Last week the Applied Research Center (ARC) published Shattered Families: The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System, which shows that there are 5,100 children currently living in foster care because their parents have been detained or deported. High levels of deportation (400,000 persons have been deported in the U.S. in 2011 alone) combined with weak child welfare policies are contributing to the separation thousands of families, in some cases permanently. At least “15,000 more children will face these threats to reunification in the next five years”, according to the ARC report.

Information obtained by ARC through the Freedom of Information Act showed that during the first six months of 2011, 46,000 parents of U.S.-citizen children were removed from the country—almost half the number of deported parents of U.S.-citizen children that were deported over a 10 year period, between 1997 and 2007. Today, 14.6 million people in the U.S. live in a mixed-status home where at least one member of the family is undocumented and is at risk of being detained and deported.
(more…)