After Encarnación Bail Romero was arrested for being an undocumented United States resident, Judge David Dali ruled that because she was in jail, Encarnación had abandoned her son and was an unfit mother. The judge allowed Seth and Melinda Moser of Carthage, Missouri, to adopt Carlos, who is called Jamison by his new parents. Although Seth Moser has a criminal past, the judge ignored it. In 18 federal detention centers around the country this story is played out time and again. Now, ABC news reporters are showing the pain caused to families on both sides of the involuntary adoption issue whose lives are torn apart by difficult immigration issues.
According to a report from the Applied Research Center, “Shattered Families,” as of the summer of 2011 an estimated 5,100 children in 22 states were in foster care after their parents were either detained or deported. Immigration attorneys and children’s welfare advocates say a small but troubling number, like Jamison, have been put up for adoption to American families after their birth parents were stripped of their parental rights.
“It’s a massive national problem,” said John De Leon, an attorney for the Guatemalan Consulate who worked to help Encarnacion Bail Romero secure a visa to stay in the country while she fights for custody of her son.
How many families are involved? “Do the numbers,” he said.
The ARC report concluded that at least 15,000 more children will face “threats to reunification with their detained and deported mothers and fathers” over the next five years.
“I can tell you that if you were to go into any dependency court, any child welfare court in the country today, any community where there are immigrants, this is a problem,” De Leon said.
The concept of taking children away from poor parents living outside the power centers of United States society is not new. In Andrew Johnson’s reconstructionist south after the civil war, “Black laws” were written to ensure white landowners would continue to enjoy a continued free labor force to work their plantations even though slavery had supposedly ended. In History is a Weapon, Howard Zinn writes
. . . returned southern states enacted “black codes,” which made the freed slaves like serfs, still working the plantations. For instance, Mississippi in 1865 made it illegal for freedmen to rent or lease farmland, and provided for them to work under labor contracts which they could not break under penalty of prison. It also provided that the courts could assign black children under eighteen who had no parents, or whose parents were poor, to forced labor, called apprenticeships – with punishment for runaways.
In his paper, Evolution of the Dependency Component of the Juvenile Court, Marvin Ventrell writes
. . . English Poor Law, was transplanted firmly into the colonies and even enhanced… Involuntary apprenticeship of poor children became an integral part of colonial North American Poor Law. Such apprenticeships were frequently used throughout the colonies. Douglas Rendleman makes the case that it is at this point we see an enhancement of English Poor Law into a “poor plus” system. In 18th century Virginia for example, children could be removed and apprenticed not only because of their poverty but because their parents were not providing “good breeding, neglecting their formal education, not teaching a trade, or were idle, dissolute, unchristian or uncapable.” Rendleman suggests this is an example of the state’s belief that poor children needed to be protected, not just from poverty, but from certain environmental influences commonly associated with the poor. Apprenticeships were in many ways the ideal anchor in the poor law system because the child paid his own way, kept relief costs down, was trained in skilled labor, and society experienced reduced idleness and unemployment. As a reflection of the state in the role of beneficent ultimate parent, however, the system left much to be desired, as the quality of the child’s care was suspect and the child operated frequently as nothing more than a slave subject to a business proposition.
It didn’t take long for white society to learn that the benefits of disenfranchising Blacks extended beyond getting free child labor. Jailing the most vulnerable members of society turned out to be a very lucrative practice and it has become a means to make some people fabulously wealthy while destroying the lives of many others. This practice also apparently provides adoptive families with a steady supply of children who have been forcibly seized from their parents, many of whom are jailed for relatively short periods of incarceration – and some of those, for infractions that are not very high up on the criminal scale. In her October 2010 article, The U.S. System of Punishment: an expanding balloon of wealth, racism and greed, Jenny Truax says,
“The prison system in the U.S. remained generally unaltered until the Civil War ended. Following the Civil War, slavery was abolished as a private institution, but the cleverly worded 13th Amendment provided a very large exception, stating: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime – shall exist within the United States.” In the ensuing months and years, states revised the Slave Codes into new “Black Codes,” imprisoning former slaves for acts such as missing work, handling money carelessly, and performing “insulting gestures.” A massive influx of former slaves into the penitentiary resulted, a new form of slavery was born, and the racialization of the U.S. punishment system took root. The unpaid labor of the newly created, mostly black, convict lease system helped the South achieve industrialization.”
Encroaching on the civil and parental rights of the vulnerable is not a new practice at all, but it’s always been a bad one. Looks to me like it’s time to dig in heels and change it. What do you think?