Tougher immigration enforcement was responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone—many of them were fathers of American children. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in the escalation of interior immigration enforcement to assess its impact on the structure of families to which many of the deported fathers of U.S.‐born children belonged. We find that the average increase in immigration enforcement during the 2005 to 2015 period has raised by 19 percent the ...