That’s right — over 5,000 children have been separated from their families due to an accident of birth and circumstance.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] supposedly has regulations allowing parents to make arrangements for their children in the event of deportation; any regulations they may have made, though, have not been uniformly and effectively enforced. According to Seth Wessler of the Applied Research Center:
I mean, ICE has said, and consistently says, that parents get to choose what happens to their children if they’re deported. The reality is, that our research and our investigation has found, that’s simply not happening. Now, ICE protocols for protecting families are really antiquated. They apply to old forms of immigration enforcement that were relevant when there were these workplace raids. Now we’re talking about the expansion of immigration enforcement to local police departments and where local police are now tasked with the job of immigration enforcement. So, as I described, there are people being picked up by local cops and then funneled into the detention process without any regard for their families, where their families are.
Worse still, sometimes this separation comes after women who are “illegally” in the country report domestic abuse. Once detained, they emerge to discover their children in foster care, adding one calamity upon another.
It’s not a simple matter of simply requesting that their children come back with them to their country of origin either as this Colorlines article demonstrates:
Josefina and Clara were deported to Mexico after three months in immigration detention. They made their way to Michoacán, 1,000 miles south of the border, to their mother’s home, where they began trying to regain custody of their children.
During a July 2011 phone interview from Michoacán, Josefina spoke quietly about the baby she never got to bid goodbye. “I don’t know where my child is, I have no contact with my baby,” she said. “I didn’t do anything wrong to have my children taken away from me. I didn’t steal, I didn’t do drugs, nothing. Why did they take my children?”
Once parents are deported, the threats to their families grow. While parents are detained, child welfare departments are largely prostrate to reunify families. Once mothers and fathers are deported, however, the agencies often switch gears, actively slowing down the reunification process and sometimes halting those efforts altogether.
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.
“I miss everything about my kids,” said Clara through sobs over the phone. “How I spent Saturday and Sundays with them, how I made my home with them, all of it. Then my children were just gone.”
Many deported parents make the tormented decision to make the bloody desert journey over the U.S.-Mexico border without papers so that they can be present at juvenile court hearings. Caseworkers around the country said that in many cases, when a parent of a foster child is deported, they are back weeks later to appear in a juvenile courtroom to try and reclaim their children.
The risks of crossing are enormous. In addition to growing violence in Mexico against migrants crossing into the U.S., immigrants caught in the country after a previous deportation now face prison time. Until recently, immigrants who were deported before were simply deported again. Now, “illegal reentry” is treated as a federal criminal offense that carries sentences of years. The charge now accounts for nearly half of all federal criminal prosecutions.
While Clara and Josefina were eventually reunited with their children, the rupture of families is unaccountable. It’s a shame that these people, without legal or political resources, have a high chance of never seeing their children again due to a mishandling of and misguided legal attitude towards so-called “illegal immigrants.”
For all those who say that all “illegals” need to be deported immediately, look at the human cost of this: if this same rate continues in the next five years, over 15,000 children will be in the foster care system. Think of all those families torn apart and tell me we don’t need an overhaul of the whole immigration system in the United States.
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