Federal immigration authorities detain hundreds of thousands of people every year, but officials are unaware of how many of those individuals are parents, in violation of their agency’s own policy, according to a new report by a government watchdog.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials could not readily search or aggregate data to identify all detained parents or legal guardians, including those with U.S.-born children, the report found.
“ICE is not able to account for the overall impact of its enforcement actions on U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident minors whose parents or legal guardians have been detained,” said Gretta Goodwin, who directs the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s Homeland Security and Justice team, and led the report.
ICE’s own guidelines, adopted in the summer of 2017, spell out that its staff must be aware of the potential impact that arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants could have on children who are U.S. citizens or green card holders.
Detentions by ICE totaled nearly 440,000 nationwide in 2018, about 30% higher than in 2015, according to the report. The watchdog agency also found that the number of detainees who have disabilities, are transgender individuals or are nursing and pregnant women also increased during that period.
The GAO review, published on Dec. 5, was requested by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a San Jose Democrat, who chairs the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship.
Although ICE collects information on some parents and legal guardians, it does so only for individual cases that require accommodations, such as child visits to detention centers or transportation for parents to attend child welfare hearings, said Britney Walker, an agency spokeswoman.
Those cases represent only a small proportion of all parents in ICE custody, according to officials quoted in the GAO report.
“ICE does not have any requirement or need to aggregate or instantaneously pull data on the parent or legal guardian population, and doing so would not better inform ICE’s decision-making processes,” said Walker.
In California, about 750,000 students in grades K-12 have undocumented immigrant parents who are at risk of arrest by ICE, according to an analysis by The Education Trust—West, an Oakland-based think tank focused on academic equity.
Knowing the total number of detained immigrant parents could help shape policies to address the needs of families in California and the rest of the country, said Bill Hing, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law.
“Without that information, we don’t know the extent of family separations that result from ICE enforcement policies,” said Hing. “It’s very important to inform ICE’s decision-making process, to know the data and to be able to have that information quickly.”
Finding out if arrested immigrants have children could lead ICE to detain parents closer to home or allow them to remain free while their cases are decided in immigration court, said Abigail Trillin, who directs Legal Services for Children in San Francisco.
But Trillin said she also feared that such questioning could lead to immigration enforcement against more children
“We have to be cautious about any line of inquiry that gets into the immigration status of anyone, especially children,” said Trillin. “Because in our current immigration climate we don’t want any inquiry that could lead to more detentions, more deportations and ultimately family separations.”
During the final years of President Obama’s administration, immigration enforcement was focused on arresting and deporting convicted criminals and people considered threats to national security. But in the first week of his term, President Trump greatly expanded those targets to include any noncitizen who is charged with a crime, or did something that could be charged as a crime.
ICE produces semi-annual reports to Congress on the total number of deported parents of children who are U.S. citizens by manually reviewing its records. But those statistics miss many arrested parents who are still in custody or who opted to leave the country without formal deportation proceedings, said Hing.
When a parent is detained or deported, a child is much more likely to suffer anxiety and depression, as well as economic instability, according to the American Immigration Council.
ICE’s guidelines direct officers who encounter children while making an arrest to try to allow the parent to arrange for someone else to care for their kids before agents call a child welfare agency.
About 5,000 U.S. citizen children with parents who were deported or detained lived in foster care in 2011, according to a national study by the Urban Institute and the Migration Policy Institute.
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