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Making the arduous journey north to the U.S./Mexico border is never a simple decision for parents. If they stay, they may die. If they pack up their belongings and leave, they may still be in danger. But this journey could also mean safety in the U.S. The trek, its nightmares and all, could be worth it. But then there’s the nightmares parents never could have imagined, like getting their children temporarily stolen from them. Or even worse:
Federal officials insist they are reuniting families and will continue to do so. But an Associated Press investigation drawing on hundreds of court documents, immigration records and interviews in the U.S. and Central America identified holes in the system that allow state court judges to grant custody of migrant children to American families—without notifying their parents.
Araceli Ramos Bonilla, a Salvadoran asylum seeker, had her daughter taken away for 15 months beginning in November 2015, when then two-year-old Alexa was placed with foster parents as Ramos Bonilla was deported. “It took 28 minutes for a judge in a rural courthouse near Lake Michigan to grant Alexa’s foster parents, Sherri and Kory Barr, temporary guardianship,” the AP reports. “Alexa’s mother and the little girl’s immigration attorney were not even notified about the proceedings.”
Ramos Bonilla eventually got her daughter back, but not before Alexa “had lost all her Spanish and spoke English to her mother, using words like ‘water’ and ‘chicken.’ Ramos, who spoke almost no English herself, had to point to pictures or call friends to translate.” Now the fear is the Trump administration is creating hundreds of Alexas, because officials still have over 100 migrant kids, stolen as a result of the “zero tolerance” policy, under custody, and is struggling to locate parents it deported.
Immigrant parents losing their own kids to adoption is not unprecedented. Bethany Christian Services, an adoption agency with ties to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and a history of coercive adoptions, “acknowledged that nine of the 500 migrant children assigned to its foster program have been adopted by American families” since the 1980s. Another instance, Jessaca Leinaweaver of Brown University writes, “unfolded tragically in 2007 when a Guatemalan mother and worker, Encarnación Bail Romero, was caught in a poultry plant raid in Missouri and separated from her infant son”:
Judge David C. Dally of the Missouri Circuit Court wrote, “Her lifestyle, that of smuggling herself into the country illegally and committing crimes in this country, is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child.” The case moved through the courts, resoundingly terminating the parental rights of Ms. Bail Romero in 2012.
This worry is real for many migrant parents right now. The Trump administration tore thousands of kids from parents at the border “in a way that courted disaster,” the government’s own inspector general recently found in a report. “Border Patrol does not provide pre-verbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification, nor does Border Patrol fingerprint or photograph most children during processing to ensure that they can be easily linked with the proper file.”
The administration also lied about the existence of a “central database” link supposedly linking kids and parents. According to the report, “the OIG team asked several [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] employees, including those involved with DHS’ reunification efforts at ICE Headquarters, if they knew of such a database, and they did not. DHS has since acknowledged to the OIG that there is no ‘direct electronic interface’ between DHS and HHS tracking systems.”
This criminal incompetence has resulted in the administration resorting to creating billboards and radio ads in the home countries of separated families in order to try and locate deported parents, with former government officials, like former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director John Sandweg, issuing a dire warning about permanent separation. “We have the kids in the U.S. and the parents down in Central America, and now they’ll bring all these child welfare agencies into play,” he said. “It’s just a recipe for disaster.”