Donald Trump is attacking a public education program for infants and toddlers from low-income households, including its branch that serves Austin families.
The federally funded preschool program, Head Start, is for children 0-5 years old from families living below the poverty line. Since elected, the Trump administration has closed five regional Head Start offices and cut 60% of staff, per Chalkbeat reporting. At the end of July, a government watchdog showed Trump had illegally frozen federal funds from January to April meant for Head Start, which forced programs to close across the country.
On July 10, Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a surprise notice that, effective immediately, undocumented children will be barred from enrolling in Head Start programs, including Austin ISD’s Head Start branch.
AISD’s full-day Head Start program helps students build a pre-elementary foundation in reading, math, and science through play and guided activities. The students are served free breakfast, lunch, and healthy snacks and provided with free health screenings. Head Start is also equipped with social services for students’ families, helping them achieve their career and parenting goals. In 2024, children enrolled in Head Start nationwide were speakers of more than 140 languages.
AISD’s program is already overenrolled and underfunded. Classrooms are almost always full to capacity and have an active waitlist. Federal funding for AISD as a whole will plummet 56% for this upcoming 2025-2026 school year, from almost $20 million last school year to now $8.6 million. Even before these budget cuts took effect in July, the AISD Head Start program has needed to turn away families and already struggles to fill the community’s demand, according to AISD Trustee Kathryn Whitley Chu. Less money in the district this year, along with the federal government’s sweeping Head Start cuts, will only further harm Austin’s program.
“There’s a target on this wonderful program that offers opportunities to our neediest, youngest kids at the most critical time in their development,” Whitley Chu said, referring to the fact that a child’s brain develops 90% in those first five years of life. “This is making things harder for families throughout the country.”
HHS is undoing a 1998 interpretation of what a “federal public benefit” is within the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, one that exempted community-based programs, like Head Start, from requiring families to provide their legal status to enroll. PRWORA was created two years prior, in 1996, and effectively blocked undocumented families from accessing food stamps and most Medicaid services.
“For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration,” RFK Jr. said in the HHS statement, ignoring the fact that “undocumented” individuals often possess taxpayer identification numbers and pay taxes toward such public programs.
The Head Start Act’s stated criteria for a child’s eligibility has been that they live in poverty, whose families “in the absence of child care, would potentially be eligible for public assistance,” or are homeless. There’s nothing in the act’s language to exclude undocumented kids from the program. HHS didn’t give any further guidance on how Head Start administrators should enforce the new rule.
Even Dr. Deborah Bergeron, Trump’s deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development and director of the Office of Head Start during his first term, thinks this is a bad idea. “Head Start has 60 years of proven success, helping more than 40 million children grow into productive, healthy adults. … Let’s not use children to solve an adult problem,” Bergeron wrote in a guest column for the Los Angeles Times.
Head Start programs and the ACLU say what HHS is trying to do is illegal. On July 15, Head Start programs in Washington state, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and others, along with the ACLU, filed an amendment for their existing lawsuit against the Trump administration’s attacks on Head Start. Twenty-one U.S. states also filed a lawsuit against the federal government on July 21, with incisive language:
“The hungry have never needed to produce government identification to enter a soup kitchen or food bank; parents have never needed to produce their children’s citizenship or immigration records before enrolling them in Head Start … people facing homelessness or domestic violence have never needed proof of immigration status to walk into a shelter. … This is not America, and it is not the law.”
AISD’s Head Start program already requires the guardian’s photo identification and proof of residency. For now, the program simply awaits the outcome of these lawsuits and any further directives from the federal government. Nonetheless, Whitley Chu thinks the announcement is already damaging by itself. “There’s just great harm in general with the effect of folks being scared to enroll their kids in school at any level,” Whitley Chu said. “Every time there’s this level of screening, I think the point is to scare people and to harm people.”
This article appears in August 29 • 2025.
