Immigration Enforcement -- Raiding Children's Dreams

On May 12, 2008, teachers in Postville, Iowa, interrupted their classes, called the names of some of their Latino students and directed them to report to the principal's office. Usually, this would mean that they were in for punishment for some infraction. But these children had done nothing wrong. In the principal's office, they were informed that one or, in some cases, both of their parents would not be coming home because they had been taken into custody by federal law enforcement officers.

Earlier that day, hundreds of helmeted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in combat gear, toting assault rifles, swooped down on the Agriprocessors kosher meat processing plant in this town of about 3,000. With military precision, nearly 400 of the plant's alleged undocumented immigrant workers were shackled and marched out of the slaughterhouse in single file and herded onto buses and vans. Those rounded up in the raid, one of the biggest in our nation's history, were transported to detention facilities miles away.

The raid not only economically devastated the town but also left in its trail hundreds of children wondering when or even if they would see their parents again. Postville was just one of a series of ICE raids in search of undocumented immigrants. According to a report by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute, "Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America's Children," there are about five million children in the United States with at least one undocumented parent. The stepped-up ICE raids have put the children of these families at increased risk of separation, psychological distress and economic hardship.

These raids have disrupted communities across the country and separated thousands of parents from their children. The majority of these children are American citizens who are integrated into the schools and communities of the only country they know. After the arrest or disappearance of their parents, children have experienced psychological duress and developed mental health problems including feelings of abandonment, separation anxiety disorder, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The "Paying the Price" report states that the raids affect children, who are "emotionally, financially and developmentally dependent on their parents' care, protection and earnings." Children and other family members left behind face serious and immediate economic hardships when the primary breadwinner has been hauled off into custody. The majority of the children affected are under the age of 10--many are infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Their immediate needs are for food, baby formula, diapers, clothing and other essentials.

One of the great challenges for the communities where raids are carried out is to ensure that no child has been left behind in school, left at home without adult supervision or taken into foster care. Some children have been left in the care of teenagers or even babysitters for weeks and months at a time.

Actions to charge, convict and deport undocumented workers have escalated. In 2006, ICE officials chose December 12, the Our Lady of Guadalupe feast-day, an important religious holiday for the Mexican community, to launch simultaneous raids on Swift & Company meat packing plants in six states. On that one day, ICE agents arrested nearly 1,300 Swift employees. ICE is not only engaged in large-scale raids, but it is also expanding door-to-door operations with deportation orders to arrest immigrants. The knock on the door by an ICE agent can be the beginning of a nightmare for thousands of children.

Undocumented workers are being charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers and being threatened with serious jail time. With little access to court-appointed lawyers, many of them waive their rights without understanding the seriousness of the charges against them. Within two weeks, federal prosecutors extract guilty pleas in a procedure that could eliminate the worker's prospects of future relief and imposes criminal sentences and removal orders simultaneously--at once sending a breadwinner to prison and thrusting his family into poverty, giving new meaning to what it is to be "railroaded."

I agree with many of the recommendations in the "Paying the Price" report: Congress should provide oversight of immigration enforcement activities to ensure that children are protected during worksite enforcement and other operations. ICE should assume that there will always be children, generally very young children, affected whenever adults are arrested in worksite enforcement operations and should develop a consistent policy for parents' release. Social services and economic assistance need to be in place and provided until parents are released from detention and their immigration cases are resolved--often a prolonged period of many months. Longer-term counseling for children and their parents to mitigate psychological impacts may also be necessary.

Those who suffer the greatest harm in ICE raids are children. If our nation is to make any claim for humanity, children deserve to be protected and cared for when their parents are taken away.

For more information about the Children's Defense Fund, go to http://www.childrensdefense.org/.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.

Join Marian Wright Edelman in Los Angeles on September 14 for the first annual People® Red Carpet Fun Run. Jessi Stensland, and members of the Women's Olympic Softball team will also be there! This 3 mile run (or 1.5 mile walk) through the iconic sets and stages of the Paramount Studios lot benefits the Children's Defense Fund.

Mrs. Edelman will release her new book, The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, in September 2008. The book will be a look at what's been done and what still needs to be done to make our world safe and fair for all children.

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Comments

[RobinSeattle]

The children get victimized twice in regard to illegal immigration:

One, even though their parents don't have a pot to piss in, they have children anyway. And if there is any more sure way to keep yourself poor, it is by having kids when you can't afford it.

Two, their parents drag them across the border into a foreign country where a different language is spoken while the parents take the risk of being snared in an illegal immigration arrest. They are then left in limbo when the cops lawfully deport their parents.

This is 100% the child's parent's fault. It is not the American government's nor is it the child's.

A lot of these pro immigration activists do not live in the real world, where there are large numbers of Mexican gang mambers, clown houses that ruin the quality of life in neighborhoods (that is, where you have dozens of illegals crammed into one house or apartment), they use emergency rooms as their health care because Taco Bell doesn't offer health insurance and the schools are filled to bursting with kids who can't even read and write in theiir primary language, which diverts money from educating actual U.S. citizens.

Please, get a clue. We need to exponentially expand the scope of these roundups of illegals and crack down harder on the gangsters they have plopped into our cities. It is not the job of Americans to be a relief valve for Mexico's problems.

[LeftRight]

But the REAL solution is not to crack down on the illegals. They will continue to come here for jobs as long as jobs are offered to them! The only solution is to crack down on the EMPLOYERS!!! First time that they find an illegal working, they arrest the hiring officers, the CEO, Chairman of the board, and then they fine (and ENFORCE the fine!!) the company 50% of their profits from the year before. Second time, they fine them 100% of their previous year's profit! And if there's a 3rd offense, they not only fine the company 100% of the REVENUES earned in the prior year, they SHUT THEM DOWN!!! They are not allowed to function in the USA ANYMORE!!

If this happens, the jobs will dry up in about 2.3 seconds, and the illegals will stop coming here. At the same time that you do this, you allow a VAST increase in LEGAL immigration! This will allow the companies to continue to operate with a cheaper labor force (which will have protections under the law!) while allowing those who want to work here to do so, AND keep America great!

[HoneyBQuick]

If you want to stop illegal immigrants from working in this country, you don't go after the poor, disadvantaged in order to do that.

The people who insist that we get tougher on poor people who are WORKING to FEED THEIR KIDS makes me so angry, I shake. Don't walk around with your snotty noses up in the air, running your mouth, instead of shutting up for a moment to actually do some THINKING. I know, it's a novel concept.

If you want this to stop, you go after the people who have the most to gain and lose... the companies that employ them. Stop arresting the disadvantaged and start shutting down companies that employ illegal immigrants.

Do you want to stop people sneaking into the states from Mexico? There is one sure-fire way to do that, without building a bigger wall: help Mexico build up their economy so that their people do not need to look elsewhere for good jobs.

After all, we're "supposedly" fighting a war in order to help some poor, down-trodden people regain national stability, but we refuse to help our own neighbors? How very AMERICAN of us.

All it takes is the smallest measure of common sense to realize that you don't punish the poor for being poor. You punish the rich for taking advantage of the situation.

[mogran]

The problem is some people do not know how to let go. These people are here illegally, most of their children are illegal, if not, please take your childrens with you when you are deported. These laws need to be changed, if you are here in this country illegally and give birth, your child is now here illegally. We cannot stop the magnet is we keep making exceptions.

[lewes17266]

I know we need to enforce our laws, more now after 9-11 than ever, but I understand what the essayist is saying. My friend who is here from Latvia was taken from her home with her two sons and carried off and photographed and finger-printed and accused of playing hide-and-seek with Immigration. They described the ordeal as traumatic. They described the ICE guys as uncooperative and mean. Everything worked out fine in the end but it never should have happened in the first place. They came here with their European passports and have filed all the legal paperwork but the process takes time. In the meantime they have no driver's license, no right to work and earn an income, and no right to any kind of assistance. Thankfully, there are many church organizations that provide their community's immigrants with food, counsel, and necessities. I worry about the children too, like the essayist. I know there are safety concerns and I understand the need for documentation, and I understand the resentment I am reading here, but still, I worry too about the vulnerable innocents caught up in this time-consuming and difficult process. They need to be treated with dignity and they need their basic needs met while they wait.

[Jonahson]

Give a thought to what happened to children in Iraq. Those nightly raids by US and Iraqi forces in full combat gear in the middle of the night and seeing their father, uncle or brothers taken away while their mother cry and beg at the feet of those soldiers.
Children should be kept with their parents under humanitarian ground as long as possble until their parents are charged. Once charged either get their next in line guadian from the kid's home town to take the kid back failing which to place them under welfare care.

[dadw5boys]

A 14 year old girl in Iraq was discovered with a vest of explosives.
Her father had used one in a crowd last year.

Her aunt straped it on her !!!!!!!!

[Jonahson]

What do you think drove them to such vegeance?

[peckerberto]

It appears there are a lot of callous, unsympathetic folks responding to this post. I am not one of them. The immigrants would not be in the USA if there were not a need for them to fill. It seems to me that many Americans are afraid that in the near future the white population will be in the minority. Get used to it. Immigration policy needs to be changed so that children don't get hurt for transgressions of their parents and the biases of many of the American people.

[jvarga]

"The immigrants would not be in the USA if there were not a need for them to fill."

Sadly the need they're filling is for employers to pay as little as humanly possible to get work done. If unemployment was 1-2% I'd be more willing to assume that there just aren't enough legal citizens to do the work.

[Quaoar]

Sadly the employers in question will continue to illegally pay as little as possible until CEOs of the companies in question start serving prison sentences on a regular basis for such infractions.

[LeftRight]

"The immigrants would not be in the USA if there were not a need for them to fill."

Yup. The need is for cheap labor by those who would refuse to pay someone what they are required to under law. Course, you seem to think that Americans are just lazy and would NEVER want to work in farming, or packaging, or anything else. The reality is that I'm not going to go work in a packaging plant that isn't paying AT LEAST minimum wage, and these places that they are raiding are paying LESS than that!!

[TXfemmom]

Ms. Edelman, I applaud your work for children.

You need to understand the reality of living in an environment where one in ten individuals within your community is undocumented, however. I live in the Houston, TX area, with a population of around four million, four hundred thousand of them are thought to be undocumented citizens of other nations, with about 80% being from Mexico and Central America. We also have the highest insurance rates in the nation because of uninsured motorists and a large majority of that falls on the back of the immigrants.
Our hospitals are falling apart, and we have the highest health insurance premiums in the nation on top of that, with the undocumented being among those uninsured yet they cannot be denied care. Then, we see their children, who are twice as expensive to educate, drop out after having spent all that extra money on them, at over a fifty percent rate and they also have a birth rate twice that of legal citizens of all racial backgrounds, and their teens have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the country.

I support care for children, but reality has bitten us to the point where we now realize that either this influx is stopped or sent back, or our society is going to break in this area. Don't we or shouldn't we have the right to defend it from destructive influences such as undocumented waves of workers who are destroying the fabric of our lives?

[AZBunny]

We have the same situation in Tucson Arizona. Our hospitals are overwhelmed to the point that we only have ONE Trama unit anymore.

Our schools are underfunded AND the federal government keeps fining them MILLIONS for not teaching illegals english fast enough!

Seriously ma'am the illegals need to solve this problem by taking themselves back to Mexico before they are picked up by ICE-- problem solved.

[mbh78213]

Actually, I read (in SA Express-News) that Mexicans are returning home in droves ever since the jobs in construction dried up. The Mexican consulate reported that more and more parents are inquiring on how to get their children registered in school in Mexico. In other words, if you don't hire them, they won't come. What the government needs to do is fine any employer who pays below minimum wage and take away the incentive to exploit people without legal work permits.

[HoneyBQuick]

And to what degree of accountability do you hold your business owners who continue to pay below standard wages to illegals?

Is it poor people coming over from Mexico that are destroying your way of life, or is it the greedy business owner who already drives four nice cars and vacations in the tropics, while you struggle?

And if you're going to make someone pay for that, might it not serve you better to punish the rich man with fines and the threat of being shut down, rather than poor people who will just return again, and again, as long as they can find work in order to feed their kids?

Stop thinking about how you're being hurt, and start thinking about what you might gain.

Insist on ground-breaking fines for any business who employs illegals - stop the problem and boost your local government's economy, which, with a little hope, will trickle down to you.

[Wilburrr]

Call me crazy but I think that any person willing to walk for three days through the desert in summer just to be able to be able to mow lawns or work in meat packing plants deserves immediate citizenship. Are they taking jobs away from Americans? Maybe but of all the people I know that hire workers here in Phoenix, ALL of them try extremely hard to hire American citizens first. Are they a terrorist threat? No, those people have all entered the country through Canada.

[jvarga]

The people you know who hire workings in Phoenix, as part of their trying extremely hard to hire citizens first, does that include increasing pay? I know that over simplifies it, and that there are lots of factors involved, but a basic issue would be that if the pay offered is low enough that the only takers are people who are desperate and illegally in the country, than that might be a problem.

[Wilburrr]

Pay is not the problem.

[LeftRight]

Granted, the children did nothing wrong, but the parents did. HOWEVER, they should have focused more on the EMPLOYER!! Take the EMPLOYERS to jail, not the workers! Do that one or two times, fine the corporation (and MAKE them pay!!!) at least half of their profit last year, and they will stop hiring illegals! Then they will stop coming here!

At the same time, of course, they need some way to actually check the immigration status of potential employees, and we, as a nation, need to create a reasonable immigration policy, such as allowing workers to come here.....

[LeftRight]

And one more thing! We have GOT to change the laws so that a person born on US soil is not automatically a US citizen! If you are born to even one citizen, then you have full citizenship. If, however, both of your parents are not legal US CITIZENS (not residents!) then you are ALSO not a US citizen!!! This whole thing about being conceived, and then the 40 weeks of gestation in another country, and then you cross the border, give birth, and the child is, BY DEFINITION, a US citizen needs to END, NOW!!!

[recless]

You do realize that would most likely take a Constitutional amendment don't you? And it would have other, unforseen consequences.

[peterg76]

Maybe breaking the law in the first place was bad parenting.

[jvarga]

So I guess having kids makes it ok to ignore the laws. What's the excuse then for people illegally in the country who don't have kids?

[HoneyBQuick]

No, Smarty-Pants, having kids does not mean it's okay to ignore the laws. But having kids does tend to make a parent willing to do just about anything in order to make sure those kids are fed.

If I couldn't find work in America, and my kids were struggling to survive in poverty, you can bet your sweet Aint-I-So-­Super-Spec­ial American panties I'd be crawling under a wire to get into a country where I could earn enough money to make sure my kids had it a little easier.

I know, it's a CRAAAAAAZY concept.

Been human, long?