A graduate of a local high school, “Rosa” is a full-time student at Allan Hancock College, boasting a grade point average that would make fellow students blush.
She has high hopes for her academic future, planning to transfer to Cal Poly next semester. At 20, Rosa—whose name has been changed to protect her identity—is the oldest of four children. Her parents moved to Santa Maria from Mexico before she was born, though when her mother was pregnant, her parents had to briefly return to Mexico. She was born there, but was brought back to Santa Maria as an infant.
As she was growing up, her father owned a business and had no criminal history. However, after trying unsuccessfully to get a worker’s permit, when Rosa was still in grade school, her family was notified they were facing deportation. They appealed and were denied. The lawyer told them nothing could be done but to wait. With a home and business in the United States, that’s exactly what the family did.
Rosa’s father’s business often kept him on the road. Once a week, he would stay the night at home and rise early to travel. One morning, about two years ago, he walked into Rosa’s room. He was going to fill up his truck, he said, while Rosa’s mother prepared breakfast. Rosa left to take her little sister to school and returned home to a scene she had always feared.
“My mother was crying. She said, ‘Your aunt called and said ICE came to take your dad,’” Rosa said. “I started crying, too. I was like, ‘So what are we going to do now, are they going to come for me?’ We hadn’t spoken to my dad, so we didn’t even know if he was OK. It was just horrible.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. He was just taken,” Rosa continued, choking back tears. “They just round you up like cattle or something; that was the thought that came to my head.”
An excellent student in high school, Rosa was accepted into four-year colleges, but couldn’t get the financial aid to attend. Her father’s deportation at such a crucial time still leaves a bitter taste in her mouth.
“It’s already hard as a student to not let your dreams die, even with the barriers,” Rosa said. “Then you find yourself without your father, who’s the head of the house’s support. He’s the one that brings food to the table. And now you’re the oldest. You have to take on that role along with your mom, and not only can’t let your dreams die, but not let your siblings’ dreams die.”
Secure communities, broken homes
Anecdotally, Rosa’s story isn’t unique, but statistically, it’s nearly impossible to find out exactly how often parents with children are deported from Santa Barbara County.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokeswoman Virginia Kice, deportation statistics aren’t broken down by county, though ICE does track enforcement against parents by jurisdiction, as required by U.S. Congress in 2010.
A recently released report to Congress revealed that over the first six months of 2011 alone, ICE deported 46,486 parents nationwide who reported they had at least one child who is a U.S. citizen. Of those, 1,496 came from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations’ (ERO) office in Los Angeles, which oversees seven Southern California counties, including Santa Barbara County. In all, nearly 400,000 people were deported nationally during fiscal year 2011, an all-time high. By conservative estimates, about 22 percent, or 90,000 of those, were parents of U.S. citizen children.
The data used in the congressional report, Kice said, came prior to a June 2011 ICE “prosecutorial discretion” memo outlining the agency’s priorities for removal, which focused enforcement efforts on removal of convicted criminal aliens, recent border crossers, and illegal re-entrants.
According to Kice, ICE typically won’t detain people who are the primary caretakers of children, unless the person is subjected to mandatory detention due to the severity of their criminal or immigration history.
“ICE uses prosecutorial discretion to release individuals in ICE custody for humanitarian reasons, such as being the sole caregiver of minors,” Kice said in an e-mail. “When we are aware that the detention of a non-criminal alien would result in any child (U.S. citizen or not) being left without an appropriate parental caregiver, ICE takes great care to evaluate cases that warrant humanitarian release.”
The criteria for what constitutes a “criminal alien” have expanded in recent years. Under ICE’s Secure Communities program, implemented in Santa Barbara County and throughout California in 2010, local law enforcement shares fingerprints with ICE and other agencies, and “holds” are placed in county jails on immigrants with criminal backgrounds. The program is intended to catch “high threat” criminals, but has often stretched to minor charges, including traffic violations.
Santa Barbara immigration lawyer Abbe Kingston, who counsels local parents facing deportation on a daily basis, said while ICE’s claim that parents aren’t a priority is “clearly accurate,” the Secure Communities program casts a wide net, catching more of them than ever.
“They’re not going to go to a day care center and look for undocumented workers and pick up the kids—that’s not what they do,” Kingston said. “But … if you get into county jail for jaywalking, you’re going to get examined, whether you’re here illegally or not.”
About half of deportations, Kingston said, are illegal immigrants; the other half are people with green cards who have committed a crime. For parents ordered removed, it’s up to them to determine whether or not to take their citizen children with them.
“If the child is born in the United States, he or she cannot be deported unless the parent chooses to bring them,” Kingston said. “The kid has the election to stay here, if there’s a strong family here, or to go with the parent that’s removed.”
Santa Maria immigration lawyer Adrian Andrade, who routinely represents parents facing deportation, said depending on the age of the children, most move in with relatives. As a result of Secure Communities, relocated children are becoming more common, creating a “problem of trust” in the local Latino community.
“The situation is pretty dire,” Andrade said. “They’re using it here in Santa Maria to target gang members, but that’s not the way it’s working out. They go in looking for somebody, and he may or may not be there, and as a consequence, they go in with a search warrant looking for somebody who may have committed a crime and they wind up arresting the entire family. It happens more so than we’d like to believe.”
Generally, when someone in the house has committed a crime and young children are involved, Andrade said, the county’s Child Welfare Services picks them up to place them with close family members. In fact, he said, calling CWS is often used as a threat against residents of the house.
According to Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Drew Sugars, as in any case where children are involved, the department looks first for a family member to take care of the children. If no family members are available, the department contacts the county’s Child Welfare Services, though they don’t track the data.
‘Raised by strangers’
As welfare records are confidential, tracking children of deportees in foster care can be difficult. However, according to a report titled “Shattered Families,” released in January by racial justice advocates Applied Research Center, an estimated 5,100 children of deported parents are currently living in the nation’s foster care system.
According to Seth Wessler, an ARC researcher and the report’s author, the group gathered data through surveys with social workers and interviews with parents. Wessler said ICE’s decision to detain “massive numbers of parents” is the fundamental driver behind such a situation.
“If you’ve got a place with aggressive enforcement, any real number of kids in foster care, and a population of undocumented immigrants, this issue is very likely emerging,” Wessler said. “These agencies aren’t tracking the numbers. It’s become a big problem.”
According to Wessler, ARC found that mandatory detainment in and of itself creates barriers to the parent’s ability to maintain custody, and families, once in the child welfare system, are rarely reunified without the help of the local consulate.
“When mothers and fathers are detained and deported, and their children are in foster care, reunification becomes incredibly difficult,” Wessler said. “We’ve got these kids who are languishing in foster care while their parents are detained and basically cut off from all access and contact with their children. Then, once they’re deported, oftentimes child welfare departments end up treating those parents in the same way they might treat a parent who’s abandoned their kids.”
According to Delfino Neira, Santa Barbara County Department of Social Services’ deputy director of programs, ICE isn’t required to notify county Child Welfare Services in instances of deportation. The department only gets involved in cases of abuse or neglect. Prior to that, it’s up to ICE to figure out how to handle the situation. Occasionally, he said, children are already in foster care when a parent is arrested or deported.
“If the child is in foster care, then the child had already been removed because the parent was either neglectful or had been involved in some abuse,” Neira said. “Once the kids are in foster care, it’s up to the juvenile court to make a determination of what’s going to happen with the child.”
Neira said CWS doesn’t specifically track which children in the welfare system are there as a result of deportation, but it’s “very uncommon” and in fact, hasn’t happened in years.
“The kids we’re involved with, the majority of them are born here,” Neira explained. “Whether their parents are citizens or residents or here illegally, it doesn’t matter; we still have to provide the same level of services to that child. If the child’s here illegally and a court’s determined jurisdiction, we notify whatever their consul is and allow them to conduct their own investigation.”
Through a child’s eyes
One major reason few children of deportees end up in Child Welfare Services is distrust, according to Raul Ceja, president of the Santa Maria chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Hispanic civil rights group.
“The welfare system has been a bridge to be able to survive here, but most of [the kids] aren’t in the system,” Ceja explained. “From what I’ve seen, the parents that are here are really working it out, because they don’t want to get into a system that’s going to hang them.”
Ceja said LULAC often receives calls from families asking for help in staying together. The effects of separation due to detainment or deportation on children, he said, are “traumatic.”
“What happens is the kids are still going to school, they’re more afraid,” Ceja explained. “Some parents try to keep their kids home for safety reasons, in case they get split up any more, so it becomes an anxiety situation for the family.”
Whether children were born in Mexico or the United States, when a household is broken up, Ceja said, it’s difficult for families to survive. Oftentimes, deportees find no food or shelter back in Mexico, because they’ve sold everything they own. Many can’t support their families financially, and eventually they try to return to the United States.
“We try to advise them it’s not good for them to do that because if they come back they become a different [enforcement] bracket,” Ceja said. “Survival is the name of the game, and they want to survive, and they want their family to survive. They come here to work, not to do anything else, and it makes it really difficult for them.”
For children born in Mexico but growing up in the American school system, the situation is even more tenuous.
“The ones who weren’t born here are the ones who carry the burden of being afraid, being always cautious of where they’re at and ready to run,” Ceja said. “They’re scared, there’s no doubt about it.”
If parents choose to take their citizen children with them, ICE assists by obtaining passports or allowing for voluntary departure. Once back in Mexico, many children find themselves thrust into an unfamiliar culture, expected to speak a language they barely understand.
“There’s no way they can fit in over there,” Ceja explained. “They don’t know the culture; they don’t know how to get around. It makes it really difficult for them. It’s really kind of heartbreaking.”
When “Rosa” was young, she would lie to teachers about where she was born, thinking immigration could take her away at any time. The fear followed her from fourth grade, when her family’s deportation process started, to the end of her senior year in high school.
“I didn’t really think about it because I was so young, until I went to high school and more when I was heading toward college, and I saw all these barriers,” she said. “When I found out we had to leave, it
was scary. I didn’t know what to expect, not knowing if I walked out to go to school if I’d get taken away, or how it would work.”
Working for reform
There are remedies through the legal system for parents with children. Immigrants facing removal can petition for a “Cancellation of Removal,” allowing them to remain in this country.
Santa Barbara’s Kingston argues such cases at the federal immigration court in Los Angeles. In today’s climate, Kingston said, it’s extremely difficult for non-citizens to remain in the United States, simply because their children were born here. For a parent to qualify for relief, he or she must have resided in the United States for at least 10 years, have established compelling ties, and be of good moral character.
“You have to have an exceptional and unusual hardship,” Kingston said. “It can’t be just saying, ‘My kid speaks English and not any foreign language,’ ‘My family’s here,’ or ‘I can’t earn a living in Mexico.’ It’s not enough. It’s a very high standard to win.”
Children of deportees can also seek relief through special immigrant juvenile visas. If the child is made a ward of the court, a superior court judge can recommend him or her for a green card, which Kingston said works “pretty well.”
Maria Sanchez, who operates an immigration agency in Santa Maria, said many undocumented immigrants seek other legal means to ensure their children don’t end up in foster care.
“What I see some parents are doing, who don’t have documents, they do a power of attorney to relatives in case something happens to them, so the government will not take the children,” she said. “The children are scared that something can happen.”
However, if current trends continue, ARC’s study estimates 15,000 more children of illegal immigrants could end up in foster care over the next five years. ARC researcher Wessler warns that the collateral effects on society could be “enormous.”
“Child welfare departments need to implement clear policies and guidelines so these families are treated fairly,” he said. “They should be reunified whenever that’s possible and whenever a parent is able to care for their kids.”
Changes could be on the horizon. In addition to a recently announced U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposal to grant provisional “unlawful presence waivers” to undocumented immigrants who can prove they have U.S. citizen parents or spouses, Kice said ICE is working with stakeholders on issues of parental rights and family unity, including plans to address dependency proceedings and family law in cooperation with various non-governmental organizations.
Santa Barbara County immigrant rights group PUEBLO, which regularly receives requests for assistance from families in the immigration system, is taking a proactive approach. They’re pushing immigration reform through the Keeping Families Together Commission, which is advocating for a bill to allow California to opt out of the Secure Communities program.
“We’re working to bring to light the program Secure Communities, which is really attributed to the rise in deportations, and the result of all these children without their parents,” said Hazel Putney, PUEBLO’s director of organizing and grass roots fundraising. “The focus for us, in order to keep families together, was to remove the presence of this program that’s dividing families throughout our state.”
With her mother also ordered to leave the country, and not yet a citizen herself, “Rosa” is currently trying to establish residency to stay in the United States. She’s concerned she’ll be sent back to Mexico, a place she barely knows, before she finishes college. She also worries for the future of her younger brothers and sisters.
“I probably shouldn’t be here, according to the law, but what about my siblings? They have so much they can actually do,” she said. “I can just say I’ll leave to Mexico, I’ll figure out a way. But they have a right to opportunities that are offered here. And without my parents here, how are they going to take advantage of it?”
Rosa’s father currently lives with his mother in the Mexican state of Michoacán, with little in the way of resources. She talks to him every once in a while to check up.
“He’s really frustrated,” Rosa reports. “He tells me, ‘I wish I could just wake up and be in Santa Maria,’ that this is just a nightmare. We kind of feel helpless.”
Rosa said that when she was younger, she had heard about people getting deported, but didn’t know what it really meant until it happened to her family. She hears about the children being put up for adoption against their parents’ wishes, and hopes one day for immigration reform.
“I know that people don’t really want more immigrants here because of the competition for jobs, but if they’ve been working hard to get somewhere, it doesn’t mean they’re pulling jobs away or anything, they’re just trying to do their part and have a dream,” she said. “Just because they aren’t born here, doesn’t mean they can’t try to have a good lifestyle, too.”
Contact Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 3, 2012.