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child tax credit
Stop a Federal Budget That Betrays Millions of Children, Including Immigrant Children
The budget leans into cruelty toward immigrant children, both in the punishments it seeks to inflict—and in what it proposes to spend our tax dollars on.
Jun 24, 2025
As Congress debates the federal budget, one thing is clear: This legislation isn’t just about dollars and cents—it’s a blueprint for cruelty. The current budget proposal takes direct aim at immigrant families, and threatens to inflict lasting harm on children already subject to inhumane treatment at the hands of the U.S. government.
Advocates for children and families have raised the alarm about how the proposed cuts would gut access to healthcare and essential programs for millions of children. But what has received less public attention, and demands urgent scrutiny, is how this budget leans into cruelty toward immigrant children, both in the punishments it seeks to inflict—and in what it proposes to spend our tax dollars on.
First, the bill includes a cascade of tax and health provisions and fee requirements that will limit vital benefits and harm immigrant children and their families.
Congress is being asked to approve a spending plan that wants to use taxpayer dollars to lock up children, while stripping away the very supports that help them survive.
The budget proposal would eliminate Child Tax Credit eligibility for millions of children if neither of their parents has a Social Security number. The bill also penalizes states that fund health insurance programs for immigrants excluded from federal Medicaid. States that step up to protect immigrant children would be hit with a 10% cut to their Medicaid expansion match, punishing compassion with financial retribution.
And it doesn’t stop there. The budget levies fees on immigrants applying for humanitarian protection, impacting children applying for asylum and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, and putting children who cannot pay at risk of detention or deportation. It also imposes thousands of dollars in fees on people seeking to sponsor unaccompanied children, creating a huge financial barrier to providing children with a family home and care while they await immigration proceedings. These fees will cause children to languish in harmful institutional settings for even longer periods of time.
At the same time, the budget allocates billions of taxpayer dollars to supercharge immigration enforcement, not to solve a crisis, but to expand it. This extreme agenda targets law-abiding immigrants who have for years lived and contributed to the quality of life in communities across this nation. It proposes huge new spending on immigrant detention facilities, with families subject to indefinite detention in direct violation of long-standing legal protections for children.
Children’s Rights knows what these detention facilities look like. As co-counsel representing children under the Flores Settlement Agreement, which has protected the rights of immigrant children detained by the U.S. government for decades, we are one of three organizations allowed to speak directly with children held in federal facilities. We’ve heard their stories firsthand, and we know that even a few days in detention can have devastating and long-lasting emotional and psychological consequences for kids.
Last week, the Flores co-counsel team filed a motion to enforce the Flores Settlement, citing heartbreaking evidence that U.S. Customs and Border Protection is detaining children for weeks in harsh, unsafe, and prison-like conditions before turning them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where they are often detained for weeks more. This should not happen to any child.
It is shameful that, In the face of overwhelming evidence, the administration has filed a motion to terminate the Flores Settlement, alleging that it is no longer necessary. The eyewitness accounts we have heard utterly dispute this. Children and parents tell us they are being imprisoned for prolonged periods, subjected to cruelty, neglect, and conditions that are not only unlawful but deeply inhumane. They make one thing clear: The government cannot be trusted to care for immigrant children without judicial oversight.
The budget and our court battle may be on separate tracks, but they tell the same story. The government is waging a coordinated assault on immigrant children. It is not just failing to protect them—it is actively endangering them.
This is not just a legal fight. It’s a moral one. The federal budget is America’s budget, and it should reflect our values as a nation. Right now, Congress is being asked to approve a spending plan that wants to use taxpayer dollars to lock up children, while stripping away the very supports that help them survive.
We must say no. And we must do it loudly. Poll after poll shows that most Americans disapprove of the aggressive immigration tactics we are seeing. Now is the time to speak up by calling on our elected officials to demand a budget that upholds the dignity and rights of every child, regardless of where they were born.
There is still time to choose a better path—one that protects children instead of punishing them.
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Congress, Don’t Repeat the Mistakes of the 2017 Tax Cuts
The new House bill would disproportionately benefit the well-off—and harm the financial well-being of millions of working Americans, including Black women like me.
Jun 08, 2025
In early 2018, I remember sitting at my kitchen table, trying to make sense of how the 2017 Trump tax law was supposed to help families like mine.
I’d read headlines promising “middle class tax relief.” But when tax season rolled around, there was little relief to be found—especially for me, a Black woman navigating caretaking for elderly parents and a demanding career. My refund was smaller, my deductions had vanished, and the math simply didn’t add up.
It was clear then, as it is now: the Trump tax cuts weren’t designed with people like me in mind.
Let’s be clear: The 2017 Trump tax cuts failed Black women—and millions of others—the first time around. They widened inequality, rewarded the wealthy, and ignored the economic realities of everyday families.
Now as more GOP tax cuts for the rich move through Congress, history is poised to repeat itself. The bill would disproportionately benefit the well-off—and harm the financial well-being of millions of working Americans, including Black women like me.
Instead, lawmakers should embrace the “Black Women Best” framework and take a different path. Coined by Janelle Jones, the principle is that when Black women are thriving, then the economy is truly working for everyone.
For example, when the 2017 tax cuts were passed, most of the benefits went to wealthy, white households. Had lawmakers considered the financial realities of Black women, who are typically underpaid, they could have made a package better designed for all those who need the most help—not just Black women, but everyone struggling to make ends meet.
Refundable tax credits like the Child Tax Credit (CTC) are one of the most direct ways the government supports working families. When structured fairly, they give families a much-needed financial boost.
The 2017 tax law increased the CTC from $1,000 to $2,000 per child. But many families receive far less because it restricted the refundable part of the credit for those with modest earnings. That left out many of the lowest-income families—including 45% of Black children (double the share of their white peers)—whose parents didn’t earn enough to qualify.
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act, which temporarily restructured the CTC to make it larger and fully refundable. For the first time, all the families at the bottom received the full credit. The results were stunning: Child poverty hit record lows.
But that progress was short-lived. The expanded credit has not been renewed, and child poverty shot right back up.
This time around, the House temporarily boosted the CTC to $2,500. But limits on the refundable portion would be continued, meaning 17 million of the lowest-income children in America will still be left out.
Using the “Black Women Best” framework would make those expanded benefits permanent—not just because it’s the right thing to do for Black families, but because it lifts up the entire economy.
But instead, in this way and others, the bill favors the already wealthy.
Another significant example is the bill’s deduction for income people receive from “pass-through” businesses. Rather than pay a corporate income tax, these business owners pay taxes on their profits through their personal taxes. The 2017 tax law created a 20% deduction for this kind of income—and now lawmakers want to permanently increase it to 23%.
Increasing this deduction means Congress is giving handouts to those already holding the keys to wealth. A Treasury report showed a jarring 90% of the people who received this benefit were white. Only 5% of the benefits went to Hispanic taxpayers—and just 2% to Black taxpayers.
Let’s be clear: The 2017 Trump tax cuts failed Black women—and millions of others—the first time around. They widened inequality, rewarded the wealthy, and ignored the economic realities of everyday families. Repeating those mistakes in 2025 would be more than negligent—it would be a deliberate choice to uphold a broken system.
But there’s another way. When Black women thrive, everyone wins. It’s time for our tax code to reflect that truth.
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The Senate Must Tear Up the Cruel House Budget and Start Again
The House bill will drive up hunger and deepen poverty, including among children, and take access to life-saving healthcare away from millions of people. The Senate must reject it.
May 24, 2025
At the end of a rushed, chaotic process, House Republicans passed a bill early Thursday morning that fails the people they promised to help. It would raise costs on millions of families across the country, making it harder for them to meet basic needs and weather life’s ups and downs—while showering ever larger tax breaks on the wealthiest households.
The bill will drive up hunger and deepen poverty, including among children, and take access to life-saving healthcare away from millions of people. The Senate must reject it.
Congressional Budget Office data and other analyses make the House Republican agenda’s harmful impacts crystal clear: about 15 million people losing health coverage; millions losing food assistance or having their food assistance cut, including 2 million or more children; the 10% of households with the lowest incomes made worse off while the richest get richer by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars each year; and trillions of dollars added to our debt over the decade, worsening our long-term fiscal picture and increasing the risk to our economy.
In 2027, it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an average tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts.
The bill’s SNAP provisions are so extreme that some states, faced with backfilling deep federal funding cuts that total billions of dollars a year nationally, could take steps to dramatically take food assistance away from large numbers of people and could even decide to end their SNAP programs entirely. Simply put, House Republicans are walking away from a 50-year, bipartisan commitment to ensure that children in families with low incomes get the help they need, no matter what state they live in—with potentially devastating impacts on their health, education, and future success.
The extreme health provisions would lead to an unprecedented drop in health coverage and drive up health costs for millions. Make no mistake—the main way the bill cuts more than $800 billion from healthcare is by taking away Medicaid and affordable marketplace coverage from people who are eligible.
The bill also makes higher education more expensive for millions by driving up the cost of student loans and reducing the level of Pell education grants for college students.
The bill directs some of its harshest cuts toward people who are immigrants and their families. House Republicans falsely claim that they are restricting access to basic needs programs for people who don’t have a documented status. But the reality is that people without a documented immigration status already do not qualify for these benefits. The cuts in federal benefits will fall entirely on immigrants in the country lawfully—including some pregnant women and children who need food assistance. Refugees, people granted asylum, and victims of trafficking—people who have had to prove that they face persecution in their home countries or have been victimized by sex or labor traffickers—are among those who would see their food assistance, Medicare benefits they paid into, and affordable health marketplace coverage terminated. And the bill will also take away the Child Tax Credit from millions of U.S. citizen children in immigrant families.
The House Republican bill showers more tax cuts on the wealthy, extending the highly skewed provisions of the 2017 tax law and adding permanent expansions for wealthy households, while leaving millions of children in working families with low incomes out of even the temporary increase in the Child Tax Credit. In 2027, it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an average tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts—even while these households bear the brunt of cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and face higher prices due to the president’s tariffs, which the bill does nothing to address.
There’s a better path forward, but it requires the Senate to tear up this legislation and start again, rejecting any proposals that raise costs on families, take health coverage and food assistance away from families who need them, or drive up poverty and the number of people who are uninsured.
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