A recent lawsuit involving state agencies and a baby wrongly taken from an immigrant mother exposes the injustices that occur when power, privilege and immigration collide.
The lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center on Aug. 12, 2010 alleges that Mississippi authorities took a newborn baby from a Mexican immigrant mother and placed the child with a white couple. The SPLC also has appealed an earlier gag order that prohibited the mother and her lawyers from speaking publicly about her family’s ordeal.
“Mississippi officials and hospital workers conspired to steal Cirila Baltazar Cruz’s baby by inventing false charges against her – allegations she couldn’t refute because she doesn’t speak the right language – and then told her she couldn’t talk about it,” said SPLC Legal Director Mary Bauer. “This was an outrageous violation of her most fundamental rights, and we’re deeply concerned that other mothers in Mississippi might be subjected to the same treatment.”
According to a Time Magazine article last year, the hospital deemed her an unfit mother in part because her lack of English “placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future.”
This is not an isolated incident. A similar case just came to a head last month in Missouri where a mother detained on immigration charges had her baby adopted against her wishes to a couple while she was incarcerated. Fortunately, an appeals court overturned the adoption proceedings deeming a parent’s rights to raise children “a fundamental liberty.”
Both of these cases involve health care employees, attorneys, educators, and judges who unlawfully or immorally facilitated the separation of these children from their biological mothers and into the arms of adopting couples. Both cases warn of an ugly trend: the privileged, with the help of racist institutions and broken policies, are preying on poor women of color – specifically women who are vulnerable due to their immigration status.
Even the proclamations of the adopting parents are disturbing. In the Missouri case the couple was able to plead their story in the media long before a court with any authority on the matter could hear the case.
Their argument was essentially that they could provide a better life for the child. One of their points was ironically almost identical to that of millions of young undocumented students currently fighting for a path to citizenship: they didn’t want “their” child to return to a country he’d never known with his birth mother. The key difference is these millions of students are right now fighting to keep their families intact, not tear them apart.
And well-intentioned though these couples may have been initially, they must have realized at some point that they were complicit in a conspiracy to deny a mother her child, and blind to the fact that citizenship, nationality, or wealth don’t determine one’s worth as a parent.
In the end, the so-called good intentions of all involved came out more like cruel, self-serving paternalism.
History is full of such tragedies. Perhaps the most infamous involved Australian Aboriginal children who were systemically stolen from their parents by the government and placed with white families for over one hundred years. All in the name of “protecting” the children. It will forever remain a shameful stain on Australia’s history.
In a broader example, the State of Oregon recently reported that the rate of child abuse is about the same for white families as for minorities, but that Native American children are in foster care at nearly six times the rate that their population would suggest and African American children are twice as likely to be in care. The culprit? Widespread institutional bias. And there’s no reason to believe this problem is confined to Oregon.
It’s an extraordinarily powerful method of dehumanizing people – breaking up their families, taking away their children. It’s clear that attacks on immigrants in this country now include doing just that. It must be stopped.