El Amor de Dos Madres (The Love of Two Mothers)
The smell of authentic Mexican soup bubbles from a pot on the stove. After tending to it all day, Justina spoons a generous amount into a blue container. She then begins to assemble a picnic of sorts: the soup, four disposable bowls, a stack of napkins, four silver spoons and four bottles of Gatorade. Once the picnic is packed into a Wal-Mart bag, Justina gathers three Easter baskets full of sugary goodies and loads it into her red pickup truck.
Justina, 29, cautiously winds her way through the streets of Bowling Green’s “Little Mexico,” an area of town with a large Latino population. She is an illegal immigrant and cannot afford a traffic stop. Soon Justina finds herself behind a large yellow school bus. Smiling Latino children jump off the bus and run to the arms of nearby parents. But Justina has not seen or held her children, Reyna, Alex and Daisy, for two weeks.
“The truth is, I don’t know where they are,” Justina said. “The family that has them brings them to a park or an office, and I can see them for an hour and a half two times a month.”
Justina is just one of many mothers in the state of Kentucky fighting to regain custody of her children. According to the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, known as CHFS, the state agency responsible for the protection of abused, neglected or dependent children, 7,166 children are in foster care in Kentucky. Of these, 343 children, or 4.7 percent, are Hispanic. Hispanics in Kentucky represent only 1.5 percent of the total population.
According to the National Foster Care Coalition, minorities make up a disproportionate amount of children in foster care in the United States. Hispanics make up 18 percent of children in foster care but only account for 17 percent of the general population. White children represent 41 percent of those in foster care and 61 percent of the general population. The NFCC said minority children are likely to stay in foster care longer and less likely to be reunified with parents.
Although CHFS’s stated goal is to reunify families, immigration status and the inability to speak English make this process more difficult for illegal immigrants like Justina. Justina was about to get another lesson in just how difficult it could be.
On the day of her scheduled visit with her children, Justina arrived at Roland Bland Park. She gathered the gifts and the food from the back of the truck and arranged it around a table. As she set four places, a van parked nearby. Three children bounced around the back seat, waiting to see their mother. But the van doors never opened.
Nearly 10 minutes later, social worker Mark Smith arrived. He sent an interpreter to order Justina to go to the social services office. Smith then yelled at a reporter and photographer who accompanied Justina to the park that day. Justina had invited the two journalists, who were documenting her struggles as an immigrant. Smith later said that due to confidentiality rules, the journalists could not be present for the children’s visits with their mother.
Justina didn’t get to play with her children in the park that day. She visited them behind a locked door at the office and went home sad. It was just one more frustrating day in Justina’s battle to get her children back.
Justina said police officers and social workers still have not adequately explained to her why her children were removed from her home or how to get them back.
She came to the United States nearly a decade ago to escape an abusive father and worse poverty than she knows now. Since then, she has struggled to find a job. She worked in a grocery store until she was fired because of her illegal status. The only steady work she can find is in tobacco fields, but this only provides work through summers. Sharing the rent for a small apartment with friends helped save money.
When she met her boyfriend, the father of two of her children, she relied heavily on him, both financially and emotionally. When he left her, she turned to alcohol.
“I don’t know why I started drinking,” said Justina, who, like all illegal immigrants in this story, is referenced by her first name only. “I was suffering and my friends said it would help the pain.”
Justina did not know this would eventually lead to more heartbreak.
Sign these papers
On February 12, 2007, the Bowling Green Police responded to a call from Justina’s neighbor claiming she was hitting her oldest child, Reyna, with a belt. Reports later state that alcohol played a significant role in this incident.
According to Justina, two police officers and two social workers arrived and immediately began asking questions. Justina said no interpreter was present. According to the police report, a friend was used to interpret.
“Are you the mother of these children?”
“Sí.”
“Did you hit her?”
“Sí.”
Justina, who speaks only Spanish, now says she didn’t understand what happened. Police made her sign papers in English that she couldn’t comprehend. “They didn’t tell me anything else except, ‘Sign these papers,’” Justina said. “I signed and they took my three children, and they took me to jail.”
Bowling Green Police Department policy gives responding officers the choice of whether or not to request an interpreter, International Communities Liaison Officer Monica Woods said. Officers have the option to call a language line to assist with interpretation, but translation services have not been extended to documents, she said.
Social workers from CHFS documented substantial bruising to Reyna’s face, eye and forehead. According to an emergency custody order filed the same day, “When questioned, Reyna stated that ‘Mommy did it.’” The report further states that Justina admitted to the abuse. She was arrested and the children were placed into foster care.
Justina’s arrest alerted authorities to her illegal immigration status. Officer Barry Pruitt, public information officer for the Police Department, said the jail is required to report all inmates without a Social Security number to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the federal immigration agency. Justina, being an illegal immigrant, has no Social Security number.
Justina spent nine days in the Warren County Jail before ICE moved her to the McHenry County Jail outside Chicago to await deportation proceedings. During her five months in custody there, she was not allowed to see or communicate with her children. Officials asked her to sign a deportation order, written in English, stating she understood she was illegal and wished to be deported. Justina complied, not understanding what the order said.
On March 9, 2007, federal officials ordered that Justina be deported from the country and returned to Mexico.
It was not until a representative of the National Immigrant Justice Center of Chicago visited the McHenry County Jail that Justina said she learned she had signed a deportation order. The legal center then helped Justina submit an affidavit stating she didn’t know what she had signed and asking that her case be re-opened in order to fight for custody of her three children. She was released from the McHenry County Jail five months later.
Nancy Oliver Roberts, a Bowling Green lawyer who now represents Justina, said her client should have been allowed to speak to and visit with her children.
“These children were born in the United States, and every American child has rights,” Roberts said. “One of those is a right to your parents.”
Justina was also deprived of her right of due process, Roberts said.
“Knowing what you are charged with and knowing how to go through the process to change it” is a minimum, she said. “There have been times that my client has not known what to do to rectify her situation.”
Termination
After Justina returned to Bowling Green in August 2007, CHFS gave her a strict set of “reunification goals” in order to regain custody of her children. The goals are set by a social worker and approved by a judge.
Justina was required to get counseling for mental health, domestic violence, substance abuse or alcohol abuse, and anger issues. She was also required to take classes for English as a second language and told to secure independent housing.
Social workers enrolled Justina into all of her required counseling classes. She began taking classes for English as a second language at the Bowling Green Internatinoal Center.
By early October, Justina had completed half of her reunification goals. Social worker Smith said in an Oct. 9, 2007, report that Justina was making great progress and he felt “there shouldn’t be any reason why the family cannot and should not be reunified” upon completion of domestic violence counseling and securing an independent home. At the time, she was attending weekly two-hour visitations in which she and the children played games and bonded.
When Smith filed his next report on March 6, 2008, Justina had completed all classes requested by the court and was using techniques she learned in her parenting class. The report also stated Justina had not used drugs or alcohol to the knowledge of the social worker.
For the entire year Justina was separated from her children, CHFS’s plan for the children was always “return to parent.”
But on July 7, 2008, the plan changed to adoption, after a surprise visit by Smith to Justina’s home.
In his report, Smith said Justina had not yet found a permanent residence and was living with a friend. When he visited the house, he found the door to be unlocked, broken glass on the floor, beer cans scattered about the house, dirty dishes in the sink and the trash not taken out. On Sept. 19, 2008, CHFS filed a motion to terminate Justina’s parental rights. Justina’s three children had been in foster care 19 months.
According to Jim Grace, assistant director of the Protection and Permanency division of CHFS, when a child has been in foster care 15 of the past 22 months, the court must review the goal of reunification with parents and consider recommending that the court terminate parental rights. But Justina did not know this until she hired Roberts, her attorney.
In a four-year span, Justina called the Bowling Green Police Department to report three different abuse incidents perpetrated by three different boyfriends. Justina blames the abuse and a self-admitted problem with alcohol for her custody battle.
“Sometimes that pattern is initially hard to break,” Roberts said of Justina’s multiple experiences with domestic violence. “But I think she has.”
Justina’s three children have been placed with an English-speaking foster family. There are few foster parents in the area who speak languages other than English. As a result, native languages are rarely reinforced.
Roberts said Justina’s children have lost almost all of their Hispanic culture and language and have had a difficult time adjusting.
“In an effort to make them safe, we have traumatized them too,” Roberts said.
Should I hit him?
Not far from Justina’s house in Little Mexico, another mother is also struggling to win her child back from the state’s custody.
Her name is Margarita, and she is also an illegal immigrant from Mexico who cannot speak English. But unlike Justina, Margarita, 48, has no idea how to get her child back. There is no reunification plan, no goal to work toward. Her daughter, Balvina, was taken away because the child was raped.
The crime that broke up Margarita’s family happened last April.
Margarita had taken roommates into her three-bedroom home in order to help pay the rent, as many immigrants do. Work had been hard to come by.
One of the roommates was a man named Rene. He was from the same small Mexican village as Margarita, and their families had known each other for decades.
In the darkness one night, Jesus, Margarita’s oldest son, saw a shadow move in his room. Jesus immediately turned on the light and discovered that Rene was in his sister’s bed. Both were naked.
“Balvina kept looking at me,” Jesus, now 15, said. “She was looking at me in a weird way. I was wondering, ‘What should I do? Should I hit him?’ I had things in my room that I could hit him with.”
Instead, Jesus ran to his mother’s room, giving Rene the opportunity to escape. Jesus then dialed 911.
According to the report of the first officer to the scene, Balvina was “lying in bed, motionless. Her pants and underwear were lying next to her in the bed.”
Balvina was transported by ambulance to The Medical Center, where nurses checked for signs of rape. Tests indicated Balvina, then 21 years old, was several weeks pregnant. Officers assumed other sexual assaults had taken place previously.
Thirty-three hours after Jesus dialed 911, the police located Rene and arrested him. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of third degree rape. A judge ordered him to serve five years in prison, and he must stay on the Kentucky Sex Offender Registry for 20 years.
Why had Balvina not reported the assaults earlier? Why had she not told her mother?
Balvina is mute. Around the age of 11 or 12, she learned simple words in Spanish: madre, agua. But later in life her communications skills regressed, leaving her with gestures. Margarita said she was born with developmental problems.
According to a psychological examination performed two years earlier, Balvina had never been in school. She functioned poorly in all areas, including communication and social skills. She was determined to have the mental capacity of a 5-year-old.
After Balvina’s assault, CHFS began an investigation. The Warren County Family Court held an emergency hearing and determined that Balvina qualified as disabled. Social workers for Protection and Permanency also discovered that this was not the first assault.
Indefinite decision
Margarita had come to the United States in 1999 to pursue a better life for her family after her husband was stabbed to death on the way home from work. She settled in Gastonia, N.C., and got a job at a factory making plastic chairs. There she met a man named Juan, another immigrant from the same Mexican town. The two became friends and soon fell in love and had a child. Margarita sent for Jesus and Balvina, her other young children who were still living in Mexico.
But one night after work, Margarita said she came home to the police. Jesus had called 911 after finding Juan in bed with his sister, Balvina. Margarita could not believe someone she trusted would hurt her daughter. Juan was never caught, and Margarita later moved her family to Bowling Green, hoping he would never find them.
Although the family has never seen Juan again, what happened to Balvina keeps haunting them.
“I never thought this would happen in this country,” Margarita said. She left Mexico to provide a better life for her children.
State officials determined that Balvina could not stay at home. Social worker Shawndi Isable said in a court record, “At her mother’s admissions, this is not the first time or the first perpetrator. Remaining in the mother’s care places [Balvina] at imminent risk of additional harm.”
CHFS’s guardianship services took Balvina away and placed her with an adult guardian. She is allowed to see her family every two weeks.
“I cry a lot,” Margarita said. “I miss her. I think about her a lot. How is she? What condition is she in?”
CHFS officials denied requests to see or communicate with Balvina for this story. Karen Rector, a social worker familiar with Balvina’s case, said Balvina was removed from the home because of her mother’s neglect. Rector said this was an indefinite decision since the court had determined that Balvina was mentally disabled. The only way Balvina could return home is if the court determined she could make her own decisions, which Rector doubts will happen.
“Our goal is to protect, not necessarily to reunite,” Rector said.
Grace, the CHFS official, said once an individual turns 18, the age of legal majority in Kentucky, a parent no longer has custody of the child.
Margarita did not know, until interviewed for this story, that there is nothing she can do to get her child back.
A baby girl
Martha Deputy, founder of the Bowling Green International Center, has worked with immigrants and refugee resettlement for 27 years. Even though she is now retired, she still assists families informally.
When a friend told her about Margarita’s situation, she began researching ways for Margarita to regain custody of Balvina. Deputy doesn’t believe that Margarita could have prevented the assaults.
“In both cases it was someone that Margarita knew,” Deputy said, “and Margarita was sound asleep. I don’t see that she’s at fault at all. And yet her daughter was taken away from her. We’re at a stop gap as how to get this family reunited.”
It has been over one year since Balvina was attacked and separated from her family. Since then she has had her baby, a girl. But Margarita has never met her granddaughter.
Deputy has tried to find a lawyer to take the case but has had no luck. When she tries to contact social services herself, she said confidentiality rules prevent her from gaining access to any information.
“Confidentiality is good to a point, but if I call and ask ‘How is the baby?’ or ‘When can Margarita see the baby?’ and I can’t get anybody to talk to me— it just seems like it is taken to an extreme,” Deputy said. “We don’t even know where the baby is. Is the baby adopted? Why does this grandmother not have the right to see her grandchild?”
Deputy believes interactions and communications between Margarita and the foster parents have been misunderstood due to the language barrier. She has tried to contact CHFS and ask that an interpreter be provided to Margarita during her visits with her daughter and the foster parents, but her request was denied.
“I know social services wants to protect every child,” she said. “But this is a family torn apart. It is costing our system a lot of money.”
According to Grace, assistant director of the Protection and Permanency division of CHFS, a child in foster care costs taxpayers an average of $73.63 per day. With the average stay in foster care lasting 21 months, the state can potentially pay nearly $60,000 to care for each child. Grace said Kentucky spends $189 million annually on children in foster care.
Margarita wants to return to Mexico but said she will not leave without her daughter. She worries about Balvina losing her culture and the very few communication skills she does have.
“It is very difficult to communicate with her,” Margarita said. “What if the people taking care of her don’t understand her?”
She also worries about her son, Jesus, who has changed since his sister was taken away. He was removed from Bowling Green High School and placed into 11th Street Alternative High School for bad behavior.
Jesus admits he’s not really trying, which he attributes to his family being pulled apart.
“You know how the shooting stars go by in the sky … and they said you had a wish? My wish would be for my family to be happy,” Jesus said. “That’s like the only wish I would ever have in life.”
Links:
http://www.nationalfostercare.org/
The National Foster Care Coalition is a nonpartisan group whose goal is to improve the U.S. foster care system. Their website provides national data for foster care children.
The Cabinet for Health and Family Services is the state government agency that administers programs to promote the mental and physical health of Kentuckians. They are responsible for the state’s adult guardianships and foster care system.