Infuse concepts and strategies for achieving cultural and linguistic continuity into other topics of training.
• Acknowledge and celebrate the funds of knowledge, skills, and resources the families already have and can share with their foster and/or adoptive child.
• Every effort will be made to secure culturally and linguistically appropriate services when referring families for additional social, support, health, and educational services.
Esperanza’s founder, Becky, contended that the county system repeatedly failed to address these sorts of specific needs for the Hispanic population. She took the position that “private money allows for better recruitment, screening, training, and support,”18 and gave her the flexibility to address these concerns without the restrictions and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures of the public county agency.
Importantly, children were brought into these public/private partnerships, and provided with services including food, shelter, schooling, and medical care, by the child welfare systems in Tijuana and San Diego without regard for citizenship status. While each system was expected to alert the other to the presence of minor citizens across the border, they were not authorized to reclaim their own citizen children without express authorization by the other state or to repatriate noncitizen children of their own accord. In the U.S. context repatriation was not typically pursued for children within the child welfare system, and thus under state guardianship. However, children who were apprehended by border patrol authorities were frequently repatriated across the border into DIF custody, where they would commonly reside in temporary shelters while their family members in Mexico were located and contacted to collect them. Adults, and older youth who could pass as adults, were simply returned to the border and released into Mexico. The cases I turn to below involved Alba, a Mexican citizen child entangled in the San Diego child welfare system, and Tommy, a U.S. citizen sheltered in a Tijuana orphanage. The divergent trajectories of their two cases illuminate the ways that narratives of worthiness, under particular conditions, are mobilized to compel state actors to address the citizenship status of a child migrant. I argue that in that process the ever-shifting boundaries of the nation are reworked and reinforced.
Alba’s Story
I first met Alba and her foster mother and biological cousin, Tatianna, in the summer of 2008, when Tatianna and her husband were still in pursuit of adoption and U.S. citizenship for Alba. Alba’s story was unique because it had largely been resolved outside the law enforcement and federal bureaucracies typically involved in trafficking cases. According to Tatianna, this was partly because after arriving in the United States with Alba, Esther, who had allegedly “purchased” Alba, managed to register Alba under her legal guardianship and was able to receive some support services for food and housing through the social service system without raising any red flags about Alba’s origins.19 This meant that Alba was already enmeshed in the child welfare system, a circumstance that did not protect her from the threat of deportation but did enable her to sidestep the immigration bureaucracy that would normally attend to the circumstances of a child migrant or a trafficked child.
Children who are under the custody of the child welfare system are technically vulnerable to detention and deportation if they are not U.S. citizens. However, in practice it is quite unusual for children in foster care to be detained or deported while in care, and they are formally eligible for the same treatment and services provided to citizen foster children. Undocumented parents and family members attempting to regain custody of their children did experience profoundly differential treatment within the child welfare system; these distinctions form one of the central concerns of the chapters that follow. However, during my research I never observed undocumented foster children being treated differentially or denied access to services available to U.S. citizen foster children during their time in state custody. Although foster children were almost never detained or deported, it was much more likely that this might happen once they aged out of the foster care system at eighteen, particularly given high rates of homelessness, incarceration, and unemployment for former foster youth, and thus the likelihood of their increased visibility to law enforcement officers.20
Alba’s story, as I recount it here, is full of gaps, unanswered questions, and inconsistencies. The depiction I present is primarily Tatianna’s narrative, supplemented by my own observations while Alba’s case was open, conversations with two Esperanza social workers involved in the case, case notes in Alba’s file, and documents Tatianna shared with me, including a written exchange from Alba’s biological father to Esther. However, substantial gaps in the story do remain, and without access to the county social worker’s version of events, the story is partial at best.
Tatianna, Alba’s cousin, was living in San Diego, where she had attended college. She lived in the city with her husband, with whom she co-owned a business, and their three-year-old daughter. Tatianna’s extended family, living in Tijuana, did not initially know what had happened to Alba when she disappeared. However, they were hesitant to involve law enforcement in their family circumstances, concerned that Alba might be placed in a Tijuana orphanage instead of with her extended family. Tatianna’s involvement in Alba’s case began when one of Tatianna’s aunts discovered a letter from Alba’s father to Esther, requesting more money than the funds that had already been exchanged for Alba. Based on the name and address, Tatianna’s aunt managed to locate Esther, who was living in San Diego. With this new information, Tatianna went to check up on Alba. She explained, “Look, I wanted to adopt Alba. But I would have been content to leave her there, with Esther, if things had seemed okay. But I just wasn’t comfortable.”21
When Tatianna arrived at Esther’s house she was not happy with Alba’s circumstances—she didn’t feel that the home had enough room for the whole family, she didn’t like that Esther said she was relying on welfare payments, and she wasn’t comfortable with the fact that though Esther had told Alba’s father she was married, she in fact lived in San Diego with an undocumented boyfriend. Tatianna felt that Esther had misrepresented her situation to Alba’s father and that Alba was not as well cared for as she could be. When Tatianna explained who she was and refused to leave Esther’s home without Alba, Esther called the police. Officers soon arrived, hands on their guns, to evict Tatianna from the property. Tatianna explained to the police that Esther had illegally smuggled Alba into the country, but they told her the situation was beyond their jurisdiction and would have to be settled in family court. Tatianna was then escorted off Esther’s property.22
Tatianna then began the long, arduous process of petitioning for Alba’s custody. She explained how surprised she had been that the social worker for Alba’s case did not seem concerned by Alba’s circumstances and the lack of clarity about how she had come to be in Esther’s care. Even Tatianna explained, however, that Esther’s intentions seemed good: “I really do think she just wanted another daughter,” Tatianna told me, “She wasn’t really trying to exploit her, I don’t think. It wasn’t a money situation.”23 I was never able to speak to the county social worker involved in this case, so I do not know what her perspective was on Alba’s condition and Tatianna’s claims. From Tatianna’s perspective the social worker was dismissive of what amounted to human trafficking and did not feel she had any reason to be concerned about Alba’s situation. Tatianna, for this reason, appeared to be nothing more than a hassle the social worker was forced to deal with in the context of an otherwise relatively straightforward, unproblematic case. Tatianna initiated a letter-writing campaign to Alba’s social worker and her supervisor, eventually pressuring the social worker to move Alba to a foster home while the case was pending in dependency court. Tatianna realized she needed help navigating the legal complexities of the child welfare system. She happened to see an ad for the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program in San Diego, an agency that provided volunteer advocates empowered by the court to make recommendations on behalf of foster children. Tatianna requested an advocate for Alba, and was connected with a CASA without whom she felt she would not have been able to navigate the complex legal obstacles to gaining custody of Alba.
