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

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.

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.

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?

In this photo released by U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Adrian Conejo Arias and his son, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, are seen in San Antonio on Jan. 31 after being released from the Dilley detention center.

(U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro)

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.