Last week, immigration and customs law enforcement detained Denisse Parra Vargas' three children, two of whom were U.S. citizens and one was born in Mexico - in Texas last week, they also sent them out of the United States as authorities deported their mothers.
The government has responded to the fight against children’s deportation and other U.S. citizens minors, including children with cancer, and has recovered from rare brain tumors, saying that mothers are illegal and have chosen to take their children with them. The family and their attorneys strongly disagree with the mother's choice.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposed in an interview with Meet the Media on April 27 that the situation of children is easy to resolve.
"If these children are American citizens, if there is their father or someone who wants to take on them, they can go back to the United States," he said.
Although lawyers, advocates and researchers agree that U.S. citizens are often entitled to return, they say kids can easily return to the obstacles and difficulties of the United States, which will bring to the United States.
Mich P. González, co-founder of Southern Shelter, said their U.S. citizen children need to overcome many obstacles so that their U.S. citizens can return. His group and its member organizations have been assisting two families whose mother was expelled from Florida and its children, including three U.S. citizens who were sent to them with them.
Gonzalez said the ice often confiscates identification documents when expelling people. He said, for example, the daughter of a 2-year-old U.S. citizen represented by Honduras’ mother González, took her passport away before leaving. This means that the family must obtain the necessary paperwork from the United States to prove that the child was born there.
In many cases, U.S. citizen children first do not have a passport, which is necessary when returning to the United States from a foreign country. Children under the age of 16 arriving from Canada or Mexico must have their original birth certificate or other specific documents to return to the United States if they do not have a passport.
"They don't have a passport and the two children have only a birth certificate," said Naiara Leite Da Silva, the attorney representing Parra Vargas. "Not sure if the mom is original or a copy, but she only has a birth certificate, so it will take a long and puzzling process before they have the potential to come back."
Finding an authorized guardian who is a U.S. citizen and can also be difficult to travel with children, Gonzalez said. The lawyers say families will have to offer the money to pay for sending their children back to the United States or to bear the guardian’s expenses when they may be financially stressed.
According to Gonzalez, one of the biggest complications at the moment is any potential risk of U.S. guardians traveling abroad to have children. The government has raised the power of border authorities to determine who should be accepted back to the country, even those with legal immigration status.
"You might be stuck outside the United States," Gonzalez said.
Activists and lawyers say the country's focus should be on whether children should be fired first.
They believe that parents may have the option to stay in the United States if they have the opportunity to consult an attorney. In some recent cases, attorneys noted that parents can at least address whether their children should stay in the United States and before deportation with them.
Leite da Silva said Parra Vargas's family "strongly opposed the government's narrative that leaving children with them is the choice of the family...they never chose to leave children in the United States." As a result, she called the children "forced expats."
She said Parra Vargas was “in trouble” because families claimed they were told to attend asylum interviews, they would get work authorization documents and were told to take their children with them. According to the attorney, once they are booked and told to be deported, they are not allowed to communicate with their families in the parking lot of the Pflugerville machining center, who are legal residents and can leave their children behind.
In response to NBC news issues, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin pointed out via email that if immigrants in the country were illegally detained, they were “almost certainly detained”. The Department of Homeland Security has previously said Parra Vargas had deported the deportation order after failing to attend the 2019 immigration hearing.
McLaughlin repeated previous statements from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that illegal parents in the country can “control their departure” and leave using government-created apps, and that the government is offering them to those who leave $1,000 and free flights.
Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Program, said ICE adopted a process during the Obama administration - Trump border Czar Tom Homan was acting director of ICE at the time to give families time to decide what to do with their citizens’ children. She added that a mother who was deported from Florida said she did not want her citizen children to have to leave the country.
The decision of parents to decide to spend their children with them or to send them back to the United States is not easy to reach the United States.
Gonzalez said parents must consider whether to abandon them and send their children back to the United States, and even travel without parents could further traumatize their children.
When her mother was deported to Mexico, one of the children sent out of the country was 11 years old and was recovering from a brain tumor.
"When you are 11, think about when you are 11 years old," said Rochelle Garza, chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and chairman of the Texas Civil Rights Program.
Advocates and attorneys are working to file a petition for humanitarian parole to make family members who are not returning to the United States with the girl.
Overall, deported persons are not allowed to return to the United States within three to ten years, depending on their time without legal authorization in the United States.
Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigration families at anti-poverty organizations, said parents prefer to allow older American citizens to stay in the United States.
In some of these cases, older children become guardians of young siblings.
“I’ve seen family members get broken down and older kids stay here, they might be with uncles or aunts, and in some cases if they are close to 18, they are actually people who are taking care of other kids to keep the homes that might be (the parents bought) and become these super young adult caregivers,” Sevats said.
It may take years to return to the United States due to U.S. government policies and parents’ decisions that are forced to live in their parents’ homes. A lot might have happened in those years.
Victor Zúñiga González said children of American citizens may immediately suffer setbacks when they arrive at their parents’ homeland, Victor Zúñiga González, a professor of sociology, studied the migration of Mexican and Chinese children to Mexico and Central America for nearly three years.
In addition to adapting to language and cultural issues, American-born children can establish their legal Mexican citizenship through lack of documents to delay their enrollment, which requires schooling. Mexico grants citizenship to Mexican parents by children born abroad, but requires official certification, and Zúñiga says it spends less time in the United States than in Mexico.
Cervantes said parents could have similar problems in other countries. In Guatemala, requirements for notarized school documents (a process that is different from the United States) can delay enrollment.
Erin Hamilton, a professor of sociology at the University of California Davis University, said that between 2000 and 2015, the population of children born in the United States doubled.
In her study of our birthed children who lived in Mexico in 2014 and 2018, she found one in 1 in there, about 80,000 to 100,000, as they and her research colleagues were deported, calling it “decided in fact.”
Hamilton found that children who were “de facto expelled” were more likely to be financially disadvantaged than those born to us in Mexico. They are also unlikely to be admitted to school, while 70% of children do not have health insurance, while 53% of other born children are not allowed.
"Does we really want a conversation that can evacuate certain American citizens from the country ... create this kind of novel, and they can come back if they want," asked Garza, chairman of the Civil Rights Commission.