Testing exposure to local immigration enforcement as a structural determinant of preterm birth disparities in California counties

Summary: 
We evaluated the impact of county-level immigration enforcement measures under the SCOMM program on preterm birth. SCOMM is a federal immigration enforcement program that initially ran between 2008 and 2014; it was re-instated in January 2017. SCOMM led to widespread fear in immigrant communities by mandating collaboration between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement officers.

Principal Investigators:
Jacqueline Torres, PhD | Epidemiology & Biostatistics | UCSF School of Medicine

Background

SCOMM led to widespread fear in immigrant communities by mandating collaboration between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement officers.

Objective

We evaluated the impact of county-level immigration enforcement measures under the SCOMM program on preterm birth. SCOMM is a federal immigration enforcement program that initially ran between 2008 and 2014; it was re-instated in January 2017.

Method

We obtained data on monthly SCOMM exposures (deportations and fingerprint submissions from local law enforcement to the Department of Homeland Security) and linked these data to individual birth records, limiting our analyses to singleton births to Latina and non-Latina white women in California’s most populous counties.

We observed significant interactions between maternal ethnicity and county-level SCOMM enforcement during pregnancy in only a small number of cases.

Results

We found inconsistent associations between SCOMM enforcement in late pregnancy and total pregnancy with preterm birth for Latina and non-Latina white women, with the latter group serving as controls.

These interactions suggested widening disparities in preterm for Latina versus non-Latina white women with increased SCOMM exposure during pregnancy. In some cases, these widening disparities were driven by increases in preterm birth for Latina women; in other cases, these widening preterm birth disparities with greater intensity of county-level SCOMM exposure appeared to be driven by improvements in preterm birth for non-Latina white women. These analyses also revealed a number of methodological challenges associated with modeling the impact of societal stressors that vary over time and place on preterm birth, including the need for careful attention to other social and environmental factors that could be occurring during the same time period and may also be impacting preterm birth. We hope this project serves as the catalyst for future research on the impacts of immigration policy and enforcement on preterm birth.