Arizona Case of Illegal Immigrant’s Fight for Her Children in US Foster Care

We have discussed illegal immigrant cases and the burden on both the immigrant and US foster care system here, here, and here.

This new article describes the plight of another illegal immigrant’s separation from her children who are in US foster care.Stolen Babies? Immigrant Mother Loses Four Kids [ABC News 2/2/12 by Lauren Gilger, Charles Gorra, and Brian Ross].

Arrest

“The police came for Amelia Reyes Jimenez in 2008 to arrest her for one count of child endangerment, a misdemeanor, because she had left her 13-year-old son Cesar, who is severely disabled, alone in her apartment. Jimenez says she thought that Cesar was with her two older daughters and their father, but he had taken the girls to the park and left Cesar home alone.

When she arrived home with baby daughter Erica in her arms, she found the police waiting.

“The only thing they asked was if I was illegal and whether or not I had my papers,” she said. She told them she had no papers. She was handcuffed.”

Detention

“Reyes Jimenez was sent to a detention center an hour outside Phoenix. It would be six months before she had any contact with her children, and nearly two years before she would see them again in person.

“I didn’t know anything about my girls; they didn’t give me any reasons,” she said. “I would ask about them and nobody would answer.”

“Reyes Jimenez, who pled guilty to the misdemeanor, then spent nearly two years fighting deportation. Ultimately, she was loaded onto a bus and dropped off in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, just across the border.”

“”Reyes Jimenez, who pled guilty to the misdemeanor, then spent nearly two years fighting deportation. Ultimately, she was loaded onto a bus and dropped off in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, just across the border.”

Parent Rights Termination

“An Arizona court terminated Reyes Jimenez’s parental rights in late 2011. The most recent publicly available information indicates that the children, who now no longer speak Spanish, are in foster homes and are in the process of being adopted. But Reyes Jimenez says she is determined to see her children again, to be their mother again.”

ICE 2010

“In June of 2010, ICE released a memo that said immigration officers are encouraged to consider a person’s “family relationships” in the country when deciding whether or not to prosecute a deportation case.

In a statement to ABC News, ICE spokesman Brian Hale said that, “as outlined in the agency’s June 2010 Civil Enforcement Priorities memo, ICE will typically not detain individuals who are the primary caretakers of children, unless the individual is legally subjected to mandatory detention based on the severity of their criminal or immigration history.”

“The 2010 memo also said officers should consider whether the person has children who are U.S. citizens and “whether the person is the primary caretaker of a person with a mental or physical disability.” Particular care should be taken in cases concerning “pregnant or nursing women.”

REFORM Puzzle Piece

I would like to see some level of competence in ICE. That starts with some honesty.

This is a huge problem that burdens our already-burdened courts and our foster care system (which means it burdens all taxpayers); the US citizen children who apparently have no right to be with their parents and are stripped of their original language by their US foster care placement to English-speaking homes; and the illegal immigrant. “We keep your kids” is not a good policy except for maybe the adoption industry. Does anyone think that the US citizen children will fair well in the long run with this process?