When children fall victim to harsh immigration laws
Children of illegal immigrants often have to face the brunt of the severely punitive immigration and child-protection laws in First World countries like the US and Britain, writes Suranya Aiyar.
into the USA. What should be attracting the attention of people concerned about the children is how easy it could be to use the CPS system to traffic in illegals and “disappear” children.
The problem is not just of corruption, which can exist anywhere, but of the CPS agencies’ wide and practically unsupervised powers to confiscate children. It is not clear from the reports of the migrant children if a judge’s order was needed for DHHS to remove them from parental custody. But even if it was, anyone who knows the CPS system can tell you that judges are giving interim custody orders to CPS agencies ex parte as a matter of course. The interim takeover of custody by CPS is little more than a matter of filing a pro-forma custody application before a family court judge. These interim orders are rarely overturned until a full trial or the closure of the case by the CPS, which can take anywhere from six months to two years. In this way countless children in the US have been deprived of the care and comfort of their parents, some even as infants or toddlers.
The CPS system also holds the power to identify and register foster carers and shelter homes without a robust review process. Of course, there are rules for vetting and supervising foster carers and shelter homes, but the system is largely selfregulated by the CPS agencies or their affiliated public authorities. So the system is ripe for trafficking by criminals and malafide elements. There have been many reports of paedophiles managing to register as fosterers and of children in care being trafficked for sex. So it should not come as a surprise if immigration rackets have gotten on the game as well.
This is not to say that the missing migrant children are safe. In this closed system having such wide powers of seizure and custody of children, anything can happen. The US government has responded to the migrant children situation by piggybacking on a system already in place of easy child confiscation by state agencies that is wide open to abuse.
The basic problem with child protection systems everywhere is that they were conceived of only as a benign state intervention between the supposedly opposing interests of parents and children. Little attention was given to having the usual checks and balances when police or confiscatory powers are given to state agencies.
If critics of the system are right then we are looking at a problem affecting hundreds of thousands of children of all races and of very tender age in the USA. DHHS’s latest estimates show over 4.3 lakh children in foster care (AFCARS Report as of October 2017). 44% of taken children are listed as white, 21% black and 23% hispanic. Over 31,000 of these children (7%) are newborns (below one year) and 56% are eight years old or younger. The breakdown of reasons for children taken in 2016 is worrisome if it is similar for other years. The majority of children are not taken for physical abuse (12%), sexual abuse (4%) or parental substance abuse (drug abuse: 34%; alcohol abuse: 6%) but for the subjective and contested ground of neglect (61%) or “caretaker inability to cope” (11%) and other non- child abuse reasons such as parental incarceration (8%) and poverty related issues such as housing (10%). (Note: the categories reported are not mutually exclusive.)
Separating children from immigrant parents is also not unique to the USA. I will end with describing a case in England that was brought to my attention of a Tamil Muslim family whose children—a boy, then six years old, and a girl, then four years old—were taken in 2015 for no other reason than to punish the parents for their undocumented status. Here is what happened, in the words of the English judge: “The Background: Both parents are of South Indian origin. They are Tamil Speakers and of the Muslim faith. It appears that the mother has a Singaporean identity card which permits her to live in Singapore. In this jurisdiction they are illegal immigrants… The parents probably arrived… around 2004… The children were both born here. The father was employed until April 2013 when he lost his job…in April 2014 a referral from the Children’s Society brought the family to the attention of the Local Authority… The referral was made on the basis that the family were destitute… The Local Authority carried out an initial assessment… The children were made subject to a child in need plan…in April 2014, there were no concerns about the parents’ general abilities to provide the children with good enough care… The concerns all related to the parents’ ability, financially, to provide for the children and the potential instability arising out of the parents’ immigration status or lack of it… A major dispute erupted at one of the first meetings between the parties to discuss the financial support the Local Authority would give to the family…the disagreement about financial support escalated over the next 14 months and the children became embroiled in the dispute.”
The “dispute” was on two points: whether the children were entitled to free school lunches and whether the parents were entitled to an additional weekly stipend of £70 above the stipend of the same amount being given by the Local Authorityfor the children.
The dispute ended with the children being taken away from their home in a surprise move by the Local Authority. The father says the children were screaming in protest and soiled themselves in terror as they were dragged away by British social workers. The parents never saw them again.
As it turned out, and the judgment itself concedes, the parents were correct in both their claim for the school lunches and the additional stipend. However, when the Local Authority found that it could not deny the family’s legal demands, they accused the parents of causing “emotional harm” to their children by “using them” to get money making “false” claims. While the case was going on, the mother was pregnant with a third child. She left for Singapore for fear of losing even that child as it is routine in England for babies to be removed at birth if previous children are in care. But the judge called this “abandonment” by the mother.
The real reason for this ferocious treatment of the family is revealed when the judge says, “In my judgment, the father has sought to prolong these proceedings in order that he may shortly be able to take advantage of the seven year rule to obtain leave to remain… He could establish seven years presence by reference to [his son’s] seventh birthday on 10th April this year.” So the judge’s seventh birthday gift to the little boy was to confirm him and his sister in state custody, never to see their parents again.
It needs hardly to be said that people like these Tamil parents aspire to settle in the UK or other rich countries above all to give their children a better future. But the judge calls this emotional abuse of the children. The cruelest line of her judgment comes at the end when she says, “I accept that the parents love the children. The father’s breakdown in closing to my mind was genuine.”
This is the unspeakable manner in which illegal immigrant children and their parents have been treated for years all over the First World. I daresay there can be legitimate objections against illegal immigrants taking advantage of laws to get benefits and naturalisation. But summary deportation would be kinder than the current insidious pressure tactics. The Yusuffs are pleading for their children to be sent to relatives in India. The only logic for the children to be kept in the UK at taxpayers’ expense is to send a strong message to aspiring immigrants. Unless the public support the Yusuffs, the UK will not relent.
This is the human tragedy that is being played out while big media and public intellectuals have abstract debates over immigration. Let us hope that at some point public attention will also turn to the underlying problem, which is of protecting all children immigrant and native, illegal and legal—from arbitrary and motivated state action of all forms and in all countries.
This is the human tragedy that is being played out while big media and public intellectuals have abstract debates over immigration. Let us hope that at some point public attention will also turn to the underlying problem, which is of protecting all children immigrant and native, illegal and legal—from arbitrary and motivated state action of all forms and in all countries.
The author is a Delhi-based lawyer and mother. ‘Global Child Rights and Wrong’ series is run in collaboration with her website www.saveyourchildren.in, critiquing the role of governments and NGOs in child policy