FROM her 7 MONTH old BABY. Judge GIVES BABY AWAY!
Encarnación Romero
was an undocumented immigrant working at a
poultry plant in Missouri when she was arrested in 2007 during
a raid by
the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE! She was jailed for two years
for federal identity theft, because she used a fake name and
Social
Security number when applying for her job (those charges, notably,
would
not stick if they were filed today — the Supreme Court rejected
the use
of identity theft prosecutions in simple immigration cases like
this
one). But here a good mother is working and they jail her. Go figure.
In prison and unable to care for her infant son any longer, Encarnacion
Romero
did what many parents would have done (and what my own parents certainly
would have done);she asked her sister to look after the baby, Carlitos,
until she could come home. The sister was already overwhelmed with
her
own three children, and sought help through her church. An acquaintance
took Carlitos to the home of the church’s minister, and the minister
and
his wife contacted another couple who were looking to adopt.
Romero’s parental rights were then terminated,
and Carlitos was
adopted by Seth and Melinda Moser.
Unsurprisingly, Romero did not have adequate legal
representation,
and does not speak English. Lawyers for the Mosers, who adopted
Carlitos, say that Romero abandoned her
child, and “She went by
different aliases, and therefore all the correspondence that the court
sent her, and that I sent her, even that her attorney sent her, all
came
back refused.” Romero’s attorneys, though, say that while she
did seek
employment under an assumed name, she gave ICE officers her real
name
shortly after being arrested. The fact that she was booked under
a false
name doesn’t mean that she abandoned her child — it means that there
was
a clerical error (and possibly that there wasn’t proper translation,
and
that she didn’t have a lawyer).
The case has all the usual hallmarks from there.
* Romero’s lawyer was hired by the Mosers.
* the lack of language skills being used as an argument
against
restoring the child to Romero (mind you, the fact that adoptive couples
going to China and picking up a kid and then forcing the kid to learn
English, but first going through a period of being unable to communicate
with the child they adopted is viewed as ‘cute’, and ‘necessary to
the
process’ not some reason to prevent them from having the child).
* the usual “possession is 9/10 of the law” and “finders
keepers”
type arguments.
The fundamental truth of the matter is, there are winners and
losers in this, and the ‘winners’ as always, are not the
the undocumented immigrant, nor the child.
A lot of the commentary on this story says it’s a
“tragedy for all
involved” and that we’re all hoping for “the best outcome for everyone.”
Except, well, no. It is a tragedy for all involved, but it’s more of
a
tragedy for the woman who had her baby taken from her and for the baby
who was taken than for the couple who knew that parental rights hadn’t
properly been terminated, but apparently thought that their desire
for a
child trumped another woman’s rights to raise the child she carried,
birthed, loved and raised for his first six months of life.
Money, power, and adopter status trumps human and parental rights quite
consistently.
The consequences in cases like this do not fall evenly. A mother’s
“tragedy” results in direct personal gain to the Mosers.
Jill pulls her punches a bit in the piece, hedging and giving some
benefit of the doubt to the Mosers:
I don’t want to impute too many motives on the Mosers,
because who
knows what the whole story is from their perspective.
But for those of us in this field, who have seen cases like this again
and again and again, this is simply adoption business as usual.
This being the industry’s “national adoption month,” (supposedly at
least) focused upon foster adoptions, it’s long past time everyone
put
down the pom poms and began to question how those terminations of
parental rights came to be in the first place.
By focusing on foster adoption merely as something that takes place
in
the space between foster care or state “in loco parentis” and adoption,
far too many conveniently sidestep all the pertinent details of how
kids
came under state custody and the state’s ability to redistribute in
the
first place, in other words, that line of rationalization erases
Families and Mothers.
Encarnación Romero’s case is one of many ways kids are made available
to
the adoption system.
I recently wrote about the role of the hideous “Adoption and Safe
Families Act” and it’s mandatory trigger dates in relation to
termination of parental rights.
More recently, adding new pressures on those in the
system and
parental rights (as well as siblings ability to remain together etc.
)
has been the addition of laws like the “Adoption and Safe Families
Act”
that went into effect in 1997. It has been widely criticized both within
the Bastard community and by those who advocate on behalf of parents
ability to retain their parental rights.
It has had numerous effects upon children in foster
care, not the
least of which being the setting of time frames for almost mandatory
terminations of parental rights, (thereby increasing the number of
children made available to the adoption process.)
In that post, I spoke specifically to how parents entering prison can
lead to the loss of their parental rights:
See this article, A Tangle of Problems Links Prison,
Foster Care as
but one of many examples criticizing the effects of the law on some
of
the most vulnerable of parents in terms of defending and retaining
their
parental rights:
“The hurdles facing imprisoned parents grew higher
in the late 1990s
with the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act. If a child has spent
15
of the previous 22 months in foster care, the law requires that child
welfare authorities file for termination of the birth parent’s rights.
The aim is to set a time period so the child can find “permanency”
instead of foster care — generally, either reunification with the birth
parent or adoption by another family.
Though child welfare agencies can make limited exceptions
to the
timetable based on family circumstances, the law has tightened pressure
on parents to defend their custodial rights. Meanwhile, state policies
make no specific exemptions for incarcerated parents, whose sentences
typically exceed the time line. According to research led by Columbia
University law professor Philip Genty, in the years following the act’s
passage — 1997 to 2002 — termination proceedings for incarcerated
parents more than doubled.”
Romero’s case must be viewed within that broader context.
Parents in prison (or even military service) and charges of having
“abandoned” a child must be understood as the crowbars they are, tools
that serve to sever parental rights even when the parent has no means
by
which to fight back.
Couple this with the federal financial incentives states now have for
doing so, and outcomes like this become an inevitable by product of
the
system.
That’s the meta-picture and systemic adoption problems at the heart
of
this.
But as always, it comes back to all the old prejudices and assumptions
as well.
* who in American society is viewed as a “legitimate”
parent?
* who is considered “brown” and who is considered
“white”?
* who has money and who is not merely poor but economically
vulnerable to manipulation and coercion?
* who is considered “legitimately” American, and
who is
undocumented?
* The role religion plays in all of it, including
this case, and who
has privilege and lack thereof in relation to such.
Etc.
When children are collected from undocumented immigrants you almost
need
a new adoption category as this is neither precisely akin to domestic
adoptions not inter-country adoptions. These form some third
classification whereby people who were previously the “other country”
come to the adopters.
Child collection for purposes of adoption injustices like this
inevitably play out against the broader fabric of race, class, and
societal power and lack thereof.
These cases are never apart from the cultural assumptions that form
the
backdrop adoption itself plays out against.
In light of such the “winners” naturally, have become little more than
a
foregone conclusion.
Giving any benefit of the doubt when states are literally being paid
to
do this shifts the burden of evidence towards forcing individual women
to prove the existence of the system by which they are strip mined
for
the children.
The burden should be on the state and the adopters in light of the
system, to prove they aren’t.
ACTIVISM SUGGESTED: WRITE MISSOURI JUSTICE
DEPT. Tags: Keywords Encarnación Romero, parental rights,
Undocumented
Immigrants, + prison + baby.
IMMIGRANT LAW: DEPORTING BABIES EVEN IF BORN HERE
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/politics/Children-of-Illegals-Should-Be-Deported-Hunter-92313089.html
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