while asking citizens to have bigger families, even as the main proponents of the so-called pronatalist movement are white conservatives while nearly all of the kids la migra are booting are Latinos.

But an administration that can’t treat these children humanely shouldn’t be trusted with taking care of even American-born children. And one can’t separate Trump’s supposed pro-baby policies from what this country has historically inflicted on Latino families.

American authorities forced U.S.-born children to leave for Mexico with their parents during the Great Depression, arguing they would become a welfare burden at the expense of white children. Doctors were sterilizing Latinas without their consent in the name of population control as recently as the 1970s. Popular culture ridiculed large Latino families as backward and destined for poverty.

I grew up in a California where politicians railed against Mexican American kids like myself for supposedly overwhelming schools, parks, medical clinics and streets with our numbers. We were supposedly the ground troops in a nefarious conspiracy called Reconquista that sought to return the American Southwest to Mexico.

If Trump and Musk want Americans to have more children, they should stop the stunts and make life easier for families.

By the time I reached high school in the 1990s, voters began to pass laws that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants like my father and other relatives, with a special punitive focus on their progeny. The infamous Prop. 187, which passed in 1994, would’ve banned undocumented children from attending California public schools from kindergarten to higher education. Five years later, the Anaheim Union High School District, whose schools I attended, passed a resolution seeking to sue Mexico for $50 million for educating the children of undocumented immigrants.

Board president Harald Martin — who migrated to this country from Austria as a 2-year-old — appeared on NPR to justify his actions by comparing the students he was in charge of to Tribbles, furry little aliens that starred in a famous “Star Trek” episode when they bred in such numbers that the Starship Enterprise was overwhelmed.

“They were so cute and fluffy, nice little things when there were four or five of them,” Martin said. “Then it got to the point down the road when it wasn’t so nice. They were getting in the way because there now were thousands of them on the ship.”

Martin’s example was not only wildly racist, it ignored the reality that Latinos were on the same road to assimilation as other previous immigrant groups ridiculed for their large families. While a March of Dimes study released last year shows Latinas had more children than any other ethnic group in this country as of 2023, the Latina birthrate declined by a third since 2003 — by far the largest drop of those groups.

I’ve seen this play out in my own family. I have 16 aunts and uncles who lived to adulthood and am the oldest of four children born to my parents — but my dad has just one grandchild and probably isn’t getting any more. I agree with Trump, Vance and the rest of them that children bring magic and vitality to communities — but what Latino family would want to raise a family where everything is far more expensive and the threat of deportation is never far away?

Fatherhood wasn’t in the cards for me, but I love being Tío Guti to my nephew and the children of my friends. That’s why my heart breaks when I hear them say that their classmates left the United States and my blood boils when I hear Vance, Trump and others urge Americans to have more kids. Trumpworld isn’t looking to increase the number of people who look like my loved ones — and that’s something that should frighten us all.

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Ideas expressed in the piece

The Trump administration’s push to increase American birthrates through expanded child tax credits, $1,000 Trump Accounts, potential $5,000 baby bonuses, and consideration of a “National Medal of Motherhood” represents a contradiction with its aggressive immigration enforcement policies that predominantly target Latino families and children. The administration is simultaneously detaining an average of 175 immigrant children daily—a 700% increase from the Biden administration—while urging Americans to expand their families

[1][2].[4]The pronatalist movement championed by the administration and its leaders, such as Vice President JD Vance, is primarily driven by white conservatives, yet the children being targeted by deportation enforcement are overwhelmingly Latino. This selective application reflects a historical pattern of policies designed to control Latino population growth while promoting fertility among white Americans

.[1]The author connects current pronatalist policies to decades of systemic discrimination against Latino families, including forced deportations during the Great Depression, forced sterilization of Latinas without consent in the 1970s, and more recent ballot initiatives like California’s Proposition 187 that sought to bar undocumented children from public schools. These historical injustices cannot be separated from contemporary policy messaging

.[1]Latino families face diminishing incentive to have children given the combination of rising costs of living and the persistent threat of deportation, making the administration’s appeals to increase family size feel hollow to communities experiencing targeted enforcement. The administration cannot credibly advocate for larger families while simultaneously pursuing policies that destabilize immigrant households and separate children from their parents

.[1]

Different views on the topic

Supporters of Trump Accounts argue that the $1,000 seed investment provides a meaningful wealth-building mechanism for American children, particularly those from lower-income backgrounds, allowing them to benefit from long-term compound growth in stock market investments. The administration frames these accounts as a response to declining U.S. birthrates, which historically have been associated with economic and demographic challenges in countries such as Japan and Russia

[2][3].[4]Proponents view the expanded child tax credit increase to $2,200 per child and larger standard deductions as critical affordability measures for working families facing a cost-of-living crisis, with analysis suggesting tax refunds could increase by approximately $1,000 per refund in 2026. These tax benefits are positioned as putting money back into families’ pockets for necessities such as rent, food, and credit card bills

[4].[5]Supporters have emphasized private sector participation as evidence of broad commitment to the initiative’s goals, with billionaires and investors pledging billions in additional contributions to Trump Accounts. The program is framed as creating opportunities for children to build assets and achieve financial security from birth, with the White House characterizing it as giving children “ownership of America’s future”

[2].[3]