At Least 5,100 Children of Illegal Immigrants in US Foster Care UPDATED

“While anecdotal reports have circulated about children lingering in foster care because of a parent’s detention or deportation, [ARCs year-long] investigation provides the first evidence that the problem occurs on a large scale.”

“That number represents a conservative estimate of the total, based on extensive surveys of child welfare case workers and attorneys and analysis of national immigration and child welfare trends. Many of the kids may never see their parents again.”

“These children, many of whom should never have been separated from their parents in the first place, face often insurmountable obstacles to reunifying with their mothers and fathers. Though child welfare departments are required by federal law to reunify children with any parents who are able to provide for the basic safety of their children, detention makes this all but impossible. Then, once parents are deported, families are often separated for long periods. Ultimately, child welfare departments and juvenile courts too often move to terminate the parental rights of deportees and put children up for adoption, rather than attempt to unify the family as they would in other circumstances.”

“According to over 100 child welfare caseworkers and attorneys we interviewed around the country, as rates of deportations increase, so do the numbers of children from immigrant families in foster care. Indeed, federal data released to the Applied Research Center through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that almost one in four people deported in the last year was the mother or father of a United States citizen.”

ARC has “identified at least 22 states where children in foster care face barriers to reunifying with their detained or deported mothers and fathers.” The first article linked to below shows the specifics on a map.

“In Los Angeles, where according to our research, the mother or father of approximately one in every 16 children in foster care has been detained or deported, a caseworker for the country described the frustration. “Ultimately, as social workers our role is to reunify families. I’m not saying that ICE is right or wrong; what I’m saying is, let us do our job, let us reunify families.”

Juvenile Court Hearings and ICE Detention

“All of the parents with children in Child Protective Services custody whom we interviewed inside six detention centers said that they missed at least one of their juvenile court hearings. From detention, they could not access the courts and their attorneys could not find them.

ICE is not by law required to detain many of those it plans to deport, but it keeps non-citizens locked up to prevent them from absconding. A parent whose singular concern is getting her kids back is scarcely a flight risk. ICE nonetheless takes confinement to an extreme. Even when parents know about their juvenile court hearings, ICE categorically refuses to transport them to juvenile court hearings where vital decisions about their families are made. In hundreds of interviews with attorneys and caseworkers, not one had ever seen a detained parent appear in person at a hearing. Some detainees are not even able to arrange to phone into the hearings.

Unsurprisingly for a system in which about 85 percent of detainees lack legal representation and can be held for months, sometimes years, in squalid conditions, ICE functions without any obligation to the legal needs of the people it detains. And juvenile court judges are powerless to compel ICE to do anything.

“Parents [should] have an absolute right to be present in a court hearing,” a juvenile court judge in Pima County, Ariz., told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We order that if they are in custody they appear, but these orders are not honored by the detention facilities. We don’t have the authority over the federal centers.”

Example

“A month after she was initially detained, Roberta was finally able to contact her court appointed attorney by phone. But the attorney spoke no Spanish and they could not communicate. Roberta still arranged to call in to the next court hearing, but she says that because of a bad phone connection over the detention center phone, she understood nothing uttered in the courtroom.

Without any specific policy for addressing the needs of detained parents, child welfare agencies often treat them as if they’ve abandoned their children. And so, after several months in detention and no contact with her children, Roberta says she got a letter in the mail. “All [the court] sent me was a Spanish sheet with threats,” she said. “If you don’t appear, you’ll lose kids. That’s all it said.”

There was also little chance she could have complied with the child welfare department’s overall plan for family reunification. Detention centers provide parents no access to the services and programs needed to take part in their case plans for reunification, which for her would have consisted of treatment for alcohol abuse, parenting classes and visitation with her children.”

Example 2

“Soon after they were deported, the sisters contacted the Mexican consulate in New Mexico to ask for help in regaining their parental rights. The consulate began corresponding with the child welfare department on the sisters’ behalf. For months after their deportation, a staff person at the consulate repeatedly told Clara and Josefina that the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department planned to reunify the family as soon as the sisters could prove that they had stable housing and jobs.

Yet, even after they found work and were set up in their mother’s home, the children remained in foster care. Reunification dates cited by the department came and went, but still, no children.

According to the sisters, the New Mexico child welfare department would not let the mothers speak by phone with the youngest two of the three children and Clara spoke only once to her 6 year old.

According to Josefina and Clara, they heard word that their children were placed in three different foster homes and the babies were being raised entirely in English. They feared their children would not remember them even if they were reunified and they began to believe they might never see their children again.”

Better Off in the US?

“In jurisdictions around the country, child welfare departments and children’s attorneys have successfully argued that it is in a child’s best interest to remain in the U.S. rather than join their parents in another country. Though child welfare departments are required by law to try to reunify children with their parents, and research shows that children fare better with their families than in foster care, the principal is often quashed when a border stands in the way.

Many caseworkers and attorneys noted to us a pervasive bias against placing children in another country. “When you break down the cases, placement with parents in Mexico happens very rarely,” an attorney who represents children and parents in El Paso, Texas, told us. “The knee-jerk reaction of almost everyone is that the children are better off in U.S.”

San Diego County’s and El Paso County’s Solution

“Some jurisdictions, especially those near the U.S.-Mexico border, are working to interrupt this rapid move to sever families. In San Diego County, Calif., and El Paso County, Texas, for example, the child welfare departments have established international liaisons who work with the Mexican consulate and Mexican child welfare department to place children with their families in Mexico.

Without the consulate, Clara and Josefina would still be without their children.

Yet most countries lack any formal policy for deported parents and ultimately, when parents are detained and deported, families are shattered.”

46,000 Deportations of Parents of US Children January to June 2011

“Between January and June of 2011, the United States carried out more than 46,000 deportations of the parents of U.S.-citizen children, according to previously unreleased federal data obtained by Colorlines.com’s publisher, the Applied Research Center. The figures reflect a striking increase in the rate of removals of parents and raise serious concerns about the impact of these deportations on children, many of whom are left behind.

Congress demanded two years ago that the Department of Homeland Security begin to compile this data by July 2010, but it had not been made available to the public. The Applied Research Center obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request.”

Proportion of Deportations of Parents of US Children Increasing Rapidly

“The data on parental deportations does not reveal how many children each of these parents had, or whether their children remained in the U.S. or left with their mothers and fathers. However, the Applied Research Center has also found a disturbing number of children languishing in foster care and separated from their parents for long periods. After a year-long national investigation, we estimate there are at least 5,100 children in foster care who face barriers to family reunification because their mother or father is detained or deported. That number could reach as high as 15,000 in the next five years, at the current rate of growth.

The rising number of parental deportations has corresponded with an overall increase in immigration enforcement under the Obama administration; in fiscal year 2011, a record 397,000 people were deported. Yet parental deportation has also increased as a proportion of all removals. Between 1998 and 2007, the last period for which similar data is available, approximately 8 percent of almost 2.2 million removals were parents of U.S.-citizen children. The new data, released to the Applied Research Center in September, reveals that more than 22 percent of all people deported in the first half of this year were parents of citizen kids. ”

The executive summmary and full report pdfs can be downloaded at ARC’s website here.

Thousands of Kids Taken From Parents In U.S. Deportation System
[Colorlines 11/2/11 by  Seth Freed Wessler]

U.S. Deports 46K Parents With Citizen Kids in Just Six Months
[Colorlines 11/3/11 by Seth Freed Wessler]

Shattered Families Research
[Applied Research Center website]

Update: “In a briefing with Latino journalists last week, President Obama directly acknowledged that his administration’s immigration enforcement practices break up families and exclude parents from decisions about the custody of their children. His comments affirmed the central findings of a yearlong investigation by the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com, released earlier this month. The investigation concludes that there are at least 5,100 children currently in foster care who are stuck there because their parents were detained or deported by immigration officials.

The president said parents should have access to their children if they are detained and that he has directed the Department of Homeland Security to examine its family unification practices to ensure that happens. The White House declined to comment today on the details of that examination or what policy changes it may produce. ”

“The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to request for comment on the president’s remarks, but a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that the agency has reviewed the Applied Research Center investigation.”

“In June, ICE announced that officers would be expected to use their discretion to weed out immigrants whom the administration considers low-priority for deportation, because they have not been convicted of a criminal charge. These include longtime residents of the United States and those with children.

But in interviews with Colorlines.com, immigration attorneys and advocates around the country say that they have not seen any significant increase in the use of ICE discretion to release parents. On Wednesday, the American Immigration Lawyers Association released a report that concluded “most ICE offices have not changed their practices since the issuance of these new directives.”

Obama: Kids Stuck in Foster Care Due to Deportation a “Real Problem”
[Colorlines 11/14/11 by Seth Freed Wessler]

Update 2: “Part of the problem in estimating how many children of deported immigrants are transferred to foster families is that national data simply do not exist, said Wessler, because neither Immigration and Customs Enforcement nor social services departments are required to compile the information.

Moreover, within many states, such as Colorado, each county operates independently with regard to foster families. If the data exist, these agencies have no obligation to share it.

Even so, according to statistics from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security​, each year since 2005 ORR has received 7,000 to 9,000 “unaccompanied minors,” that is, minors who entered the country alone – most of them from Central America – or who remain alone in the country after their parents have been deported or left the United States.

However, ORR’s report does not detail how many of those minors are put in foster care families or orphanages, how many of them are adopted or how many are eventually reunited with their families. For that reason, ARC’s research was needed and is innovative, according to Wessler.

The ARC report is the first attempt at national data regarding the children of deported parents, he said.”

“The figures provided by ORR do not include children of Mexicans who decided to “voluntarily return” to their countries of origin, leaving their American children in this country. In fact, 85 percent of those unaccompanied minors come from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, according to the Vera Institute for Justice. This group was hired by ORR to provide pro bono legal assistance for those children who, without their parents, would also lack proper legal representation unless it were freely provided to them.

The Innocenti Insight report published by UNICEF in 2009 reported that 22 percent of U.S. children are children of immigrants, and that three out of four of those children do not speak English at home.

More than half of them belong to low-income families.

Therefore, most of the children in foster care due to the deportation of their parents are from low-income families with limited knowledge of the English language, as confirmed by the ARC report.
In addition, the Insight report said, most of the children of immigrants in the U.S. live in traditional families, consisting of father, mother and several children. In these families, both father and mother work, either part time or full time.

Current immigration laws, according to the ARC report, are destroying these traditional family structures.

To determine the immigration status of children in the care of foster families and compile the information necessary for their report, the ARC staff met with social workers, lawyers and judges in states with the greatest numbers of immigrants – Florida, New York, California and Texas – and other states, including Utah, with high numbers of deportations.

They used the data compiled to project for the similar states not analyzed, including Colorado, and concluded that about 5,100 children of immigrants are in foster care.

“But that’s a very conservative estimate,” Wessler said at a news conference, explaining why ARC’s estimate differs from ORR’s numbers and from other reports. Although Colorado was not among the states analyzed by ARC, Fabiola Esposito, who works in Child Welfare for the Denver Department of Human Services, said there are 1,700 children in foster care in the capital city, and 51 percent of them are Latino.

For privacy reasons and to protect the children, the Denver Department of Human Services does not keep statistics about the immigration status of the parents of children in foster care. Also, it is difficult to find statewide statistics about children in foster care because each county follows different policies, Esposito explained. Although Colorado was not included among the states studied by ARC, assumptions about children of deported immigrants in Colorado now in foster care can be inferred from ARC’s national statistics.

According to the ARC report, “The foster care cases with deported or detained parents ranged from under 1 percent to 8 percent of the total foster care cases for each of the counties surveyed.”

The federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System estimates that there are 8,213 children in foster care in Colorado.Using ARC’s numbers, that means there are potentially 82 to 657 children of deported or detained parents in this state.Therefore, in Denver, with 1,700 children in foster care, there are potentially 17 to 136 children in that situation.

However, it should be noted that Colorado is not among the states where ARC identified detained or deported parent foster care cases. In other states, those cases were identified through official data, media reports, visits to immigration detention centers, or information provided by caseworkers, attorneys and foreign consulates. It should also be noted that Colorado law “does not require courts terminate parental rights in the normal deadline of 15 of the most recent 22 months if the child’s extended stay in foster care is due to circumstances beyond the parent’s control, including a parent’s incarceration,” according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (September 2011),” as quoted by ARC.

Colorado is one of three states with such a law, Nebraska and New York being the other two.

“Because states have not passed exceptions fordetainees, detention can lead directly to the termination of parental rights,” the report says.

Regardless, “Current laws do not reflect the culture of the Hispanic community and therefore have a negative impact on our families,” Esposito said.

Thousands of children of deported parents get stuck in foster care
[Denver Post 11/17/11 by Francisco Miraval]

Reformatina says, “Why are these statistics confidential?”

REFORM Puzzle Piece