Deportation system takes thousands of kids from parents

What’s worse than getting deported? Getting deported without your kids.

Applied Research Center, publisher of the magazine Colorlines, just released a groundbreaking study of families broken by deportation entitled “Shattered Families: The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System.” For years, many of us have heard anecdotes about kids getting put in foster care after their parents’ deportation. But this is the first study to show the magnitude of the problem. Analyzing government data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, ARC found at least 5,000 children in foster care because one or more parent had been detained or deported.  Here’s an excerpt from the report:

Josefina’s baby was just 9-months old and Clara’s children were 1 and 6 when they were placed in foster homes with strangers. Clara and Josefina, sisters in their early 30s who lived together in a small New Mexico town, had done nothing to harm their children or to elicit the attention of the child welfare department.

In the late summer of 2010, a team of federal immigration agents arrived at the front door of Clara and Josefina’s trailer home in New Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE ) had received a false tip that the sisters, who were undocumented immigrants, had drugs in their home. Though they found nothing incriminating in the trailer and the sisters had no criminal record, ICE called Child Protective Services (CPS ) to take custody of the children and ICE detained the sisters because of their immigration status.

For the four months that ICE detained them, Josefina and Clara had no idea where their children were. In December, the sisters were deported, and their children remained in foster care. Josefina was very quiet as she talked by phone from Mexico a year after she was deported: “I don’t know where my child is; I have no contact with my baby. I didn’t do anything wrong to have my children taken away from me.”

This is the knee-jerk response of legal systems that don’t even communicate with one another – the various state-based child welfare systems vs. the federal immigration enforcement system.  While parents are still present in the country awaiting deportation, detention facilities won’t release them long enough to attend family court hearings about their children’s fate. What’s worse, they’re often detained hundreds or thousands of miles away from home.  Once they’re deported, they might as well have been sent to another planet as far as child welfare systems are concerned.  According to the report, child welfare officials are extremely reluctant to place children with their parents outside the country.  I have no doubt that it’s difficult for children to transition to life in a foreign country that they may have never known.  But that can’t outweigh the profound trauma of permanently separating children from the only parents they’ve ever known.

In the immigration system, people aren’t entitled to court-appointed legal representation, in part because the law considers immigration a “civil” matter, i.e., not as serious as a criminal case.  If a parent does have legal representation in her child welfare case, that lawyer is unlikely to have much experience in immigration law and probably has no way to even communicate with her. It’s clear that getting on the wrong side of either the immigration system or the child welfare system can have devastating consequences.  It’s bad enough to lock up people who’ve committed no crime (lacking legal immigration status is not, itself, a criminal offense under federal law) – especially while the federal government insists that it’s focusing on deporting serious criminals. Terminating the rights of parents who’ve done nothing abusive or harmful to their kids – and refusing to even let parents speak to their children or inform them of their whereabouts – for months at a time benefits no one and just seems completely unnecessary.

In my work at various legal service organizations, I’ve spoken at length with many people who’ve immigrated to the United States – some legally, some not. When I ask them why they come – especially those who’ve risked their lives by crossing the desert on foot – the overwhelming majority tell me something along the lines of “to provide a better life for my family”, “to feed my kids”, etc.  It’s profoundly cruel that while we kick people out of the country, we simultaneously deny them access to the very families they’ve risked so much to care for in the first place.

Download the full report, and read the corresponding article on Colorlines, “Thousands of Kids Taken From Parents in US Deportation System.”