Heather Koball
Heather Koball is a Senior Fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, where her areas of expertise include immigration and at-risk youth. Koball has directed multiple projects on issues faced by children of immigrants, including access to public benefits among immigrant families, the implications of the Affordable Care Act for immigrants' health care, and immigrant integration in new destination areas. Her research also focuses on programs to improve the well-being of at-risk youth. As coprincipal investigator of the Opportunities Youth project, she is developing and evaluating interventions to improve the employment outcomes of disconnected youth. She is also principal investigator for an evaluation of after-school programs in New York City that aim to improve youths’ social and emotional development.
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Rising immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior over the past decade increased the chances that the estimated 5.3 million children living with unauthorized immigrant parents, the vast majority of them born in the United States, could experience the deportation of a parent. This report reviews the evidence on the impacts on children, finding significant and long-lasting harm can occur at emotional, economic, developmental, and academic levels.
This Urban Institute-MPI report offers findings from fieldwork in study sites in California, Florida, Illinois, South Carolina, and Texas, examining the involvement of families with a deported parent with health and social service systems, and barriers to access. The report finds that economic hardship is highly prevalent following detention and deportation of a parent, while child welfare system involvement is rarer.