About 7 percent of kindergarten through the 12th grade schoolchildren in the United States have at least one undocumented parent, according to the Pew Research Center.
Some 3.9 million students in the U.S. live with a parent who lacks legal status, up from 3.6 million in 2009. Almost 6 percent of these children were born in the U.S. and about one percent are undocumented themselves, though that number is declining.
"Since the end of the Great Recession, the growth in the number of students with unauthorized immigrant parents has been entirely due to a broader increase in the number of children born in the U.S.," writes Pew's Jeffrey S. Passel and D'Vera Cohn.
President-elect Donald Trump vowed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, saying through a surrogate "every person in this country has to follow American law. No person living here illegally gets a free pass, like they did under the Obama administration," Trump's immigration adviser Kris Kobach said, according to NBC News.
"The jobs are going to dry up, the welfare benefits are going to dry up, and a lot of people who may not be criminal illegal aliens may decide, hey, it's getting hard to disobey federal law, and may leave on their own," he added.
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