Giving Compass' Take:

• Migration Policy Insitute lays out policy recommendations to better support child immigrants and the children of immigrants in the United States. 

• How can funders help to build support for immigrant families at the local level? What organizations are already working to help immigrants in your community? 

• Learn about South American immigrants in the United States. 

To better understand state and local child welfare systems’ policies and practices for working with immigrant families, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) reviewed relevant literature and conducted discussions with APHSA’s National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators and interviews with administrators in 21 jurisdictions. Drawing from this work, this report describes a set of key policy issues for child welfare agencies and examples of promising agency approaches.

Recommendations:

  • Employ specialized staff or provide access to a skilled point of contact for caseworkers to reach out to for guidance and support on immigration issues in child welfare cases.
  • Develop preservice and ongoing training for frontline workers concerning immigration issues in child welfare cases, with content emphasizing cultural competency and issues relating to legal status.
  • Review whether language access policies adequately reflect the characteristics and needs of the service population, with attention to translation of forms and availability of multilingual staff and interpreters who are not children or other family members.
  • In light of the importance of placing children with relatives when possible and appropriate, identify and address barriers that may prevent noncitizen caregivers, including unauthorized immigrants, from becoming licensed providers.
  • Review policies concerning placement of children with a parent or guardian abroad, develop MOUs with consulates for countries with significant numbers of placements, and ensure that the jurisdiction either has skilled staff or contracts for access to such staff for involvement in these cases.
  • Reach out to consulates whose nationals comprise substantial service populations to coordinate and explore developing MOUs to address respective roles when foreign nationals or children of foreign nationals are involved with the agency.
  • Develop a process, using internal staff or a grant or contract with an outside entity, to ensure that all noncitizen children in care, and parents associated with children in care, are screened for immigration benefits such as naturalization, humanitarian protection, and relief from deportation.
  • Review confidentiality policies to ensure that they explicitly limit information sharing with federal immigration authorities and provide workers with guidance about how to inform adults and children about confidentiality protections, as failure to address concerns about immigration enforcement can prevent child welfare agencies from effectively engaging with immigrant families.
  • Develop policies for communicating with and engaging detained parents in child welfare case planning and hearings, and for sharing the parent’s location with the court and any parent attorney group so that the parent may be assigned counsel; review ICE’s directive on Detention and Removal of Alien Parents or Legal Guardians, incorporate its key provisions into agency policy manuals or guidance to caseworkers, and identify and build a relationship with the appropriate ICE field office point of contact for child welfare matters.