Preparing Children For Immigration Trauma
Families at risk of being torn apart should prepare now to protect their children.
Those most vulnerable in our communities need access to attorneys more than any other segment of the population. Most of us do not need a lawyer to see a doctor or access health care or keep our families safe. But the indigent often do. The basic necessities of life can hinge on access to justice. For that reason, this population often find themselves seeking assistance under urgent, emergency situations, when so much is so quickly at stake. When they are faced with the immediacies of a crisis, when homelessness is looming, the voiceless desperately seek help. But today there is a mounting avalanche of fear that is spurring many to find an attorney before any actual calamity ensues.
That fear is most evident among immigrant families. Stories abound about undocumented men and women being detained by immigration authorities at schools, in courthouses, at places of work, at their homes. While deportation is nothing new, and workplace immigration raids have never been uncommon, the level of fear and uncertainty is as high as anyone in recent memory can recall.
Immigrant mothers and fathers have a recurring and increasingly possible nightmare. Their children come home from daycare, school, a baby-sitter, but the parents never arrive. Or their children are waiting to be picked-up, to go home, to eat dinner with their family and do their homework, but are left waiting on a street corner, at a bus stop, in a school hallway, and their parent never shows up. A terrified child waits alone, perhaps in an empty house, perhaps with a friend, perhaps with a friendly bus driver, most likely during a rapidly descending nightfall. To compound the terror, the child ends up spending the night in foster care, not knowing what will happen next. Can a parent be more worried? Can a child’s most unimaginable fear be more palpable? An unexpected deportation will wreak this kind of havoc.
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Advocates around the country tell us that these scenarios are real. They also tell us that even more prevalent is the fear of these possibilities. Living with uncertainty is awful. Living with uncertainty for your children is unbearable. For instance, the Mighty Writers program in Philadelphia is helping children of immigrant parents express their fears, and those fears are pouring out in the form of comic books and writings. The children write about how scared they are at the thought of coming home to find their parents have been taken away. Their inner turmoil is heart-wrenching.
Every immigrant family needs to consult an attorney. They cannot wait until the catastrophe occurs. They cannot wait for the equivalent of an eviction notice that will not come. They need to protect their children immediately. They need immigration experts to help them understand and evaluate all possible forms of immigration relief available to them and their family members under the law. Additionally and critically, they need to consult with attorneys expert at advising, in advance, how to respond to an unseen deportation and their family being separated from one another. Attorneys are invaluable in creating a family preparedness plan, helping the families to think ahead and to think through the complexities of the law, ensuring their children are protected and cared for properly and legally.
Legal aid organizations, immigration advocates, and their pro bono supporters are working around the country and around the clock to offer help. While procedures may differ from state to state, there are basic issues that must be addressed. Identifying, planning for, and making arrangements with a specified adult who can be trusted to provide care for the children is the first thing on any parent’s list. While it may be difficult, it is critical to have a conversation with the children themselves, about who will take care of them, pick them up from school, and provide a temporary home in the event of some emergency. Schools must be notified about who is authorized to take the children home with them.
Having some sort of even informal understanding with that responsible adult, knowing that the caregiver is well-versed in what the parents’ intentions may be, can be very helpful. It will not vest that adult with legal decision-making authority, but it is an important step. Various states have different means of more formally memorializing the parents’ wishes. A caregiver authorization affidavit is available in California as one way to address the issue. In other jurisdictions it may be a power of attorney or some other similar mechanism. Local legal aid providers will know how to help. Courts can grant guardianship rights, appointing an adult temporarily to act in place of a parent. Again, however, there are legal pitfalls and questions that must be asked and understood, issues that only a lawyer can address. For instance, a guardianship may provide great protection and keep a child out of foster care, but it temporarily suspends a parent’s rights over her/his child, a suspension that only the court itself can later lift.
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Pro bono attorneys wanting to help in these situations can contact their local legal aid organizations, their local bar associations, or their local immigration groups. Help is needed and the nation-wide network of legal services offices is the vehicle by which attorneys can get involved and have an impact.
When the immediacy of a deportation occurs, the best prepared families will be the families with less resulting trauma in a most traumatic moment. If ever there is a time for the legal community to step up and help, it is now, it is for families and children living in fear. No matter one’s political persuasion, a child in fear is a child in need.
Photo via Getty Images (Frank Schiefelbein)
David A. Lash serves as Managing Counsel for Pro Bono and Public Interest Services at O’Melveny & Myers LLP. He can be reached at dlash@omm.com. The opinions expressed are his alone.
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