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

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.