This is a guest blog by Kelsi Lo and edited by Victor Yang. They are high school students whose families have both been impacted by immigration policies and seek to raise awareness about the barriers that birthright citizens and mixed-status families face. You can follow more of their work at JustSoli.com
Yeisvi was no older than 11 years old when she was separated from her mother, Vilma Carrillo, at the Arizona border. Ms. Carrillo was detained in Arizona and moved to a detention center in Georgia while her daughter was placed in foster care. Yeisvi was a U.S. citizen by birth and her mother was an asylum-seeker from Guatemala. Ms. Carrillo fled to the U.S. from her abusive husband. She was forcibly separated from her daughter at the United States-Mexico border, which lasted for more than 200 days as she appealed her deportation order. Because Yeisvi was a U.S. citizen, she could not stay with her mother, who was detained in an immigrant detention center.
Immigration policy has resulted in detrimental impacts on U.S. citizen children born to non-citizen parents. Despite politician promises of social equity for all U.S. citizens, the U.S. government time and again imposes barriers on U.S. citizen children based on their parents’ nationality. Statistics from the Kids Count Data Center in 2016 showed that about 23% of children born in the U.S. (more than 910,000 children) had non-citizen mothers. Although the number was predicted to fall, in 2018, an estimated 4.4 million U.S. citizens under the age of 18 lived with at least one undocumented parent. Of those, nearly half a million have had at least one of their parents deported between 2011 and 2013. UIC Today found that children who lose a parent to deportation are more prone to depression, anxiety, and academic withdrawal.
Thousands of children who are separated from their parents are forced into the strained, underfunded, and overcrowded U.S. foster care system. According to a report in 2011 from the Applied Research Centre (ARC), there were at least 5,100 children with detained or deported parents in foster care. ARC expected the number to rise. Foster care frequently deals with issues such as a lack of funding, foster parents, and caseworkers. In 2020, only 39% of children in foster care were actually covered by the government’s funding, leaving about 60% not properly cared for. In addition, research shows that foster care children are more prone to depressive and anxiety disorders, with 37% suffering from depression and 35% suffering from anxiety-induced mental illness. The evidence proves that not only do children in the foster care system face a worse quality of life, but these children–who are already victims of trauma–are put in environments that lack resources to support them.
In 2019, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 27,980 people with U.S.-born children. According to a press release from the Department of Justice in 2023, the United States reached a settlement relating to the separation of parents and children at the southwest border in Ms. L. v. ICE. Under the settlement, new standards were established that aimed to limit family separation and improve family reunification efforts. However, the lack of transparency and accountability with ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) remains a fundamental barrier to achieving those goals.
In an interview we did with Shaina Simenas, a social worker by trade and the Co-Director of the Technical Assistance Program at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, she reflected, “I heard a colleague of mine say that ICE took better care of remembering where they kept people’s belongings than where they had placed immigrant children.” She shared experiences from case consultations where mothers suspected their children were in another state but had no clear idea of where, and records from CBP did not contain the information needed for reunification.
Fighting for his sister’s release, Ms. Carrillo’s brother Gregorio told the Times, “It makes no sense that a girl born in this country has to suffer an extended separation.” Immigration for families like the Carrillos is a personal not political subject and should be treated as such. Ultimately, the forced separation of families through deportation policies not only undermines the very foundational principles of equity among Americans but also perpetuates cycles of poverty and systemic inequality. These policies disregard the rights guaranteed by the constitution of U.S.-born children, whose citizenship is meant to guarantee them protection and opportunity. By prioritizing punitive immigration measures over U.S. citizen children, the U.S. government fails its youngest and most vulnerable citizens.
FILED UNDER: family separation
