in Tommy’s case, and social service support in Alba’s case, without specific concern for that child’s citizenship status.45 It was only through the concerted efforts of Tatianna, a college-educated U.S. citizen, that Alba was retrospectively granted Mexican citizenship, recognized as a victim of trafficking, and then granted U.S. citizenship through her legal adoption. Tommy’s assumed rights as a U.S. citizen child, and as a sick and abandoned child, were not realized, I argue, because there was no one positioned to make claims on his behalf, no one to force the gears of the state apparatus into motion. These cases thus highlight the contingent status of vulnerable child migrants, and their comparative voicelessness in efforts to construct and mobilize an effective narrative of worthiness.
The cases of Alba and Tommy illuminate the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the contingent, tentative narratives through which individuals are placed inside or outside national boundaries. And while narratives of poverty and economic need are decidedly problematic for enabling children to move across borders and enter the U.S. national “family,” in many cases decisions about child custody are based on a child’s increased life chances in a certain setting. These “life chances” or “future opportunities,” the subject of the following chapter, are often framed in terms of a child’s “best interest,” and serve as a gloss for the economic circumstances that differentiate one custody setting, one possible future, from another.
CHAPTER 2
Belonging and Exclusion
Esperanza foster parents Trevor and Josh were reflective about their experiences fostering four children over a period of three years and about the pending adoption of their current foster daughter, a petite Honduran toddler named Emma. They spoke frankly about their concerns and reservations with the fostering system. I had spoken casually numerous times with both of them and more extensively with Trevor, since he took charge during most home visits and functioned, in both their opinions, as the primary parent. But when I sat down to interview Josh formally he surprised me with his direct and open reflections on his experience as a foster father and adoptive father-to-be. Josh and I spoke about the shifts in Emma’s case. Although it had never seemed likely to social workers involved in the case that Emma’s mother and father would regain custody, due to ongoing mental health issues and general conditions of family instability, Emma’s maternal grandmother had expressed interest in gaining custody of Emma, as she already had custody of some of Emma’s older siblings. Because she was elderly, Emma’s grandmother felt she could not care for the children on her own, and wanted to bring a daughter, Emma’s aunt, from Honduras to help care for the children. It was for this reason that Emma’s case had dragged on for some time. However, when Emma’s grandmother could not procure the required visa for Emma’s aunt, the county social worker felt she had waited long enough for a family placement, and focused her attention on finding Emma a permanent, adoptive home, in this case with Trevor and Josh, to whom Emma had grown quite attached.
Toward the end of our interview, once my notepad had been put away and we were speaking more casually, Josh looked down at his lap and said, “I just don’t know if we are doing the right thing by taking Emma away.”1 Josh told me he wondered about what they were doing, explaining that he was happy to adopt but he worried that sometimes adoptions happened in cases where it was not truly the only option. Citing the case of Kyle, one of Josh’s former foster children who had been reunified with his father only after the forceful intervention of Josh and Trevor, Josh asserted he was speaking not from conjecture but from experience.
Kyle’s parents split up when his father was hospitalized for severe depression. Kyle’s mother remained with him in San Diego while his father relocated to another state. Months later, two-year-old Kyle was placed in foster care, with Trevor and Josh, due to allegations of maternal drug use and neglect. When Kyle’s mother’s parental rights were terminated, Kyle’s father continued to fight to regain custody. Josh and Trevor believed the social worker had written Kyle’s father off as a good placement option because she didn’t feel that he had a strong relationship with Kyle, and their “visits” over the phone were not going well. Though Kyle did display anger at his father and unwillingness to speak with him on the phone, Trevor felt that no two-year-old could rebuild a relationship through phone calls. He and Josh set up Skype communication with Kyle’s father, and each week coached him through reading stories and playing with finger puppets, something Trevor and Josh had discovered that Kyle loved. Kyle was eventually reunified with his father, and while Trevor and Josh were thrilled with the result, they felt that the reunification had occurred largely through their efforts and in spite of, rather than because of, the actions of the social worker and the routine workings of the child welfare system. Their experiences with Kyle left them feeling that the system did not always work toward reunification as enthusiastically as it might and, as a result, split up families without legitimate cause to do so. Josh explained that he had raised these sorts of concerns with Emma’s adoption social worker, wondering whether all avenues had been exhausted before termination of parental rights, if adoption was really in her best interest. She had responded that Emma was going to be adopted, and that if he and Trevor did not “open their arms” to her, another family would. When I asked Trevor whether the various case outcomes he and Josh had witnessed were, in his opinion, largely contingent on the social worker who happened to be assigned to the case, he responded, “One hundred percent, oh, absolutely.” But he went on to say how amazed he was by social workers and impressed by the passion they give to their job regardless of the “gross underpay” they received. “I wouldn’t do it for that money,” he told me, “No way.”2
The vast majority of foster parents I spoke with articulated a nuanced understanding of their foster child’s biological parents as not “bad” parents, but as people caught up in bad circumstances. But none except Josh expressed such an explicit sense of discomfort with their own adoption of a foster child and with a concern about what they saw as a potentially unnecessary severance of family ties. Josh, based on his own experiences, expressed a belief that the foster care system made it difficult for parents to get their children back and that the system as a whole supported adoption over reunification. He felt that the county was not sensitive to transportation difficulties parents faced in attempting to get between work, therapy, and visitations with their children. This was particularly the case given the size of San Diego County, the lack of effective public transportation, and the likelihood that biological parents were without their own vehicles. He had also heard that parents had their “salaries cut” when their children were removed.
Josh was correct, in a sense, because parents whose children were removed from their care did often lose benefits such as food stamps and housing subsidies based on the number of people in their “family.” They also often had difficulty qualifying for subsidized housing or childcare while they did not have physical custody of their children.3 This was a substantial obstacle for parents who had to demonstrate their ability to provide stable housing and a childcare plan before their children could be returned to them. The concerns that Josh voiced were issues that impacted parents entangled in the child welfare system, regardless of their social position, by virtue of being subject to the regulations and expectations of the social worker assigned to their case. However, as I argue throughout this book, these difficulties disproportionately impacted low-income parents, particularly those who were racially marginalized and undocumented, due to the precariousness of their legal status, their network for social support, and/or their economic circumstances. This differential impact was, in some sense, the issue Esperanza was founded to address. Most other foster parents I spoke with seemed to carefully avoid consideration of the possibility that they might have been raising children who could have been safely and happily returned to their parents’ care. Josh, on the other hand, was willing to articulate this problem out loud and to mark the circumstantial differences between those who lose their children and those who adopt them.
Josh’s concern about the patterns of removal and what he perceived to be the agency’s
