Mothers whose ties are cut at the border

It began as an episode of teenage defiance. Jennifer had watched her siblings all morning while her mother, Luz (names were changed: the family court case is still pending), was at work. The way Jennifer tells it,  the minute her mother  arrived home that afternoon, she  began complaining. “She was telling me, ‘You didn't do this, you didn't do that,’” says Jennifer, who was 17 years old at the time and feeling especially rebellious. They argued, and then Jennifer lashed out, striking her mother.

Luz remembers calling the police, but when they arrived, the officers informed her that there was nothing to be done. Jennifer was still a minor. In a fit of anger and frustration, Luz struck Jennifer and they began to fight. The police, hearing the commotion, returned to the apartment, handcuffed Luz and called Child Protective Services. That day in April 2013 was the last they lived together as a family.

Mother and daughter call the episode “the stupidest thing,” but stupid became serious when immigration status became part of the equation. For Luz, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, that day triggered an interlocking set of immigration policies adopted over the last 18 years that resulted in her deportation and put her at risk of losing her children permanently. After a month in jail, she went through deportation proceedings and her three children went into foster care, joining an estimated 5,000 children of deported parents. Two months later, an aunt took them in.

Some 5 million children in the U.S. have at least one undocumented parent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. As the Obama administration has ordered a record number of deportations, the proportion of deportees reporting that they are parents has also increased. Between 2010 and 2012, 23 percent of those deported told agents they were the parents of U.S.-born children, according to a report by the liberal think tank Applied Research Center, compared with 8 percent of those deported between 1998 and 2007. Men account for a majority of undocumented migrants, and most deportations of parents involve fathers. 

Mothers, a relatively small cohort (14 percent of deportations), are an often overlooked segment of the deported population. They don't fit the image of the single immigrant laborer or the young student brought to the U.S. as a child. However, their migration and deportation experience illuminates the many ways an immigrant parent can lose a child.

Last Thursday, March 13, President Barack Obama announced an administration-wide review of deportation practices. In recent years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has issued a number of directives outlining agency priorities, including one instructing agents making deportation decisions to weigh “the person’s ties and contributions to the community, including family relationships,” and “whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child, or parent.” ICE officials did not respond to questions about the apparent increase in deportations involving parents of U.S. citizens despite the directives or requests to clarify protocols to safeguard parental rights.

But the directives operate within a complex, sprawling border control and immigration system with a budget that outstrips all other law enforcement agencies combined. Local police now cooperate with immigration agents. Immigrants are often deported without going before an immigration judge who once might have canceled a deportation by taking into consideration family ties, a person's standing in the community and the details of a crime.

Meanwhile, parents facing deportation must decide whether to take their children or leave them behind, says Luis Zayas, dean of the department of social work at the University of Texas-Austin: “It's a Solomon-like decision that parents have to make.”

In some instances, authorities have separated children from immigrant mothers by linking immigration status with criminal behavior. In 2008, the child of a Guatemalan woman in Missouri was adopted, against her wishes, after she was taken into immigration detention. The judge cited her deportation as abandonment and terminated her parental rights.

Also in 2008, Cirila Baltazar Cruz's newborn was taken from her at the hospital and placed in foster care. Although hospital and case workers were unable to communicate with her in her native language, they concluded she had traded sex for housing and intended to give up her child for adoption. A youth court judge later placed the newborn with a couple, both lawyers, who were not certified as foster care parents, according to court documents.

Charges of neglect were brought against Baltazar that included allegations that her lack of fluency in English “placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future.” The youth court judge later recommended that Baltazar learn English if she wanted to see her daughter.

In 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, took her case, and after one year apart, mother and daughter were reunited. Baltazar's parental rights were later reinstated.

Marsha's husband returned to Los Angeles first and began working in construction. Ten days ago, she says, she attempted to cross the border with  her children, but immigration agents discovered that her paperwork was fake. The children went on without her. “I want to cross (the border) to see my children,” she says quietly. “But I'm also thinking that maybe they bring them to me.”

Immigrant mothers separated from their children exhibit signs closely associated with exiles, says Diana Pelaez, who conducted a survey of deported mothers for a research project at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a university in Tijuana. “But the homes that exiles selected give them conditions of dignity; obviously as deported people, they don't have that. They arrive like a plant uprooted.”