In the first half of 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 46,686 parents who had at least one U.S. citizen child according to a March 2012 report by the agency.
If deportations continued at that rate for the rest of 2011, that would mean that nearly 100,000 children who are US citizens had parents who were deported in the last year.
As ICE reaches deeper into immigrant communities through the expansion of local/federal cooperation agreements such as Secure Communities and the 287(g) program, more and more immigrant parents – and their children – are being caught up in the detention and removal system.
At the same time, as ICE moves away from high profile work place raids such as the one that took place in Postville, Iowa, several years ago, and focuses more on picking up people from their homes or after an encounter with local law enforcement (even if the charges are ultimately dropped), the families whose lives are being shattered by our detention and removal system are increasingly hidden from public view.
Some of the children whose parents are deported will leave the United States with them, but many other children remain behind, sometimes in the care of a single parent, other times in the care of friends or relatives. However, an increasing number of these children are being placed in the foster care system, where their parents face formidable barriers in trying to reclaim them.
According to a recent report by the Applied Research Center, there are at least 5,100 children currently living in foster care whose parents have either been detained or deported. “Shattered Families: The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System,” is the first national investigation to look at the situation of children who have been placed in the foster care system, not as a result of abuse or neglect, but as a result of a parent’s detention by immigration authorities.
While child welfare policy dictates that families are to be reunited whenever possible, the report chronicles the numerous obstacles that ICE places in the path of parents seeking to reclaim children lost to the government’s immigration enforcement efforts.
The report lists the following as key barriers to family unity:
- Aggressive local immigration enforcement where any interaction with the police can lead to detention and deportation. An incident with the police that would not lead to a U.S. citizen being separated from his or her child, can result in a non-U.S. citizen losing custody altogether.
- The refusal of ICE officers and local law enforcement to permit parents to make arrangements for their children.
- ICE’s policy of detaining parents who could be released on their own recognizance or with some type of monitoring causing them to miss family court proceedings where the fate of their children is being decided.
- The lack of policies on the part of child welfare agencies designed to proactively work to reunify children with their deported parents.
- The belief of many in the child welfare system that children are better off remaining in the United States, even if they stay in foster care.
- Child welfare policies that dictate that any family member wanting to care for the child must be a legal resident of the United States, leaving children in the care of strangers when they could be with their own families.
While the report makes a number of important policy recommendations aimed at reducing the number of separated families, the real solution to the growing problems of “shattered families” is to provide a pathway to citizenship for the millions of immigrant parents who long for nothing more than to provide a stable, loving home for their children. As the federal government continues to pursue an aggressive, enforcement only strategy the costs in human suffering will only grow.
