NASW Social Work Talks - EP31: Getting Proactive About Child Immigration

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

Martha Gonzalez-Cortes is Senior Vice President of Community Investment at Kalamazoo Community Foundation in Michigan. She has a deep working knowledge of immigration policy issues, and a passion for finding systemic solutions to challenges faced by immigrant and refugee families. We speak with her about immigrant children in the United States who have been separated from their families, and what can be done to put an end to this inhumane practice. See the show notes for resources and a transcript. And if you liked this episode, please leave us a review in iTunes!

Welcome to NASW Social Work Talks. I'm Kat McDonald, and today we're speaking with Martha Gonzalez-Cortez, Senior Vice President of Community Investment at Kalamazoo Community Foundation in Michigan. Martha has a deep working knowledge of immigration policy issues and a passion for finding systemic solutions to challenges faced by immigrant and refugee families. We're speaking with her about immigrant children in the United States who have been separated from their families and what can be done to put an end to this inhumane practice. Remember to see the show notes for related resources. And if you like this episode, please leave us a review in iTunes.

Thank you for speaking with us, Martha. I really appreciate it. Wonderful. Thank you, Kat, for the invitation. Can you describe the work that you do now? I am the vice president of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation, and I am responsible for leading the grant-making team that distributes the unrestricted grant dollars to our local nonprofits. I'm also leading the development and growth of our public policy work at the foundation and have oversight over key initiatives in the community. So you started your career as a community organizer. Can you talk about your early experiences that drew you to your work? My work as a community organizer actually started with a peace and justice group at my church as a high school student in the Rio Grande Valley in Mission, Texas.

I was probably the only high school student in that group that was mostly composed of retirees in my local church. but it was the work that drew me into the community. And one of the issues that I worked on very early on, this was the late 1980s, the work that drew me at that point in time was the influx of Central American children that were arriving at that Rio Grande Valley border community from Central America. They were mostly fleeing the ongoing wars in Central America at the time. So there were a number of children from El Salvador, I think was the largest population of children that we started to see at that time, but also children from Guatemala and a little bit from Honduras. And they were the youngest refugee children we had seen at the border. And it was

startling that they were arriving by themselves. Some of them were as young, I remember at the time they were as young as about eight, nine, 10 and 11 years old. And there was a lot of confusion about what needed to happen next for those children. And it was in 1990 that the Bayview detention facility opened up for the first time and took those children into a setting of confinement. So we went from having like tents outside of City Hall when some of these children camped out to having them rounded up and placed inside a detention facility. And my little church group and others across the region started to organize and mobilize to try to gain access to the children, to check on their health and well-being, to try to determine who they

were, whether or not they had family members or a point of contact in the United States that they were trying to reach, and generally trying to ensure that they were released from that lockdown facility that was meant for adults, not really tailored for children at the time and were placed in a less restrictive setting and were placed preferably back into the community in a more humane way. And so trying to get access to the children, trying to push for transparency and some accountability from local authorities and the federal government, and generally advocating for the children for more humane treatment in their moment of crisis was the starting point of my organizing career.

So fast forward to today, what are we seeing in the current child immigrant crisis that you saw back then? What are some of the similarities and what are some of the differences? I think the similarities are the concerns that advocates have had, for sure. The issue of Questions about the conditions that the children are being detained in when they have that first point of contact at the border with our authorities and attempt to enter the United States or attempt to seek asylum. Questions about clothing, blankets, medical exams that they're receiving and medical attention that they may or may not be receiving, the food that's being provided to them, and then

the length of stay in facilities that may not be appropriate and humane for young children, certainly all of those were major, major concerns back in the late 80s, early 90s as this crisis situation evolved. What's different now is the sheer scope and volume of the crisis that's playing out, not just in one little community in the Rio Grande Valley, but across the border, the U.S.-Mexico border and with so many children. And then, of course, the remarkable development that we've seen over the course of the last calendar year has been the full implementation of that zero-tolerance policy on behalf of the federal government that has been so inhumane in the separation of children from adults that were accompanying them attempting to access

the U.S. and seek asylum. And so those are very significant new developments in this landscape and put a different spin on the contemporary problem, for sure. They're not just detention centers on the border. They're also detention centers in different communities across the United States. Can you talk about those and specifically also about those in Michigan where you are? Well, they're not being called detention centers. They're being referred to as federal foster care placement with contracts with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Michigan has been a receiving state for children in crisis for a number of years through the ORR program.

So we've seen children trickle in through that federal foster care system and placement for a number of years. I want to say that it's been at least 10 years or a good decade since that work has been going on. During the course of that time, there's been one non-profit, faith-based non-profit in our community that has held the largest contract and bed space availability for the children, and that's Bethany Christian Services. They have their international headquarters in the place where I live, which is Grand Rapids, Michigan, and have foster care placements for immigrant children across the western side of the state primarily. and then there are one or two other faith-based non-profits that have also dabbled in the work a little bit over the years that are in central or eastern Michigan but at this point what we've seen what we saw last year when the policy was in full effect was separated children being brought into the state and being placed into the care of Bethany Christian Services. What we understood

from the public reporting of the issue is that we had at least 98 children that were part of that separated immigrant cohort that needed to be reunified by the time we were pushing into the summer and court cases were being fought across the country to make sure that children were reunified with loved ones. So at any given time, Bethany Christian Services had, I think at the high end last year, had about 98 children that were part of that separated immigrant cohort. And then there were other children that had different classifications that were also occupying bed space under that federal contract. And part of what we were concerned about from the advocacy community very early on in this crisis last year was, one, the inhumane nature of the federal public

policy, for sure, as a starting point. Second, not knowing who the children were, what their immediate needs might be, wondering why they were being flown in to West Michigan between two and four in the morning. All of our local commercial airports generally closed down for commercial traffic around midnight, but we knew that there was a pattern developing of having children arriving between two and four in the morning to be dropped off into the care of staff at Bethany. And that was disturbing to us because it meant that maybe there was a different pattern in practice of what was happening with the children. Were they flying in on charter planes? Were they being brought in by defense contractors instead of being brought in by federal civil service staff from the Office

of refugee resettlement, which had been the pattern previously, there were a lot of unknowns. And then, of course, some information started to filter out that said that we had children, some children that had physical and developmental disabilities. There were children that had some severe health issues that were surfacing in their medical evaluations as they arrived. There were a number of children that did not speak Spanish as a primary language. They spoke an indigenous dialect. And there were a lot of questions for us in the community at large about how the agency and the foster families were communicating with these children if they didn't have adequate language access. And of course, for us in Kalamazoo, for me particularly,

I was concerned that the youngest children between the ages of zero and five that were arriving in Michigan under that cohort were being placed in my community in Kalamazoo. So that's part of what drew us into the conversation a year ago with statewide advocates. It's pretty horrifying to hear what's happening to these children. And there's so many questions and it's so hard to know exactly the scope and what's happening because of the sort of secrecy behind it. But you do talk about the need to be proactive rather than reactive. What can people around the country do to become more proactive around this issue? Well, I think that this is a perfect time to be interacting with elected officials and state administrators in your jurisdictions, whether that's your local government or state government.

There really is no better time than now to be talking to administrators and elected officials and asking for more transparency and accountability. One of the things that I think is so hard in the larger advocacy universe and organizing universe right now is that there's so much to react to, so many emergencies, so many crisis issues that are the reality of daily life now, that it's very, very hard to get out of reactionary mode and start to think much more proactively, visioning for community, what could help us get in front of a problem instead of always being in this angry reactionary crisis control mode. And so part of what we've started to do a year ago in our statewide organizing efforts with Latino leaders and immigrant rights leaders across the state was to imagine shifting the conversation with state officials that pushed back at us by saying the complexity of the domestic and federal child welfare system is too difficult to navigate. there is no state jurisdiction that allows us to get involved into asking deeper questions or pushing for transparency. We pushed hard at those assumptions and have questioned those assumptions and have asked, have pushed in the direction of getting our state child ombudsman's office more involved in helping us ask deeper questions about roles and responsibilities and about the ways in which our state needs to make itself responsible for safeguarding the health and

well-being of children that show up in our backyard. We can't become complicit with a federal system that wants to hide children in plain sight and wants to hide them in plain sight in places where maybe the federal government imagines that there isn't enough of an organized advocacy base to ask questions and to push back. And so we're very fortunate in Michigan that we started more than a decade ago trying to organize ourselves to make sure we had strong advocacy organizations in place to assist families and children in this kind of crisis, never imagining a crisis of this scope. But we do have organizations that are now grant funded that are providing individual legal counsel and advocacy to each child that arrives in the state. And they've

developed a very robust partnership. This is the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. They've developed a very robust partnership with the ACLU in the state. So the ACLU is doing counsel for the parents while Merck handles the individual legal counsel for the children. And so at least we have some of the basics of the advocacy infrastructure in place because we worked very hard for many years to make sure that that was set up and ready to go. Now what's needed and what we've been working on in the last year has been this push at administrators and at elected officials to say we need more transparency in the community. We need to know how many children are coming in. We need to know who they are. We need to know that they're being well taken care of and that

everything humanly possible is being done to reunify them with family members if they are indeed being separated from their families. At this point, we're looking for creative solutions. I've been pitching the idea now for almost a year that we need an immigrant child ombudsman in the state of Michigan. I know that there are similar offices that are set up in other states. We're looking at other states for best practice in this arena. At this point, I'm pleased with the level of seriousness that the new state administration has given this issue and the research and the conversations that are happening behind the scenes for how to improve the way that we address our ongoing concerns in a more proactive fashion. And what are some of the

actions that you've been involved with that are happening in Michigan around this issue? A year ago, the NAACP Christian leaders and different faith leaders from across the state and Latino leadership, primarily with a lot of strength out of Detroit, came to West Michigan to the headquarters of Bethany Christian Services to rally outside their international headquarters to bring visibility to this issue, to the issue and concerns of the separated immigrant children that were being placed here in federal foster care, I participated in that action, was very curious about the very robust multi-ethnic, multi-sector coalition that had come together so quickly to help us bring publicity to this issue. In places like Michigan, where we have

four or five hundred thousand Latinos that live here year-round, we don't have the kind of critical mass that you see in other states in the southwest and other parts of the country. And so it really becomes important for us to have intersectional collaboration with other advocacy movements. And so I was very pleased to see that group come together and meet with Bethany officials directly. We've also gotten and mobilized a great deal of support from the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, the leadership at that office at the state level to champion our concerns around these issues with children, as well as the Hispanic Latino Commission has also been involved at the state level. Part of what happened next over the course of the next several months after that rally

about a year ago is that Latino and immigrant rights leaders have had several meetings where we have come together to talk about strategy and about both the reactionary work that's needed and urgent and the proactive agenda that we were hoping to advance. Our elections in November brought us a new tier of elected leadership into Michigan that has been very open and very receptive to all of our concerns and ideas. We've met with the governor's executive team and a number of administrators fairly extensively in the last couple of months. So we're, at this point, I'm pleased with the attention that the issue is receiving both behind closed doors and in our continued conversations with statewide advocates. What resources can social workers and others

access to assist these children and their families? I think that it's important for social workers, especially new folks coming into the work in the field, to be tuned in to the webpages of organizations like the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. At this point in Michigan, they are our point. They are leading the work and doing the individual representation for the Children. They have a great deal of information, as current as it can be, on their webpages. They have a phenomenal staff statewide that is available to answer questions, and they're doing the best that they can to help people think through meaningful ways to volunteer or engage in the work. This is very difficult work to do, and it's very difficult work to become involved in,

again, because of the secrecy that is involved in answering any questions about who the children are and where they are in places like Michigan. But I would say that it's important for people to know what their local resources are in the states where they live and work. For any of those that are listening that are from Michigan, I would certainly point you in the direction of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. Is there anything else that you would like to add or anything else that folks should know about this issue as they are trying to figure out how to get involved? You never say no to a volunteer, and you never say no to resources that people, resources of time or money that people want to give to an issue, because you want to expand the scope of human

concern, right, of people involved in an issue. But this has been really, really hard. And I know that the work last year, when we were at the height of some of this, the work was completely overwhelming to everyone that was involved at the front lines. I think you shouldn't get discouraged if you reach out and you're told there's nothing you can do right now to volunteer, because that might actually be true. But staying informed, continuing to ask questions, continuing to reach out periodically is very, very important, I think. And staying current with the news that's happening nationally and asking questions locally, I think is also really important. There's some public testimony and hearings that have been happening now in the House that are different from, you know,

the experience we were attempting to survive a year ago. And it's not always possible for advocates in a local community to be paying attention to every piece of public comment that's happening in a congressional hearing. And so there's a lot of work that people can do just to continue to monitor all of the developments and changes and shifts of information that are flowing out of the federal government now with some of those congressional inquiries. And then circling back to ask questions of local officials in your jurisdictions to ask, do we have any children coming into this community? Who's receiving the children? What's happening next? Because I think people might be surprised. I think people were surprised last year that children were

being placed in New York City and in other communities across the country with very limited knowledge from local officials that that was happening in their jurisdiction. And so I think one of the key roles that we can ask people to play at this point is to help us to continue to be good researchers, be good followers of all of the developments that are happening at the national level, and then holding local elected officials and administrators accountable by asking some basic questions. We just got information last week that Bethany has expanded their bed space. The federal government has expanded their bed space in Michigan, almost doubled it for the federal foster care program. And Merck was telling us last week that they have confirmation

that we have children that have been placed here now that meet the definition of a separated immigrant children, which is in violation of a presidential executive order and a federal injunction against the policy. And so it's new information. It's just surfacing, but yeah, it's not over. Wow. For sure. Thank you so much for this. It's such a tough topic, but I really appreciate the work that you're doing and also sharing what you know. Kat, I appreciate your time and interest in this issue, and I think it's a responsibility that we all share to continue to stay vigilant on this issue. Thanks. Appreciate it. All right. Bye.

Bye-bye. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts to enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. And don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode. Thank you.