This article analyzes the traffic stop–to-deportation pipeline in New York State, how it harms children of immigrants, and how New York’s Greenlight Law seeks to disrupt it but has been hobbled by an implementation gap. It first establishes the phenomenon of the traffic stop–to-deportation pipeline by documenting how traffic stops are a key cause of deportations in New York State. Second, it analyzes how the pipeline harms (mostly US citizen) children of undocumented immigrants in New York State, who are more than 7 percent (more than 300,000) of New York State’s children. The pipeline makes these children fear and mistrust the police; harms their educational, social, and brain development; and consumes family income with the Mexican driver tax (costs incurred because parents could not get a driver’s license). Third, the article analyzes how the Greenlight Law should help remedy these harms, and how an implementation gap leaves many parents and children vulnerable to the pipeline. The implementation gap is partly due to the pandemic, but also driven by political and other factors that could be addressed by policy. Finally, the article analyzes how variation in implementing the Greenlight Law could leave the pipeline undisrupted and lead to unequal protection of the law by place in New York State. The article makes policy recommendations for stronger enactment to reduce the pipeline’s harms.

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Some literature on public sociology conceives of students as a public rather than potential or real practitioners of this type of sociology. There is a dearth of texts reflecting on graduate student training in public sociology and the trade‐offs they face. In this paper, I engage in a reflexive account of my experience doing public sociology, as I partnered with nonprofits to conceptualize, research, and write a report on the effects of stripped citizenship in Colombia after a mistaken administrative decision deprived 40,000 mostly binnational Venezuelan‐Colombians of their nationality in that country. This report has served as part of strategic litigation and to raise public awareness of the harmful policy. I argue that three things are key for graduate students to engage in public sociology and have been overlooked. First, training in public sociology, especially training with elements of apprenticeship, can develop the publicly engaged sociological imagination and toolkit, which is key to identifying opportunities for interventions in the midst of fieldwork, and models for interventions. Second, support from established professors. And third, local, contextual knowledge is indispensable. I also discuss ways to offset some of the trade‐offs that graduate students are likely to face when doing public sociology.