AP investigation: Deported parents may lose kids to adoption
Source: Associated Press
AP investigation: Deported parents may lose kids to adoption
By GARANCE BURKE and MARTHA MENDOZA
56 minutes ago
As the deportees were led off the plane onto the steamy San Salvador tarmac, an anguished Araceli Ramos Bonilla burst into tears, her face contorted with pain: They want to steal my daughter!
It had been 10 weeks since Ramos had last held her 2-year-old, Alexa. Ten weeks since she was arrested crossing the border into Texas and U.S. immigration authorities seized her daughter and told her she would never see the girl again.
What followed one foster familys initially successful attempt to win full custody of Alexa reveals what could happen to some of the infants, children and teens taken from their families at the border under a Trump administration policy earlier this year. The zero-tolerance crackdown ended in June, but hundreds of children remain in detention, shelters or foster care and U.S. officials say more than 200 are not eligible for reunification or release.
Federal officials insist they are reuniting families and will continue to do so. But an Associated Press investigation drawing on hundreds of court documents, immigration records and interviews in the U.S. and Central America identified holes in the system that allow state court judges to grant custody of migrant children to American families without notifying their parents.
And today, with hundreds of those mothers and fathers deported thousands of miles away, the risk has grown exponentially.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/97b06cede0c149c492bf25a48cb6c26f/AP-investigation:-Deported-parents-may-lose-kids-to-adoption
Pachamama
(16,887 posts)Its sickening and someday when the truth is told, these will be stories of shame for our Nation, no different than what Franco's Spain did in taking children from women and giving them to other families for adoption and is only now being confronted and talked about.