HPR editor with her father Octavio Gomez. Photo by Raul Gomez

Our Father, Who Art in Prison

Our Opinion/ It takes a village to raise a child, but only one law to orphan him

By Cindy Gomez
Editor

“The rights to conceive and to raise one’s children have been deemed ‘essential,’ ‘basic civil rights of man,’ and ‘rights far more precious than property rights.’” — U.S. Supreme Court, Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 503 (1977)

This finding is from a 1977 Supreme court case, but one which was recently quoted in a frightening report by Dorsey & Whitney Law firm in Minneapolis about the U.S.’s neglect of American children born to undocumented workers in the U.S. The report to the Urban Institute (with an advisory committee comprised of leading experts on law, child welfare and immigration) starts out by making a shocking statement that the U.S. is committing human rights abuses of massive proportions on this nation’s children. (Read the full report at: http://tiny.cc/USNeglect).

The report estimates that our U.S. government currently subjects 5 million children (3 million of its own U.S. citizens and another 2 million who are undocumented children) to neglect and lifelong mental and emotional trauma by separating children from their mothers or fathers—in some cases both parents.

Fathers (and families in general) are under attack in this country. This is especially true for fathers that are poor, or not white (read: Latinos, Native Americas, blacks, etc). I’m referring to the people that, for whatever reason, will never avoid being labeled as foreigners to be feared: “new immigrants,” “refugees,” “foreigner,” “new Americans,” “resident aliens,” “illegals,” or whatever the newfangled name for “not white” is these days. These are father’s with a huge disadvantage looming over them. From cradle to grave they must struggle to get equitable education, housing, jobs, medical care, justice. The list goes on and on.

As a former caseworker, this writer experienced first hand the relative ease with which the Department of Human Services (DHS) removed children of color from their parents, sometimes terminating their rights forever, for almost any reason. At the other end of the spectrum, the DHS frequently failed to remove poor whites’ or affluent whites’ children—even in cases where the children were in severe or imminent danger. Difference in cultures has historically led the mostly white DHS workers to treat people of color like savages or idiots. In one case, parents who only spoke Spanish lost their parental rights when they were subjected to, and unable to pass, an IQ tests given to them exclusively in English. They were literally determined to be mentally deficient “idiots” so that the DHS could legally divest them of their children.

But, those practices are not new. When white Europeans settled the U.S., they massacred as many of the indigenous people as they could, before exiling those who refused to die on reservations. The siege on families continued when children living on reservations were removed from their families and separated from siblings to be adopted by less savage white Christian families. The results have been socially stunting and have worked their destruction on several generations all the while distancing Natives from their roots and “assimilating them.”

The U.S. is not “the Borg” from Star Trek. And, children of color are not “aliens” that need to have their minds erased and then be raised as tame animals by white human families. Children of color have fathers, but we need to let them “have” their fathers instead of deporting them or putting them in prison.

Of those 5 million (predominantly Mexican) infants and children stripped of their parents and given in adoption to American families (usually white), most never see their parents again; parents who are deported or sitting in U.S. prisons for simply crossing into this country and trying to be responsible for the children they engendered by earning a living to support them. The callous “they brought it on themselves” attitude with which social workers and government officials have thrown up their hands is one bereft of humanity in the face of horrible conditions that plague the areas many of these families come from.

We live in a country that stands on ceremony and law to strip the most vulnerable among its populace of their civil and human rights by denying fathers who want to care for children the right to do so. We do it by deporting or imprisoning their parents, by using social and child welfare programs to separate them, by refusing to give gay fathers a right to love and raise a family. Can we truly claim we stand for family values and Christianity in the same breath?

We know African-American, Native American, and Latino dads (the documented Latinos for those of you who are counting) disproportionately populate the alternative schools, juvenile halls, county jails, state prisons, and half-way houses in this country.

2011 NAACP Image Award winner in Outstanding non-fiction work for her book “The New Jim Crowe: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Michelle Alaxander, recently spoke some startling truths about how we treat African-American men in the U.S. stating that “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.”

However, the plight of the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, and the oppressed by race or gender bias is something we write off easily by labeling “criminals” and putting them in cages. When it comes to manipulating punitive measures to impose our laws, impacts to families are being ignored. This despite knowing that parents are essential for healthy development of children into adults. Absent parents, mother or father, is devastating to children and to the fabric of community. Children that lack those basic building blocks of life and identity that parents provide flounder in life. Study after study supports that children who are raised without one or both of their parents have poor outcomes socially, in school and in work. Yet President Obama completely ignored the obstacles placed on the oppressed and instead chastised African-American fathers in 2008 saying that “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child - it’s the courage to raise one.” - President Obama, Father’s Day speech, 2008

It isn’t as if the President doesn’t know what effects an absent father will have on these children because he went on to say “We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled - doubled - since we were children. We know the statistics - that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”

But he, like so many others who play at being “colorblind,” are derelict in their duties. We may claim to be a country of family values, but our unjust policies and despotic behavior continue to be one of the most damaging factors to the health of families. The jury is already out and we have the same verdict: massive discrimination and racism is keeping fathers in this country from fathering their children.

Already some Mexican parents are suing the U.S. government and winning their children back; albeit with permanent mental and physical anguish endured. But, they are winning. National civil and gay rights organizations are fighting to assure the rights bestowed upon us by the constitution to fathers of color in this country. But the fight is long and slow. The SB1070 law, for example, may take years to decide in the Supreme Court. Most legal experts say it will eventually be found to be unconstitutional. By then the damage to families will be done and restitution can never replace what families lose in the meantime.

But those who justify their crimes against these little ones in our country should not think they will go unpunished. They should be mindful that war criminals that claimed they were “just following orders” were still tried at the Hague. And, more importantly perhaps, the should be mindful that the same God they pray to will also weigh their actions. 

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