Citizen Children Neglected and Deserted in Wake of Immigration Raids
This article, drawing on a report by the Dorsey & Whitney law firm and the Urban Institute, documents the devastating impact of ICE workplace raids on U.S. citizen children through the story of Miguel, a Minnesota boy who came home from second grade to find his parents gone and his two-year-old brother alone after a 2006 raid on a meatpacking plant — an experience that left him, in his teacher's words, "absolutely catatonic." The report finds that one U.S. citizen child is affected for every two adults arrested in ICE enforcement actions, with children experiencing PTSD, anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, and plummeting academic performance as a result of sudden family separation. The article argues that U.S. immigration law is fundamentally broken because it contains no requirement to consider the "best interests of the child," leaving communities, neighbors, and relatives scrambling to care for children whose parents have been detained — sometimes far away and without phone access. Leaders from both parties, including George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi, are quoted calling for immigration reform that keeps families together, with Pelosi calling the separation of parents from their U.S. citizen children "un-American."