Foster Program for Immigrants Criticized

The International Educational Services, Inc. is shown Thursday, July 19, 2007,in Brownsville Texas, as a van drops off children at the entrance. The service takes care and placement of illegal immigrant children in foster homes where they live until they can be united with a "sponsor," a parent, relative or family friend within the United States. (AP Photo/Joe Hermosa) (Joe Hermosa - AP)

The foster care programs emerged from the 1997 settlement of Flores vs. Reno, a class-action lawsuit against the former Immigration and Naturalization Service. The suit argued it was wrong for children caught by the Border Patrol to be treated punitively like the adults.

Under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which abolished INS and created the Department of Homeland Security, the care and placement of illegal immigrant children was transferred to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Children would fall under the purview of social service and not federal law enforcement officials.

"The government felt DHS was doing it from a legal authority perspective," said Teresa Brooks, an Office of Refugee Resettlement official responsible for overseeing immigrant foster care programs in the Rio Grande Valley. "They're law enforcement, and that's the way they are."

International Educational Services, which is a nonprofit agency, is one of more than 30 under contract with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Since January, the agency has received $5 million in federal money for two foster programs and the detention center where teens are housed a few miles away in Los Fresnos.

Foster parents are reimbursed for costs of feeding their charges and ensuring they experience "environment" _ which can mean trips to parks and malls. All homes are equipped with cribs for the many teenage girls arriving with babies or in advanced pregnancy. Eventually the children will be on their way to a relative or family friend's home _ somewhere on the felt map of the United States that hangs in the agency's hallway.

"We don't have contact with them after that," Brooks said. "It's up to the sponsors to see that they attend court sessions to see if they can stay or not."

Kathleen Walker, a longtime immigration lawyer based in El Paso, said such programs should be embraced for treating children like children rather than prisoners.

She said the government had records of every sponsor and should have no problem following up on cases.

"In this case you have citizens and legal permanent residents providing you with all kinds of information about where they are and where the person is going to be. So if there's a problem it's not like ICE can't go and do something," she said.

"I think what we're trying to do is be humane," she said. "Is the objection here that we want to make sure that children are behind bars and behind concertina wires?"