Over the final four months of 2021, Olga, a Honduran immigrant in Hollywood, Florida, grew increasingly panicked. She could not find her 5-year-old son, Ricardo. After she’d fled her homeland to escape her abusive husband, the man also migrated, disappeared with the boy and broke off contact.
By day, Olga lived her life. She cut, colored and styled hair at a Miami salon, chatting with clients as if she hadn’t a care in the world. She mothered her 7-year-old daughter, Dariela, straining to distract her from the fact that her little brother was missing. But the nights were tough. “I cried into my pillow,” Olga said. “Where was my sweet little boy? Was he, at least, safe?”
He was not.
By the time Olga, then 28, tracked her son to Massachusetts, he had been removed from his father over allegations of physical abuse. Calling office after office of the Department of Children and Families, she finally reached a woman who turned out to be Ricardo’s caseworker.
“Who are you?” the woman said.
“Yo soy la mamá,” Olga replied, bursting into tears.
In early January 2022, Olga, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her children, flew to Boston. It would only be a matter of presenting evidence — Ricardo’s birth certificate, videos of him on her phone, DNA if necessary — before she could take him home, she thought.
But when immigration and child welfare are involved — two contentious issues and their beleaguered systems — nothing is straightforward.
Under an interstate compact, Massachusetts formally asked Florida to approve the relocation. Florida said no. Although a caseworker found Olga to have a clean record, a proper home and sufficient income, she denied the move because Olga was not a legal U.S. resident.
Massachusetts does not consider immigration status a reason to prevent reunification with a parent. But intensely cautious amid a scandal involving another child’s death, the state’s child protection authorities froze, sending Ricardo on a destabilizing odyssey through the foster care system. In a case that reveals the unique vulnerabilities of immigrant parents, Olga risked losing her son forever.
Immigrant family separation did not start or stop with the Trump administration’s thwarted “zero tolerance” policy. Now as before, and with record numbers of new immigrants without legal status fanning out across the country, it happens more insidiously.
“When people think of family separation, they think of the Southern border and kids in cages,” said Lori Nessel, director of an immigrant rights clinic at Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey. “But people don’t realize how much this occurs every day in the interior of the country.”
Like other poor parents, immigrants in the U.S. without legal status encounter the chronic fallibility of state-run agencies in which Black and Hispanic children are overrepresented. They also tangle with the antiquated bureaucracy that governs the relocation of children across state lines.
But their status puts them at an additional disadvantage. They confront language and cultural barriers as well as limited access to services and benefits, fear of immigration enforcement, inadequate legal representation and, finally, anti-immigrant bias.
Additionally, many caseworkers and judges harbor the misconception that all immigrants without legal status are on the brink of deportation, viewing their homes as inherently unstable. Yet fewer than 1% were removed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year.
Cristina Cooper, senior attorney with the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law, described Florida’s decision in Olga’s case as “shocking and harmful.” Immigration status alone does not make a parent unfit. And under the 14th Amendment, fit parents, regardless of immigration status, have a protected right to the care, custody and control of their children.
Asked whether it was now Florida’s policy to refuse custody based on immigration status, Miguel Nevarez, press secretary for the state’s Department of Children and Families, neither answered directly nor denied it. “Cases regarding one’s legal or illegal status wouldn’t exist if the federal government enforced our immigration laws,” he said.
In Olga’s case, that line of thinking trickled down to South Florida from Tallahassee, where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill last spring that he proudly called “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.”
When Olga’s advocates phoned her caseworker’s supervisor, according to Nick Herbold, the boy’s first foster father, the woman told them: “Hey, we’re in Florida. She’s undocumented. There’s no concern about the home. There’s no concern about safety with the mother. It’s just the fact that politically we cannot sign off on it.”
Growing up near the Maya ruins of Copán, daughter of a tailor and a factory worker, Olga set her sights on a professional career. But in her first year studying law at the University of San Pedro Sula, she met Ricardo’s father. (He did not respond to messages from The New York Times.) In her second year, she got pregnant and dropped out.
Even before they married, her boyfriend became volatilely “machista,” she said. After their two children were born in quick succession, he turned physically abusive to her and Dariela. When she finally kicked him out, she didn’t trust him to stay away.
Selling property, Olga raised $10,000, enough to pay the way to the United States for herself and one child. Leave Ricardo with me, her mother said, pledging to travel north with him later.
The journey was harrowing, but once Olga and Dariela were safely ensconced in a relative’s spacious house in Coral Gables, Florida, Olga started to regret leaving the boy behind.
Still, Ricardo was fine with his grandmother — until his father showed up and forcibly reclaimed him, Olga said. The man then traveled with Ricardo to Hawaii and eventually disappeared with him into the vast U.S. mainland.
In mid-November 2021, Ricardo’s father enrolled him in kindergarten at the Albert F. Argenziano School in Somerville, Massachusetts. Four days later, Ricardo told his teacher that his body hurt. A child who idolizes superheroes, he willed himself not to cry as he revealed a vivid bruise on his leg and confided that his father beat him with a belt when he misbehaved.
Alarmed but not wanting to alarm the rest of the class, the teacher quietly asked her paraprofessional to take the small child to the health office.
The nurse observed not only the contusion on Ricardo’s leg but also other, fading bruises. She alerted the principal, Glenda Soto, that she would have to immediately report suspected abuse to the child welfare department.
“O Lord, give me strength,” Soto said to herself. In her seven years as an administrator at Argenziano, an elementary school with nearly 600 students, she had dealt with only one case in which a child had to be taken from a parent.
Ricardo was whisked away for a forensic examination at Boston Children’s Hospital. Christianne Sharr had just started there as a physician assistant, although she was not at work when her phone rang late that Thursday.
“We have an emergency removal,” a foster care worker said. “The child needs a home tonight.”
Sharr and her husband, Herbold, a software engineer, were new foster parents, having been eager during the pandemic “to do something hopeful when the world felt superheavy,” she said.
At 3 a.m., a social worker delivered Ricardo to the porch of their Cambridge home. When he shifted the sleeping child into Sharr’s arms, she studied his face and thought, “Oh, he’s beautiful.” After tucking him into bed, she kept vigil outside the bedroom until day broke and she heard him stir.
Leaping up, Ricardo ran to the window. “Papá! Papá!” he cried. He had been on the move for much of the year. Now, like his mother, he had no idea where he was.
On that first day, Herbold and Sharr whisked Ricardo away to a preplanned family gathering at a farm resort. In their hotel room, when he and Sharr were building block towers, he blurted, “Oh, you know what I want to tell you? I want to tell you that sometimes my dad scares me.”
The following week, the Department of Children and Families, known as DCF, granted Ricardo’s father a supervised visit at the school. When Ricardo saw his father, he collapsed, screaming and crying.
Afterward, the principal, Soto, who is Puerto Rican and bilingual, intercepted the man. “I need to ask you, Where is Ricardo’s mom?” she said. “Because she needs to be notified.”
From that point onward, the school took Ricardo under wing. “I felt, you know, in the absence of his mother, we have to try to replace that here in the building,” Soto said.
A month later, shortly before Christmas 2021, the child welfare department announced it was going to move him.
In mid-January, Olga nervously paced the lobby of a Boston Holiday Inn, waiting for a social worker to arrive with her son. When they walked through the door, she fell to her knees and enveloped him in her arms.
Ricardo wriggled out of her embrace, shouting: “What took you so long? Why didn’t you come find me sooner?”
Olga was appointed a free lawyer who did not speak Spanish. Because her English was still rudimentary, she decided to pay for one who did, and that cost her more than his $2,000 fee: The lawyer specialized in immigration, not family law. And it appears from the docket — the record is impounded — that he failed to make what could have been a crucial early plea.
In his place, lawyers consulted for this article said they would have immediately requested a temporary custody hearing and argued that Olga should be presumed fit absent any proof that she posed an imminent risk to her child. And then, in the best of circumstances, Olga could have walked out of the courtroom with her child.
But the child protection system was at that very moment embroiled in a cross-border custody scandal, whose shadow hung over Ricardo’s case.
Finally, six months after Olga’s lawyer requested a trial date, one had been scheduled.
On Jan. 19, 2023, after a four-hour hearing, the judge found that Ricardo should be returned to Olga’s custody.
But before Olga had a chance to embrace her victory, the judge stayed his order for six days to give the child protection department time to appeal. And as she left the courtroom and returned to Florida to get her daughter back to school, Olga feared the worst.
Her advocates, however, chose optimism. On the eve of the department’s decision, Herbold flew south with Ricardo.
“OK, so now we go to Mom’s, right?” Ricardo asked him.
“Oh, dude,” Herbold replied. “You have to hang out with me for the night, because tomorrow the big boss is going to make a call as to whether you get to live with Mom or if you just get to see Mom and then we have to fly back to Boston.”
The next day, more than a year after Olga first presented herself to the authorities in Massachusetts expecting an imminent reunion with her son, the custody decision became final.
Ten minutes after she got the news, Olga arrived at the hotel in buoyant spirits. She ran toward Ricardo and scooped him up in a fierce hug. As she stared into his eyes and he into hers, she staggered into the future with the boy in her arms, dangling but attached.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2024 The New York Times
