by Cheryl Cato Blakemore, MBA
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
These words from Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus" inscribed on a plaque at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty transformed the monument into a powerful symbol of welcome and opportunity to immigrants and other travelers entering the U.S. via New York’s harbor.
Despite these welcoming words, the truth is America has not been welcoming to immigrants. As early as 1639, Colonial Massachusetts and Colonial New York authorized local officials to remove poor people who had no legal settlement in the town and to send transient beggars to “the country from whence they came,” respectively.
America’s immigration policies of recent decades have been categorized as divisive and cruel as they have shattered family structures by separating parents and children. In November 2011, Race Forward published a ground-breaking report, “Shattered Families, The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System.” The first national investigation on threats to families when immigration enforcement and the child welfare system intersect, the report explores the extent to which children in foster care are prevented from uniting with their detained or deported parents.
While the report names “immigration policies and laws are based on the assumption that families will, and should, be united whether or not parents are deported,” the report also notes the challenges of the child welfare system, whose policy also aims to reunify families, to actually reunify these families. The reality is that when mothers and fathers are detained and deported and their children are relegated to foster care, family separation can last for extended periods.
This is true of the estimated 1,360 children who, as of late 2024, still had not been reunited with their parents after being separated at the U.S. border during the first Trump administration (Human Rights Watch, 2024). Seven years later with a second Trump administration, in which illegal border crossings are at their lowest levels in seven decades, families are still being separated. This go around, the Trump administration’s push for mass deportations is dividing families of mixed legal status inside the U.S. According to a November 2025 report by ProPublica, Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) sent a record 600 more immigrant children into the federal shelter system than in the previous four years combined. It is also the highest number since record keeping began a decade ago.
Once these children are in shelter, it has become harder and harder to reunify them with relatives or other adults who can act as sponsors. Under the current administration, an average stay for an immigrant child in federal custody due to the detainment or deportation of their parent(s) is nearly six months—up from a month under the Biden administration.
When children separated from their parents are left lingering in the child welfare system, the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) they face cause heightened lifetime risks of physical and psychiatric illnesses, behavior issues, and socioeconomic challenges. Migrant-specific ACEs, such as chronic fear of their own or a loved one’s imminent arrest, the separation of a parent, and detention in an immigration facility, have all been identified as sources of toxic stress. As families move deeper into the immigration system, this stress accumulates and can result in a myriad of poor outcomes, including disrupted brain development, behavior challenges, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Child welfare workers are also being adversely affected by the large number of immigrant children within the system. In addition to being challenged by increased caseloads, many lack ample resources to provide the culturally sensitive key services immigrant children within the system are in need of, particularly: trauma care, legal aid, health (physical and mental), education (especially English language and vocational training), housing, and cultural adjustment.
There are however, some key organizations that can provide services and resources to assist both immigrant children and child welfare workers, including:
- Center on Immigration and Child Welfare (CICW): A central hub for research, training, and resources, offering a large library and technical assistance on policy and practice for immigrant children.
- BRYCS (Bridging Refugee Youth & Children's Services): Provides free online training modules and toolkits for serving refugee and immigrant youth.
- Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights: Offers technical assistance for state child welfare systems, including case consultations, training, and mentorship to improve outcomes for immigrant children.
- Children's Immigration Law Academy (CILA): Focuses on building capacity for professionals to advance immigrant youth rights through training and resources.
- American Bar Association (ABA) Child Welfare and Immigration Project: Supports courts and agencies with practice tools, models, and inter-field connections for immigrant children and parents.
As clearly stated in the Shattered Families report, “the only real answer to this crisis is an end to mass deportation.” The report names the need for governments at all levels to create immigration policies and procedures that preserve the rights of detained parents to determine the fates of their children and that honors the rights and dignity of immigrants in this country.
Cheryl Cato Blakemore, MBA, is Vice President of Narrative, Communications, and Storytelling at Race Forward. She leads a team in deepening and growing the organization’s audiences and engagement. Contact: [email protected]g