The children left behind: Dad's deportation lands son in foster care

OGDEN — Isaac Lugo wasn't worried when the cop pulled up behind his dad's car, lights flashing. The two were stopped at a red light on the way home from picking up pizza for a father-son movie night. His dad drummed on the wheel impatiently. They bantered back and forth, trying to guess what the fuss was about. When another police car rumbled up behind the first, the 16-year-old — a tall, wiry Mexican boy — was confused. But it wasn't until his dad was in handcuffs because of an unpaid parking ticket and he was alone in the car — miles from home without a driver's license — that he had any premonition of what was coming.

Within six months, Lugo was a ward of the state. His father, who agreed to voluntary deportation after authorities discovered he was in the United States illegally, was on a greyhound bus to Mexico.

More than 5,100 children are in the foster care system because their parents have been detained or deported, according to a recent report from the Applied Research Center, a New York based racial justice think tank. Children like Lugo represent 1.25 percent of the total children in foster care — a program that costs state and national governments some $29 billion annually. As the country ramps up immigration enforcement, more families are getting caught up. Twenty-two percent of the 397,000 illegal immigrants deported in 2011 were parents to U.S.-citizen children, compared to just 8 percent from 1998 to 2007. If deportations continue on trend, the ARC estimates the country will add 15,000 immigrant children to the foster care roles over the next five years.

Some of these children end up in foster care because their parents believe it is better to give them up than take them back to countries they do not remember. But others are wrested from fighting parents because of cultural biases or because the country's immigration enforcement and child welfare systems don't communicate properly. In recent years the issue has wound its way to the Supreme Court in several states, but still, immigrant advocates argue that parents whose children are sent to foster care when they are detained by immigration authorities face a number of barriers in reunifying with their children.

"We are not telling the government not to enforce the law," said Emily Butera, senior program officer for detention and asylum at the Women's Refugee Commission. "The law is the law. We just believe we can enforce the law in a way that is more respectful of the sanctity of the family."

Torn apart