It was a sunny Friday afternoon when Gena Thomas met the girl who would become her daughter for the next four months.
The girl, who looked about five, was sporting a bright-pink Barbie shirt and a pair of sequin-peppered sneakers which flickered with blue flames as they caught the office light. She radiated with an unseen energy that engulfed the dull, 90s-styled room. And sprinting out of her mouth came words, a melody of fluid Spanish rolling off her lips like a looped record. The social worker sat by, nodding politely in accordance with protocol and giving every appearance of following the child’s spool of words, only afterward confessing to Thomas: “I have no idea what she’s saying.”
Thomas was told the parents of the voluble child had been deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and that as a foster parent within the North Carolina state foster care system, she would have to care for the girl only for the weekend while her parents were located. Both of those things, she would soon learn, were not true. In caring for this child, whom for the purposes of this story she has given the Spanish sobriquet “Julia,” Thomas has begun to recognize the many jagged edges of a road to settlement in the United States.
While Julia’s story is in many ways anomalous, her experience illustrates a number of unsettling realities within the pathway for undocumented migrant children in the United States: the ambiguity and complexity of the foster care systems, the predominant focus placed upon institutions rather than the people within them, and the lack of continued oversight or guiding mechanisms that ensure proper care for the children.
As we currently witness an unprecedented rise in the number of undocumented children within government custody, it is necessary to follow these children beyond the border as they resettle across the United States. As it stands, the system into which they enter largely functions as a law enforcement agency, not a child welfare agency. If it is to care for the children under its wings, the United States government must ensure that they are protected and placed in an environment that is conducive to their health, safety and growth.
A Precarious Road
In her own journey to the United States, Julia traveled with her stepfather in the back of a tin-can tractor-trailer that rattled across the arid desert land of Mexico for about a month, as Thomas shared with the HPR. At the border, despite presenting a certificate imprinted with her stepfather’s name, Julia was removed from her sole companion and redirected, alone, to government custody between late 2017 and early 2018. From here, Julia was thrust into the patchworked world of immigration enforcement, legal adjudication and child welfare.
Her story was far from the only one. Over the course of 2019, the United States would come to hold a historic high of 69,550 undocumented migrant children in government custody. These children, who arrived at different checkpoints studded across the U.S.-Mexico border, would end up taking dramatically different routes as they sought reconciliation with their families.
The United States first erected the modern architecture for undocumented migrant children through the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The act established formal mechanisms for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement to oversee the admission and placement of “unaccompanied alien children” within the United States. It defined “unaccompanied alien children” — now simply “unaccompanied children,” as per the Biden administration’s directive on promoting inclusive immigration language — as individuals under the age of 18 who crossed into the United States illegally without parents or legal guardians. Since 2003, ORR has cared for over 409,550 migrant children and reunited them with suitable sponsors already residing in the United States.
Before this broader goal of “family reunification” is realized, however, children may go down a number of different paths. When unaccompanied children first arrive at the border, they are often apprehended by Customs and Border Protection, a federal law enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security, which remains completely separate from HHS and ORR. CBP holds children within its care before transferring them to ORR within, under federal law, 72 hours; in practice, the agency has widely stretched the length of stay, keeping some children in CBP facilities for nearly two weeks.
Upon transferral to ORR custody, children may be housed in temporary “influx facilities” which are explicitly exempted from meeting the same minimum childcare requirements as other ORR facilities. ORR aims to keep children within such shelters only during emergencies, for a target maximum of 90 days. The Trump administration inaugurated three influx facilities beginning in 2018, but soon shuttered all of them in 2019 after public outcry over serious health and safety concerns as well as a decrease in the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border.
After this potential temporary emergency period, ORR redirects the minors to the approximately 180 different foster care programs, group homes or other facilities scattered across the country, all of which are charged with placing the children in the “least restrictive setting.” Children ages 12 and under are typically transferred to “tender age” facilities specifically tailored to their needs, or are matched, through a transitional foster care program, with unacquainted families that provide them with a home until reunification.
While children navigate these various pathways within the foster care system, the government works to match them with eligible sponsors, typically family members, within the United States. In her own case, Julia was able to bypass an extended stay in either a shelter or federal transitional foster home, having been able to provide forthwith information that allowed officials to locate her relatives within the United States. ORR soon sent her to her sponsors: the family of her stepfather’s sister, living in North Carolina.
When a child is finally reunified with their sponsors in the United States, that home as well often comes with an expiration date. Once judges reach their final decisions regarding the immigration status of the child, the child is either able to receive asylum status and step foot on a solid path within the United States, or must return to their home country. Often, adjudication does not end favorably for the children: In 2019, the Department of Justice reported that 71% of cases within that year involving unaccompanied migrant children ended in deportation orders.
This threat of deportation hangs above the children throughout their experience in the federal child welfare system. In the lifespan of an immigrant’s journey, these homes are precarious stepping stones, one sinking as another surfaces, providing no clear path ahead and no way of return.
A “Least Restrictive Setting”
As children enter ORR custody, the federal government is charged with the responsibility of placing them within the “least restrictive setting” which balances the best interests of the child with the reality of the available resources. However, that balance often tends toward the latter pole and leaves the children’s best interests unmet.
Most children within government custody are placed within congregate shelters or group facilities. “By and large, the majority of children who go into that kind of ‘foster care’ — it’s not actually a foster family home,” Megan Finno-Velasquez, director of the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare, told the HPR. “The majority of children who go in ORR custody, who are considered ‘unaccompanied,’ go into a shelter-type facility, a larger shelter or group home care.”
The Flores Settlement Agreement of 1997 and the Homeland Security Act of 2002 mandate that such large group facilities undergo formal vetting processes and provide a baseline standard of care with adequate food, medical care, mental health services, education and recreation. A Houston Chronicle investigation, however, discovered hundreds of standard violations at licensed facilities.
One group facility that gained particular infamy was Cayuga Centers, a 166-year old foster care agency which soon “evolved into a business whose priority is making money as opposed to a family service that helps youth meet the challenges of life.” The New York State Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs documented 164 allegations of “abuse and neglect” at the agency’s Auburn, New York, residential program from 2013 to 2018.
Even in more appropriate circumstances, large shelters remain ineffective for child development; children are far better served when they settle in smaller-scale environments that are tailored to their needs. Sonja Spangler, who worked at a state-licensed Chicago tender age group shelter through the organization Heartland Alliance between 2014 and 2016, testified to the effectiveness of a small and individual-centered setting. “There are these really bad stories [about the shelters] in the news, but some of them are really great, you know … at least where I worked.” Spangler told the HPR. “It was a good place for the kids, and I can really say that confidently. Even if it’s not their ideal setting.” The Chicago-based shelter where Spangler worked offered children education, recreation and monthly visits by a therapist. It held children ages 12 and under, pregnant and parenting teens, and youth with special needs. Its capacity was capped at 19 residents.
Transferring children to even smaller foster settings — namely, independent family homes arranged by transitional foster care programs — yields further benefits for the youth. “We find that once a child moves from one of these large shelters to a small, family-centered foster care home, their behavior and their ability to learn just skyrockets,” shared Krish Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which contracts with the government to provide transitional foster care services, in an interview with the HPR. “They’re able to learn English better. We can see them retaining more of the things that they’re being taught. You can tell the calmness that comes over them.” However, this experience within a tight-knit family is generally the exception — according to a report authored by researchers at Stanford University and the National Center for Youth Law, eligible children far outnumber available placements in transitional foster care.
Transitional foster care may come with environmental difficulties as well. Vignarajah said that within LIRS, host parents are not always able to communicate in the native language of the children. “Sometimes the foster care parents may not speak the same language. And so, the issue is, how to navigate things being lost in translation,” Vignarajah shared. “We find that body language can actually go pretty far in terms of forging those connections.”
While body language may fulfill the need for immediate communication, some have pointed out that the absence of a common spoken language may have negative consequences for child development. “That’s just not child-centered, and I think it’s contrary to 30 years of evidence about childhood attachment and child well being,” Jodi Berger Cardoso, an associate professor of social work at the University of Houston, told the HPR. “Putting them in a home where they don’t speak the language, where they don’t eat the food, where they don’t know anyone — that adds to stress.”
However, foster services often find difficulty in ensuring that there are enough placement families to begin with, without the additional burden of meeting intercultural competence standards. Further, some respondents argue that with ORR resource-starved as it is, any additional funding is better funnelled into operations at the border. Mark Greenberg, former acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees ORR, told the HPR, “ORR operates with a limited budget, and there’s a very strong emphasis on the importance of ensuring that there is always sufficient shelter space for arriving children.” Greenberg noted that transitional foster care accounts for about 15% of all ORR shelter beds in the most recent statistics, so the predominant focus is centered on ensuring that children at the border are adequately cared for.
In December 2019, the group of Stanford researchers and the National Center for Youth Law also recognized funding as the primary barrier and solution to creating a child-centered system. The group recommended that the federal government incentivize contracts with smaller facilities such as Spangler’s and allocate more funds to transitional foster care and long-term foster care placements. A “least restrictive setting” is one that gives children the necessary resources and individualized attention to grow, and as the researchers argue, big developmental changes can only be achieved in small settings.
From a Stream to a Torrent
In 2018, when President Donald Trump enacted his Zero Tolerance Policy, the steady stream of children entering into ORR custody swelled to a torrent; it now not only included children who had appeared at the border unaccompanied, but also children who came accompanied by relatives and were forcibly removed from their companions. Over the course of 2019, the United States would become number one in the world for child separation, drawing significant criticism from the public. In response, at the end of a long interview with NPR, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly stated in loose terms, “The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.”
Kelly’s own ignorance of the children’s futures ignited a media maelstrom as it made clear the Trump administration’s lack of regard for the children at the border. “The policies at the border … have been for centuries really aimed at trade and national security. They are not designed to protect and promote the health and well being of children and families,” Alexandra Citrin, a senior associate at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, told the HPR. “But children and families are at the border, and we need to have a better way [to care] for their health and well being, and that’s really not a priority now.”
Trump’s treatment of the children and families at the border has largely been informed by his ideology of “deterrence” — imposing tough border policies in an attempt to discourage illegal immigration into the country. While the number of migrant families crossing the border still reached its highest levels under the Trump administration, his hardline stance raised the stakes of the trek. Andrea Rudnick, founder and program coordinator at a volunteer outfit known as Team Brownsville, witnessed countless families contemplate sending their children across the border in the hopes of reuniting them with family in the United States. Rudnick, cognizant of the reality that awaited them beyond the border, did everything she could to advise them otherwise. “We never encourage parents to do that,” Rudnick shared with the HPR. “We never — we, if anything, we would tell them, ‘Please don’t do it, please. … That’s a bad idea. It’s dangerous. You know, you don’t know what will happen to you.’ But desperation fuels it, so people go anyway.”
As that desperation heightened, more families crossed the border and got caught in the toils of Trump’s Zero Tolerance Policy. Officials funneled separated children into ORR custody, creating a deluge that the office was ill-equipped to handle. Though ORR maintains over 100 shelters across 17 states, a Congressional Research Service report found that the office even considered housing children within Department of Defense installations in order to account for the new swell of incoming children.
As the Trump administration continued its hardline immigration stance — even after nominally revoking the zero tolerance policy in June 2018 — ORR capacity remained stretched.
Now in 2021, ORR faces another crisis in capacity as the United States witnesses a historic surge in migration across the U.S.-Mexico border. In February alone, more than 9,500 unaccompanied children arrived at the border, a 62% increase from the month before. Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, estimated that the number of migrants crossing the border is on track to hit a 20-year peak, with the number of unaccompanied children in particular on course to exceed the historical record high by 45%. In response to these trends, a Biden briefing in early March called for 20,000 beds at the border to accomodate for the incoming children. Many of these minors have been held in ORR-run influx facilities — emptied in 2019 but newly reopened by the Biden administration — and have not yet been transferred to licensed foster shelters or homes.
In some cases, while such crises thrust more children into ORR custody, more foster parents came forward to contracting organizations to support their journey. Vignarajah noted, “As crises around unaccompanied minors come to light, it is actually really interesting to see the massive uptick in prospective parents who come forward, eager to help.” However, the transitional foster care services provided by LIRS still serve only a sliver of the migrant child population, leaving many more children without a stable pathway to reunification within the United States.
Attempts at Reunification
A migrant child’s stay in federal foster care lasts on average less than 2 months, depending on, among other factors, when a child’s case workers are able to identify family members living in the U.S. In order to reunify children with their families, transitional foster home networks work with the children in order to retrieve any identifying information about relatives in the United States who are able to serve as sponsors.
While the process appears daunting, Nathan Bult, the senior vice president of public and government affairs at Bethany Christian Services, has discovered otherwise. His organization manages the second largest transitional foster care program in the country and also provides long-term foster care services for unaccompanied children. In an interview with the HPR, Bult shared that immigrant children and their families are often quite inventive in remembering connections with one another. One child, a five-year-old arriving alone at the border from Central America, began spouting lyrical melodies when asked where his relatives in the United States resided. After a few confused glances, the team of social workers quickly realized that he was singing numbers in Spanish — the phone number of his U.S. relatives who could sponsor his stay in the United States. The child’s parents had taught him to memorize the number in the form of verse.
“These are people with names and stories, and families and loved ones,” Bult shared. “A five-year-old from Guatemala is just like a five-year-old from the United States or from anywhere else — they have the same desires, they have the same needs, their parents have the same goals for them.”
Spangler similarly attested to the tenacity of these children’s memories. “These kids would come in, and they were six, seven years old, but they always found a way to hang on to those phone numbers,” Spangler noted. “Some of them would have phone numbers written inside of their belts, inside of their collars. Some would just somehow make it through that entire journey with a crumpled up piece of paper.” Once the children supplied these numbers, case workers would work to connect them with their sponsors and prepare them for eventual release from ORR custody.
In recent years, however, immigration policies have not only encumbered but endangered this process of reunification. In an attempt to deter migrants from crossing the border, the Trump administration intensified the sponsor vetting process soon after assuming power in January 2017. Administration officials admitted in a February 2018 discussion paper that these measures would “strain bed capacity,” but still went ahead with their implementation.
Under the same administration, in April 2018, ICE, CBP and ORR entered into a Memorandum of Agreement that would allow the two agencies to share the personal information — including fingerprints, addresses, names and dates of birth — of sponsors as well as all adult members of the sponsors’ households. As stated by a March 2019 report, whose authors include the National Immigrant Justice Center, the memorandum turned ORR “from a child welfare agency into more of a law enforcement body.”
Vignarajah said, “We knew that there had been some immigration enforcement based on this information, which we believe is deeply troubling and problematic. No child should be used as bait for immigration enforcement.” In 2019, several House committee members led by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson wrote to Trump officials, urging them to rescind the memorandum of agreement. As the report detailed, 170 prospective sponsors were arrested by ICE based on ORR information shared through the memorandum.
These arrests contributed to a dangerous chilling effect. A report conducted jointly by the Women’s Refugee Commission, the National Immigrant Justice Center, and the American University Washington College of Law found that as a result of the memorandum, fewer potential sponsors were willing to step forward and claim care for the children. As Thompson noted, “One survey found that three in four professionals working with unaccompanied children ‘were aware of potential sponsors deciding not to come forward or withdrawing’ due to the MOA.”
Bult was one such professional. “We had parents coming to us being forced to make the decision of, ‘Do I come forward to sponsor my daughter or my son, when I have three other kids at home but I know if I go through this process, then ICE is going to have all of my bio data?’” Bult said. “And we know that they are using this to arrest and deport. We had several sponsors — sometimes several sponsors for an individual child — drop out of the process.”
By causing further separation between family members and their children, the memorandum generated immense backlogs in the system. As a result, children overcrowded influx or emergency shelters. By the end of February 2019, the Homestead facility in Florida held over 1,600 unaccompanied children between the ages of 13 and 17 in “prison-like” conditions as they waited to be reunified with sponsors.
While the information-sharing policy was still in place in early 2021, immigration activists saw the arrival of a new presidential administration as a herald of potential reversal. During the presidential transition period, Bethany Christian Services sent a letter to the Biden-Harris team recommending an end to the memorandum.
Last week, under the mantle of a new administration, HHS and DHS released a joint-statement declaring the end of the memorandum, acknowledging its chilling effects and writing that the two departments would continue to uphold the proper safeguards to ensure that migrant children are paired with properly vetted sponsors. However, given the damage that has already been done to the communities at the center of this memorandum, it will take a considerable effort on the part of the new departmental leaders to rebuild worn trust.
“Eliminating the sponsor information sharing memorandum of agreement between DHS and HHS will help children and families reunite more quickly. We are grateful that the Biden Administration agreed that children should never be used as bait in a broken immigration system,” shared Bult in a statement with the HPR. “Now the U.S. government must back up their words with actions. We encourage the U.S. government to communicate with immigrant communities and assure them that reuniting with their children won’t cause them to be a priority for immigration enforcement.”
Ending the memorandum will not cease all information-sharing practices between the child welfare and law enforcement agencies. The Administration for Children and Families has reported that since the beginning of the unaccompanied children program in 2002, “ORR has notified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 24 hours before and 24 hours after the unification of all UC with a sponsor” with both the name and address of the children’s new guardians. How the agencies continue to handle this information going forward will play a tremendous role in their ability to restore faith among the sponsors they are trying to reach.
As ORR works to match children with U.S.-based caregivers, it sorts potential sponsors into four different “categories.” The first category includes immediate family members such as parents or legal guardians; the second, immediate relatives such as siblings, grandparents or close relatives; and the third, distant relatives or unrelated adults.
In about a third of all cases involving unaccompanied migrant youth, managers are ultimately unable to find appropriate family sponsors for the children; in such cases, minors remain within HHS custody until they reach the age of 18, at which point they are either released or transferred to an adult ICE facility seated within the DHS. As reported by the Texas Tribune, the number of children whose sponsors fell into this “category four” spiked in 2019, leaving children in danger of falling into adult detention centers. Services like LIRS work to keep those children within the United States by offering long-term foster care placements, but the availability of such options remains sparse in the face of limited funding.
Bridges, Broken
For the children who are able to reunite with sponsors, leaving foster care often means cutting ties with all those who have cared for them throughout their journey in the United States. ORR maintains strict rules that break off ongoing relationships or responsibilities once children leave its custody.
For Spangler, who put her hours into a tender age shelter, these rules severed bonds that had been developing at critical moments in the children’s growth. “That was so hard for us and for the kids,” she shared. “We develop this really special connection, and then we’re never going to see each other again, so I think for the kids it’s hard in terms of attachment.” Spangler could not contact the children once they left her care. While case workers could secure additional appointments for children with special needs in the form of post-release services, these were rare cases.
To make matters more difficult, there is never any guarantee that children who move along to another setting might be in an environment suited to their needs. “I was just out of college when I came to this job, and one of the first things they taught us was to not tell the kids that everything’s going to be okay when they’re upset,” Spangler said. “You don’t want to instill that false sense of hope because the reality is that once they get out of the shelter, they’re facing this whole new process.”
After ORR sent Julia to family in North Carolina, sufficient follow-up would have revealed that her relatives were not in a position to provide adequate care for the child. Members of the family had to attend work and school during the day, and as a result frequently left the house as an empty, wooden skeleton with no one but a five-year-old girl inside. Left alone, Julia often escaped the house and wandered through the streets of her neighborhood, in search of someone who could take care of her. Thomas stressed that this deficiency in care was not the fault of Julia’s family — they received no stipend for sponsoring the child and could not neglect the duties of work or school. However, more thorough screening on the part of the HHS could have ensured that the sponsoring family had the capacity to care for the child beforehand.
HHS’s lack of involvement in Julia’s case is not an anomaly; the department routinely neglects to conduct effective follow-up for the children it oversees. ORR is tasked with making only one “wellness check” phone call 30 days after placement, and it is not obligated to follow up if the sponsors do not pick up the phone. In 2018, when media outlets condemned the federal government for having “lost” 1,500 children after releasing them from ORR custody, the reality was that their sponsors simply did not pick up the phone on the first ring and the federal government never called again to clarify the status of the child. While the government did not “lose” these children, this incident points to the larger issue of lackluster follow-up on the part of ORR.
A 2018 Congressional report put together by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs similarly pointed to ORR’s lack of continued supervision. In it, committee chair Rob Portman and ranking member Tom Carper stated, “No agency claims any responsibility for the children’s well-being once HHS places them with sponsors.” Even upon finding that 28 unaccompanied migrant youth had run away from their sponsor families, ORR took no action to locate the children. Once children exit federal foster care to stay with their sponsors, HHS breaks any existing bridges with them, relieving itself of any ongoing responsibility.
Another Model
From entry to exit, unaccompanied migrant youth face a difficult journey within the United States. However, there are a number of ways in which the federal government can make the foster care system for migrants more child-centered, and it has precedents to follow.
The domestic foster care system, a separate entity run by individual states and primarily serving resident children of the United States, serves as a strong model. While state and local entities vary greatly in practice, as Cardoso shared, they handle a number of issues more effectively than the national program for unaccompanied children.
Undocumented children enter the state system not when they approach the border unaccompanied or are separated from their families, but only if they have already been living in the United States for some time and their caregivers have been identified as unable to provide adequate care. Julia, who was initially placed by ORR in the care of her stepfather’s sister in the United States, was later taken to state social workers by local police — without ORR’s involvement — after they found her wandering the streets without supervision. It was through the North Carolina state child welfare system that she came under Thomas’ guidance in February 2018. The state social workers reached out to ORR about Julia’s situation; the agency responded that it would come to court, but it remained absent at every court hearing and at the final adjudication as well. Julia then officially became part of the state foster care system.
ORR claims that its program for unaccompanied children “[provides] an environment on par with facilities in the child welfare system that house American children.” However, this assertion falls far from reality. As Finno-Velasquez pointed out, while ORR remains half-hearted in its enforcement of child welfare standards, the domestic child welfare includes formal oversight mechanisms to ensure that these standards are met where U.S. resident children are involved. A 2015 LIRS report found that while all children within the state and local foster care are provided with Child Advocates — appointed experts who advocate for the child’s best interests in court — only a small percentage of unaccompanied children are afforded such resources. The report also pointed to the inadequacy of home assessments and follow-up services when unaccompanied children are reunified with sponsors — measures which are routinely implemented within the state foster care system. In 2021, ORR continues to appoint a limited number of Child Advocates and still does not guarantee home studies or post-release services.
“State and county child welfare systems really operate on a very specific set of laws and regulations that prioritize the safety, permanency and well being for all children in care,” Finno-Velasquez noted. “And they’re monitored by state children and family court systems and juvenile courts. They are a lot more regulated and experienced with trying to figure out what’s in a child’s actual best interest.”
Some have argued the comparison between federal and state child welfare systems is tenuous. “I wouldn’t recommend comparing the transitional foster directly to state foster care, because its purpose is quite different,” Greenberg responded. He elaborated that state foster care systems were meant to care for children removed from their homes due to abuse or neglect; these children would remain in foster care until reunification with a parent or adoption in the case that parental rights are terminated. “In contrast,” Greenberg said, “transitional foster care for ORR is the placement for children while there are efforts to try to get them to their parent or other sponsor, and hopefully, the transitional foster care placement is for a limited number of weeks.”
Looking at this disparity in foster care treatment between American children and foreign-born children, Cardoso posited, “If there is some precedence for doing this, why isn’t the same precedence applied in the federal system?” She continued, “You ask the feds and they’ll say it comes down to funding most of the time, but I don’t know that it’s that simple. I would argue that there’s some other underlining drivers of why we have a system that seems to work for kids that are born in this country, but we don’t apply those best practices in the federal system [for undocumented children].”
Advocates for immigrant child welfare reform have called on the federal government to take on a number of initiatives from entry to exit in order to bring children’s needs to the forefront of ORR’s mission. These include incentivizing contracts with smaller facilities that can provide children with the “least restrictive setting”; ensuring the end of harmful information-sharing practices between ICE, CBP and ORR to allow for safe family reunification; and following up with unaccompanied children and providing additional support services after they are released from ORR custody.
Once it incorporates these measures, ORR might finally work toward realizing its mandate to care for children and families with their best interests in mind.
In order to make this possible, Vignarajah said, empathy must be restored to this conversation. “I have a three-year-old daughter. Oftentimes when I see these children, I see my daughter, and that is part of why I think about the responsibility, knowing that these children are not just in our custody, but in our care.”
***
Set against the backdrop of a tumultuous immigration scene, the denouement of Julia’s own story unfolded under the wings of a Honduran airport.
After a U.S. judge signed off on reunification during an adjudication hearing in mid-March, Thomas took her foster daughter by plane from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Honduras. There, she would reunite her with her birth mother, Lupe.
Julia saw a woman emerging through the automatic clear doors of the airport entrance, and immediately knew it was her. She bolted towards the mother she had not seen in eight months. The two embraced, and Lupe said, “Te amo mija.” I love you, my daughter.
It was July 2, 2018. Twelve days earlier, Trump had rolled back the Zero Tolerance Policy that first separated Julia from her stepdad and set her on the months-long journey through the U.S. federal foster care system. “Knowing that this had happened to so many different families — I mean, 2,700 children had been separated forcibly from their parents, potentially even more than that. All of this is on you as you’re watching this happen,” Thomas said. “It’s just this beautiful moment of them reuniting, and at the same time, just this anger, right? … It shouldn’t have happened to begin with.”
Julia’s narrative remains a peculiar one in the bevy of immigration stories — she had fought her way through both the federal and state foster care systems as she undertook a drawn-out quest to see her birth mother once again. While Julia ultimately reunited with her mother, numerous other migrant children in the United States still remain in a state of limbo. For those children, Thomas, now an activist, continues to speak and write about her experience as a foster mother for a migrant youth.
Thomas left her daughter of four months with a poem, memorializing their connection in verse and calling for a love that transcends borders:
There is a daughter I mother A daughter I love But she is not mine & I am not hers, Forever. There is a mother she loves A mother who loves her, Forever. For love is like water. No human border can keep it out. Yes, love is like water It loves above in clouds, & below in soil Yes, love is water.
