Thousands of children of migrants in the US grow up in abandonment, they warn

Fernando Camacho Servin

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, July 17, 2022, p. 8

In the United States, hundreds of thousands of children – many of them sons and daughters of undocumented migrants – grow up without parental care, due to their parents’ death or deportation, but also because they often become addicted to drugs, which has forced the grandparents of the minors to take care of the little ones to cover the hollow intergenerational that has been formed in those families.

This was stated by Mercedes Bristol, a member of the civil organization Texas Grandparents Raising Granchildren (TGRG), who pointed out that despite the discrimination and prejudice faced by older adults, they are the ones who have taken on the task of raising a generation of infants. who is at risk of be lost if you don’t get the support you need.

In a conversation with La Jornada, the activist -daughter of Mexican migrants- explained that more than a decade ago, when she was 57 years old, she had to raise her five grandchildren, all of them minors, after her son and the couple they were incapable of taking care of the little ones.

Right now they are 11, 13, 17, 18 and 20 years old. They are my son’s children, but he did not take responsibility for falling into drugs and because he was diagnosed with depression, while the mother is bipolar, that’s why the State took the children from them. I was working for my retirement at the time, but I grabbed them and became a mom of five.narrated.

It was then that Bristol discovered that his case was not an isolated one. In the city of San Antonio, Texas, where she lives, she began to interact with other grandfathers and grandmothers who lived in the same situation and discovered that, according to studies by the civil organization Generations United, only in that state in the southern United States United States there are at least 303 thousand children in this situation of parental abandonment.

Although this phenomenon does not exclusively harm the children of undocumented migrants, they are the ones who suffer the most from this scenario because, by not having papers that prove their legal stay in the country, they have less access to education, health and programs. social support, the woman noted.

The lack of legal certainty, stressed Bristol, is one of the reasons for the precariousness in which these children live. According to Generations United, for every child who is (officially) in a foster home, or foster home, there are 18 more who live in a relative’s house, but without the right to receive any kind of government aid.

To have a foster home, you must get a license, take 60 hours of class and have a house of a certain size; These are pretty hard rules to follow. No one knows that the grandparents take care of the grandchildren, because some do not have legal papers to make decisions for the children. The State gives them, but without helping them with any resourceshe explained.

Although he admits that no one take care of caregivers of TGRG – which today has some 1,300 members across the country – Bristol pointed out that many grandfathers and grandmothers have no choice but to take care of their grandchildren.

“Many elderly people have our own physical problems, but the job is to save these children, because we could be losing our youth. There are two generations and the middle one –the parents of these kids– is missing. We have to connect the bridge, because the children are our future”, she emphasized.