In San Diego, more than 1,000 U.S. children separated from asylum-seeking parents
In San Diego, more than 1,000 U.S. children separated from asylum-seeking parents since 2014
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/d...rol-agents.jpg[Border Patrol agents leaving Scripps Mercy hospital in Chula Vista with a baby car seat.
(Wendy Fry / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
San Diego County Child Welfare Services says it began tracking the numbers when they started to see an increase in calls from border authorities
By WENDY FRY
MARCH 24, 2020 5:09 PM
Foreign-born migrant children aren’t the only ones who have been separated from their families as part of the federal government’s immigration policy. U.S.-citizen children are, too.
In San Diego County, approximately 1,114 U.S.-born children were separated from their asylum-seeking parents and taken into temporary child welfare custody between 2014 and 2019, according to data tracked by Child Welfare Services.
The children who have been separated include newborns who’ve been taken from their migrant mothers shortly after being born in U.S. hospitals.
Others are children born in the U.S. who end up living in other countries with their non-citizen parents, only to return to the U.S. later so a parent can claim asylum.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, chaired by Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, is calling for an end to the practice. The organization sent a letter Friday to child welfare agencies in southern border states requesting more information about how often the separations occur. The letter cites reporting on the issue by The San Diego Union-Tribune.
“It appears that immigration officials have now found a way to separate U.S. citizen babies from their asylum-seeking mothers by calling on state child protective services to take custody of the babies while DHS cruelly detains the mother or sends the mother to wait in Mexico for her asylum case,” states the letter from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
This group of children is different from the thousands of migrant children separated from their parents by the Trump administration as part of a zero-tolerance immigration policy. Those separations, involving parents and children both born outside of the United States who cross the border together, are the subject of massive San Diego-based federal litigation.
Unlike those cases, separations of U.S. children are not counted in Department of Homeland Security statistics on family separations and not included in the litigation.
These families make up a small fraction of the total numbers of families arriving at the border each year. (For instance, more than 29,700 migrants in family units arrived at the San Diego-Mexico border in fiscal 2019, either crossing illegally or presenting at ports of entry.)
When migrant children are encountered at the border and separated from their families, they are taken into the custody of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.
When U.S. border authorities take an asylum-seeking parent into custody, and that parent has a U.S.-born child, they can call the county welfare agency to take custody of the child. These arriving families are a small fraction of the total numbers of people arriving at the border each year.
A Border Patrol supervisor said the agency treats children the same as any other law enforcement agency would by ensuring the child’s safety when taking a parent into custody and working with the appropriate child welfare authorities.
“We have an obligation to ensure that child’s safety whether it’s a humanitarian effort or whether it’s a criminal case,” said acting Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Patricia McGurk-Daniel at Border Patrol’s San Diego sector.
She said border policies and the law also allow Border Patrol to call Child Welfare Services to protect children from cases where smugglers use children to conceal human or drug trafficking.
“If we encounter anything, we’re definitely going to separate and investigate and make sure that child receives the best care possible. I think that any law enforcement organization would do the same thing,” said McGurk-Daniel.
San Diego County Child Welfare Services said the agency is also called on to take custody in cases involving parents suspected of crimes at the border, but that the 1,114 cases they’ve tracked are exclusively cases where the child has an asylum-seeking parent.
The children in these cases range in age from under a year old to 17, according to data provided by Child Welfare Services. Twenty-nine were under the age of 2.
Typically, the children are placed with a family member, but the agency does not track the children beyond that, even when the parents are deported or returned to Mexico to wait for a determination in their asylum claim.
The practice was brought to light in December when a 19-year-old Honduran pregnant woman — who said she’d been denied medical access in Tijuana — illegally crossed the San Diego border from Mexico and delivered her baby at Scripps Mercy Hospital in Chula Vista while in immigration custody.
Border Patrol agents called Child Welfare Services to take custody of her hours-old infant, who was struggling to survive in the Intensive Care Unit, according to the mother and her attorney.
She said when she was visiting her daughter in the ICU, a Border Patrol agent told her she was either going to be taken back to detention or sent back to Mexico under a Trump administration program known as Remain in Mexico to await her asylum case.
But on Dec. 16, the woman was paroled into the U.S., following a Union-Tribune report and subsequent pressure from human rights advocates and the public, according to her lawyers at Al Otro Lado, a border rights nonprofit and legal services organization serving indigent deportees, migrants and refugees.
“I suffered so much knowing they were going to separate me from my girl and knowing that my daughter was born with respiratory problems,” she said in an interview with the Union-Tribune. She asked not to be identified, fearing that speaking out could affect her pending asylum case. “They wanted to send me to Mexico and make me leave my baby there. They knew I had just given birth.
One day earlier, I had given birth. I thank God that He did not allow it.”
The baby received treatment at Rady Children’s Hospital and recovered. The child and mother relocated to be near family in another part of the country.
“I don’t know how I would have gone on living without my baby,” said the mother.
San Diego County Child Welfare Services began documenting the number of cases involving U.S.-citizen children of asylum-seeking parents in 2014, “because we started to see the increase, as political winds shifted and things started to change across borders ...” said Margo Fudge, deputy director of Child Welfare Services.
“We started to notice an increase and for us it was important to be able to track it in case it impacted staffing and whether more staff needed to be allocated to serve this population that previously the numbers weren’t there before,” said Fudge.
In its letter, the Hispanic Caucus asks state child welfare agencies under what circumstances social workers can decline referrals from immigration authorities when the only allegation against the parent is neglect due to immigration status.
“We have a moral duty to protect families and children. We cannot allow the Trump Administration to continue using family separation as a cruel deterrence strategy toward families fleeing violence, persecution and even death,” the letter states.
The letter requests data from the child welfare agencies, as well as information about protocols for establishing family reunification.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com...nts-since-2014
