What does child face if parents deported?
Houston Chronicle
www.chron.com
Dec 7, 2006
Q: How many U.S.-born children are left behind when their illegal-immigrant parents are deported?
Randy Capps, a senior associate researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., says no researcher has looked into the question.
But in a recent study titled "Immigration and Child and Family Policy," he found the potential pool is large.
In the United States, one in five children has an immigrant parent. In Texas, the figure is one in four.
An estimated one-third of those immigrant parents are thought to be undocumented — meaning that across the country, about 3 million to 5 million children risk a parent's deportation.
Q: Can't parents argue that they shouldn't be deported because their American children need them here?
Before the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, if undocumented parents could prove to a judge that their deportation would hurt a U.S. citizen family member, the judge could let them stay.
But the act made deportation automatic. Capps said that change added tens of thousands of deportations per year.
The number of deportations jumped from about 40,000 a year in the mid-'90s to 204,000 in 2005.
Q: What happens to children when the parents are deported?
Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said children are rarely left behind, although he has no statistics. "Normally, the parent takes the kids with them," he said.
He explained the agency's standard procedure:
"If ICE knows that a single parent is being deported, they give the parent the option of having the children deported with them, at ICE's expense.
