When An Immigrant Mom Gets Arrested
Colorlines, News feature, Julianne Ong Hing and Seth Wessler, Posted: Jul 12, 2008
Julianne Ong Hing is an editorial fellow at ColorLines. Seth Wessler is a research associate at the Applied Research Center.
BEHIND THE THICK GLASS THAT RUNS THE LENGTH of the Yuba County Jail’s visitation corridor, Tatyana Mitrohina’s eyes glisten, and then fill with tears as she recounts the last time she saw her son. “During the visit, he climbed into my arms and fell asleep with his head on my shoulder while I walked around with him,” she remembers.
Two months after that visit, Mitrohina was sent to the Yuba County Jail in Marysville, California, hours away from her 2-year-old son, who is in foster care. She was convicted on charges that she had hit him. While she does not deny the charges, she does say she had expected to be released from jail and to get counseling and start to rebuild her life with her child. But with the increasing collaboration between local authorities and federal immigration officials, Mitrohina found that she would not get that second chance. The government had slated her to be deported to Russia, the country she left as a teenager.
“When I first got here, I would break down crying once a week, just thinking about everything that’s happened,” says Mitrohina, who is 30 years old.
Immigration and child welfare advocates say that Mitrohina’s story—the loss of her child, her incarceration and detention, and her struggle to care for her child—represents a new and dangerous terrain at the intersection of three government systems—deportation, incarceration and foster care—that are tearing apart poor families and families of color.
While rates of detention and deportation have increased exponentially in recent years, what is happening to immigrant families is not a new story. It has been played out time and again in the lives of Black families who, in the past 20 years, have faced an increase in drug-related arrests and sentences that place Black parents in jail and their children in foster care. As immigrant families find themselves targeted by a combination of public policies, it is becoming clear that their experiences and those of Black families, women and children are troublingly similar.
* * *
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA), increasing the ease with which immigrants—including green card holders—could be deported, especially as a result of criminal convictions. “Criminal aliens” (as they are labeled by the government, especially those classified as “aggravated felons”) can now be summarily deported, even if they served jail time many years ago. In addition, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, can place detainers on immigrants in jails and prisons, even those still awaiting a hearing or trial. Upon completion of their sentence, these people face removal proceedings. In the wake of 9/11, a growing number of local governments have also begun collaborating with ICE informally and formally through 287(g) programs that deputize local police to enforce federal immigration laws. Without some degree of local collaboration, Mitrohina would never have faced deportation.
According to the government, deportation is technically an administrative procedure, so it doesn’t fall under the aegis of double jeopardy. Yet deportation effectively sentences people to exile. “You would be hard-pressed to find a detained immigrant in the United States who did not constantly feel that they were being punished a second or third time for the same mistakes, solely due to their immigration status, including lawful permanent residents like Tatyana,” said Raha Jorjani, an attorney at the Immigrant Law Clinic at the University of California, Davis, who helped file an appeal on Mitrohina’s behalf.
In the past 12 years, deportations have quadrupled to more than 200,000 annually. About 100,000 people choose voluntary deportation every year. Meanwhile, deportations based on criminal convictions have increased nearly threefold, reaching almost 90,000 a year. The impact on families has been devastating. Human Rights Watch reports that since IIRAIRA went into effect there have been a minimum of 1.6 million children and spouses separated from their families as a result of deportation.
While enforcement in its totality—the raids, border enforcement, local cooperation with ICE, employer verification, special registration and deportation—is like a wrecking ball for families, Jayashri Shrikantiah, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Stanford University, argues that “it is criminal deportation where the laws are harshest.”
“It’s a double whammy for families,” she said about cases like Mitrohina’s. “The child has already been separated from the parent if the conviction is recent enough, or the parent has already suffered time in prison and then it happens a second time, and again there is a separation from the child.”
There is growing anecdotal evidence that the increase in detention and criminal deportations is fomenting a trend where the children of immigrants—80 percent of whom are U.S.-born citizens—are placed in foster care. ICE and child welfare departments do not gather, let alone share, much information on the families or gender of deportees or the citizenship of foster children’s parents, so it’s impossible to know how many children have been institutionalized so far. The lack of data collection is a major problem for advocates, who are seeing the trend grow but cannot prove its scale.
Mitrohina herself says that another woman in the Yuba County jail is facing a situation similar to hers. According to Mitrohina, the woman was charged with negligence after her 14-year-old daughter ran away from home and tried to get an abortion. ICE was called to detain the mother, who was a 30-year U.S. resident. Even without knowing the scope and scale of the children being placed in foster care as a result of parental detention and deportation, these stories suggest a harrowing reality for immigrant families.
* * *
Mitrohina has long, brown hair that she has to tug back behind her ears every few minutes. She is serious as she answers questions and recounts her story. She speaks in long streams of thought, often jumping from the recent past to her childhood when describing her current circumstances. It’s a life that has been marked by the tolls poverty and public institutions take on families.
Mitrohina was born in 1978 in Russia with deformities on her hands and feet that she says her parents could not accept. “They considered me inadequate and worthless, and told me so all the time,” she said. After shuttling in and out of public institutions as a child, her parents put her up for adoption when she was 14.
She was adopted by a couple in Sonoma County, California, soon after, but did not have an easy transition to life in the United States. And although her parents applied for her to receive citizenship, a combination of bureaucratic delays and legal missteps left Mitrohina without it. At the age of 21, she moved out of her parents’ home and has not been in contact with them since. Although years have passed, Mitrohina speaks about her childhood with an anger and confusion that is immediate.
In 2005, the prenatal clinic where she’d been receiving care made house visits and diagnosed Mitrohina with postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her deeply troubled childhood. “I really thought I could deal with my problems on my own,” she said. “They offered counseling, and even when CPS [Child Protective Services] got involved, I never accepted it because I was afraid they would take my baby away.” She acknowledges now that the enduring trauma of being cast out of her own family compounded her struggle to cope with the stresses of new parenthood and joblessness.
Things were looking up, though, Mitrohina insists. Before her arrest, she had found a job for the first time in two years and had completed two semesters at the Santa Rosa Junior College. But the strains of being a single mom on public assistance were too much for her, and she was arrested in June 2007 for abusing her son. Her child was temporarily put in foster care, and the Family Court in Sonoma County agreed that it would be in the child’s best interest to return home if Mitrohina completed a short jail sentence and six-month probation. The terms of her probation required that she enroll in parenting and anger-management classes, seek counseling and begin a course of medications to manage her depression.
photo: Jorge Rivas
Two days after Mitrohina’s sentencing, however, she found that ICE had put a hold on her record. She had been added to the long and steadily growing queue of non-citizens slated for deportation. Mitrohina was sure the ICE detainer would amount to little and felt confident that her legal entry into the country and green card would clear up the minor glitch in her case.
But it was a race against time: every day she remained in ICE custody was another day she violated the terms of her probation and risked losing her son permanently to the foster care system. She fought for a Cancellation of Removal but was denied. She then appealed that judge’s decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals but was also denied.
“The goals of that [family] court conflicted with the goals of the immigration court, which were to determine whether or not someone in Tatyana’s position deserved a second chance in the United States,” Jorjani explained. Mitrohina was stuck between two legal systems that do not communicate.
Searching for escape from this catch-22, Mitrohina still visits the law library and carries around a sheaf of notes of applicable cases and laws she wants to explore to push her case further.
Deportation, though, is now a near certainty, but not one she can accept.
* * *
Immigrant mothers are not the first to deal with the ways that different government agencies intersect, usually to their detriment. The experiences Black families have had with child welfare and criminal justice policy make clear what can happen to communities when family policy intersects with a set of other punitive policies.
In 1997, just a year after the passage of IIRAIRA, then-President Clinton signed another bill that slammed poor people and people of color. The Adoption and Safe Families Act came on the heels of changes in welfare policy. It terminated the parental rights of anyone whose child had been out of their custody and in the child welfare system for 15 of the previous 22 months. The law sped up the process for the children to be legally adopted.
In large part because of mandatory minimum sentencing polices that came out of the War on Drugs era, incarcerated parents have their rights terminated at a higher rate than others, and this disproportionately affects Black parents who are incarcerated at rates far higher than whites. Black children are about nine times more likely than white children to have an incarcerated parent and comprise 37 percent of the foster care roles despite being only 15 percent of the total population. Families are, in effect, being punished twice over.
Like Mitrohina, whose ICE detainer prohibits her from completing her probation to regain custody of her son, mandatory minimum sentences that last longer than 22 months make it impossible for incarcerated parents to take the necessary steps in proving their willingness and desire to care for their children. According to Dorothy Roberts, arguably the nation’s leading scholar on race and child welfare policy, there is a connection between the child welfare and criminal justice systems. “These are punitive systems,” she said, adding that they are “ways of regulating poor people, especially people of color.”
This punitive approach to sentencing and deportation works against family and child welfare because family well-being requires care, not punishment. In her book Shattered Bonds, Roberts writes, “One way to preserve more families is to prevent child maltreatment. An overwhelming body of research on the negative effect of poverty on children tells us that generous public support of child welfare would dramatically reduce cases of child abuse and neglect.”
The fact that these systems work punitively is no surprise. “For hundreds of years, we have addressed problems largely related to poverty by way of mass incarceration of people of color and expansion of a prison-industrial complex. Similarly, rather than engage in meaningful immigration reform, we destroy families, create fatherless and motherless children by detaining immigrants, then forcibly ship them to countries many of them have not seen since they were a few years old,” said Jorjani.
Black and immigrant communities facing similar circumstances offer new opportunities for multiracial coalitions and organizing.
Loretta Ross, national coordinator of Sister Song, the Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, reflected that just as “welfare reform impacted primarily Black and Latina women, once it became clear to Korean business owners that this is going to affect their mothers and elderly too, it did provide the space for people to work across race and across issue. There has to be an increased level of solidarity work and the people involved in child welfare would have to have been involved.”
This past spring, Mitrohina was occupying her time with books, letter-writing and television, anything to keep her from dwelling on her past and her uncertain future. She tries to nap, too. Every day between breakfast and lunch, Mitrohina returns to her cell and tries to sleep away her anxiety. The likelihood that she will never see her son again dominates her thoughts.
“I know firsthand what it is like to be abandoned,” Mitrohina said. “And now this is what my baby will grow up thinking happened to him.”
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User Comments
Melle on Jul 15, 2008 at 14:39:35 said:
I'm just really saddened by the callousness of the comments here. No matter where you come down on the issues, this is a story of human beings; a mother and a child. A little understanding and kindness can be shown even if you think the courts are doing the right thing in her case. After all, which of us has not made mistakes in their life? And ask yourself what choices you would have made had you spent the first 14 years of your life under such horrible conditions.
Charlotte Rose on Jul 15, 2008 at 11:50:38 said:
Uhm, excuse me, but this article was on the risks faced by BOTH legal and illegal immigrants, with a case study on a LEGAL immigrant. The law that effectively made it easier to deport people even affected people with GREEN CARDS, as was mentioned in the article. Such sickening racism displayed by the comments is outrageous and really shows the true reasons behind anti-immigrant activism. Posts also seem to ignore how blantantly deporting legal immigrants is violating double jepardy.
Deport Em on Jul 15, 2008 at 11:29:00 said:
Sorry, but just another sob story for a woman who did not do right for herself or her child. She never bothered to go through the process of becoming legal, then abused her child. Maybe this kid is better off in foster care. All people need to understand that what happens in their life is tied to their behavior. Its all about personal responsibility. And if you decide to bring children into this world, you are repsonsible for them as well. If people cannot conduct their personal lives in a responsible manner and instead get caught for whatever charge, then that person is to blame if their family is affected. Quit blaming everything on everyone else or the gov't instead of the person who has screwed up their own lives and those of their children.
Nezzie on Jul 15, 2008 at 06:04:19 said:
Perhaps some of you missed this one
"And although her parents applied for her to receive citizenship, a combination of bureaucratic delays and legal missteps left Mitrohina without it." I did not. It was unfortunate that she never got her citizenship, but she did not pursue it after leaving her parents home at the age of 21 and has no not been in touch nor seen them since that time. The children born to illegal immigrants are NOT, I repeat NOT, American Citizens. They need to be deported along with the parents. If they choose to come back to America after reaching the age of 21 and apply for true citizenship, then so be it. This law, that has been grossly mis-interpreted needs to be amendmended, back to what the 14th Amendmendment really meant. It did not give our country to illegal alien parents and the illegal children they born within our borders. I am a compassionate person, but I am not willing to continue to use my tax dollars to support another country 3 times over, be it Russia, China, Mexico or any of the Islam countries in the world. We must vote for a third party, we need to clean our house, close the door for a moment and catch our breath. This is getting too much to bear! Join a grassroots organization in your area, join HelpSaveMaryland.com
Aniri on Jul 14, 2008 at 17:28:10 said:
This is not about illegal immigration. This is about LEGAL immigrants being deported!!! I am shocked.
Dee on Jul 14, 2008 at 13:56:47 said:
I think most of the people commenting missed the point that the lady mentioned in the article is a legal immigrant.
It is unfare for LEGAL IMMIGRANTS to be deported without a second chance. The penalties faced by legal immigrants seem harsher that those faced by illegal immigrants.
kate on Jul 12, 2008 at 14:47:06 said:
Wow, if the US is such a racist place to live, why don't they just leave? Instead we've got 20 million illegals flooding the borders. Must not be so bad, hu?
Bernie on Jul 12, 2008 at 11:27:43 said:
No sympathy here. The message is loud and clear. If you choose to come here illegally, then you must accept the consequences of your actions. NO AMNESTY.
B Bob on Jul 12, 2008 at 10:24:58 said:
Posted by: Ryan H
Guess you would say that daily bombardment of the Internet, shows that
illegal immigration is a volatile issue that isn't going away. Our
politicians promised 'No more Amnesties' after the 1986 Simpson/Mazzoli
Immigration control act. But Ultra Liberal Ted Kennedy lied to the American
people. Right now anti-illegal advocates are battling to bring the Federal
Save Act (H.R.4088) to a vote, because like potentate speaker Nancy Pelosi
trying to dismantle the original plans of the border fence. This Democratic
lady and her minions are intimidating her moderate people not to sponsor
this piece of legislation.
The author fails to mention that ALIPAC, NUMBERSUSA, AMERICAN PATROL,
LIBERTY POST, GRASSFIRE,IMMIGRATION NEWS INDEXER, doesn't have the benefit
of big business and the special interest lobby financing them. The soul
donors to all the pro-sovereignty, anti-illegal immigrant organizations is
the general public.
Our main problem now is potential President Obama stated in a previous
speech, he would offer a path to citizenship. Which means a massive
AMNESTY, for all the illegal aliens, who ignored our laws. The newspapers
restrict information about the carnage within our communities and on the
highways, by the criminal element that have also entered through our highly
deceptive line--the government calls a border. Yet another deceptive
report, is the numbers of illegal foreign nationals that have entered here.
May be 5 years ago it was perhaps, 12 million. But today UNIPAC has
estimated that the illegal population is at least 30 million.
Has anybody taken into consideration if another AMNESTY passes, what are
going to be the ramifications of this law? It will mean an immediate rush
towards the border, from either Canada or Mexico because they will be
expecting a third AMNESTY...?
It's not bigotry or the race card..its about saving our way of life, the
quality of life. It about millions of poor, illiterate people suddenly
legal, able to steal the jobs of own poverty stricken citizens. The single
Moms with children, homeless veterans back from an ugly war along with the
sick and infirm and of course senior citizens. Would you not call it
discrimination, when a Teacher with tenure loses her job because she
doesn't speak Spanish.
If you listen to the pro-illegal immigration business funded groups, who
talk about that it will be great for the economy? Perhaps you might ask an
ailing California; a 'Sanctuary State' that has become a haven for illegal
immigrants. Then read about Arizona that has shown a remarkable economic
comeback, as illegal aliens have been fleeing owing to its new harsh
employer sanction laws.
Overpopulation, congestion, urban sprawl, pollution, Water shortages,
environmental damage, crime, diminishing resources, Diseases, lack of
affordable housing, depressed wages, underground economic, fraudulent
documents, identity theft, tax evasion, soaring crime rate, increased tax
burdens, overcrowded schools, uneducated children, overcrowded prisons,
inadequate health care, the balkanization of our communities and a large
and growing population with loyalty to other Nations. The overall decline
in our quality of life are the result of unrestrained illegal immigration!
America cannot accept the worlds destitute population of other countries.
Criminals, Undesirables and Uneducated people. Too many people chasing too
few resources is not sound economic, social or cultural policy. This is not
racism but pragmatism & common sense!
Every industrialized nation has taken steps to end illegal immigration and
to limit legal immigration to only that which is prudent, demonstrably
necessary, and above al! l other concerns, in the best interest of their
native population. Its insane to suggest that America should not do
likewise! England and Australia have adopted a points system, when it comes
to immigration. You are just not going to get a working visa, unless you
have valuable skills to offer that nation.
If we enact the SAVE ACT (H.R.4088) as an enforcement tool against illegal
foreign nationals. Then they repatriate their person by ATTRITION. After
that then we could adopt an orderly guest worker program, with no legal
right to being a citizen. However, guest workers would receive a special
preferences, but first must return to their home country. But then they
could apply for legal residence. This is the way it must be...?
American patriots have beaten just by sheer numbers, each time a new
AMNESTY has arrived into Washington for a vote. We must keep fighting,
because the alternative is to be flooded with illegal foreign nationals,
who know how to tap the welfare safety net, originally awarded to citizens
and legal residents. If you believe for one minute that illegal foreigners
don't know how to collect food stamps, because you must have legal status.
Then how come the government extracts secretly squeezes 356 billion dollars
billion dollars to support the invaders? Yet even that doesn't cover the
costs to taxpayers, when you realize this should be the weighty burden that
pariah business should be accountable for? Then can you imagine the strain
on the Social Security system and pension for seniors?
The only way working class Americans are going to hold onto their jobs, is
to demand their Democratic representatives endorse the SAVE ACT. Because it
doesn't matter what your country of origin, businesses will take the
easiest route to profits. All of us will suffer under the globalist open
border, free trade agenda as they are in Europe. Today! It's a fight to
keep our sovereignty against bad free market agreements. It's a ongoing
battle against the momentum of overpopulation.
If small state laws like in Oklahoma and Arizona, has seen a definite
change as thousands of foreign nationals have packed their bags and fled
elsewhere. Just think what the all encompassing federal SAVE ACT (H.R.4088)
could do for your states future?
legalatina on Jul 12, 2008 at 10:03:59 said:
In her book Shattered Bonds, Roberts writes, “One way to preserve more families is to prevent child maltreatment. An overwhelming body of research on the negative effect of poverty on children tells us that generous public support of child welfare would dramatically reduce cases of child abuse and neglect.”
Perhaps the corrupt, government officials of Mexico who have wholesale abandoned their underclass and have used them as cheap pawns to receive 25 billion dollars a year in remittances, should be heeding Robert's advice. Why isn't Mexico making providing economic opportunity, good education and adequate health care for its underclass?
Jenny on Jul 12, 2008 at 10:00:20 said:
An article like this, conveniently leaves out very pertinent facts, because quite honestly, they find them convenient. Those rationalizing open borders care no more for human rights considerations than they do for the civil rights of citizens, be they black, brown or white.
The US has a declining pool of jobs, outsourcing started in the '80s. We do not have a worker shortage, or a lacking of hardworking Americans who would do those jobs. Those are lies crafted by the corporate elites, and those in the far left and far right who have an agenda that is not in aid of human rights.
American citizens, again, black, brown and white are suffering economic desperation, they can barely earn enough to keep a roof over their heads, or feed their children. They suffer from malnutrition and anemia at numbers greater than during the Great Depression, and American citizen children are now getting rickets from vitamin D deficiencies. They lack even basic access to health care. Our public education system is breaking down because it is being burdened by frivolous expenses that have destroyed it's original purposes, to educate our children to have a future.
Citizens are less likely to get a job, than an illegal alien. They leave their own wealthy home countries, rather than do the hard work of demanding higher wages and increased opportunities, they buy into their own cultural racism and hatred of others, as an excuse to excuse their helping business and corporate elites to displace American citizens.
Americans on the other hand have helped lift those illegals home countries out of poverty, Americans have sacrificed, and are entitled to not be lied about and have their civil rights violated, their human rights considerations ignored.
All across the US, Americans, black, brown and white have seen their lives harmed by illegal aliens. They've been thrown out of jobs, seen the occupations that lifted them out of poverty, whether in meat packing plants, construction, roofing, carpentry, landscaping and so many other jobs, undermined.
Jamiel Shaw's mother was serving in Iraq, his father worked and cared for their two sons. Jamiel was a good student, and a football star at his high school in the Los Angeles area. He was murdered by an illegal alien gang banger, who had been released from jail a few days before. The illegal alien gang banger shot Jamiel, because he was black, and no matter what the writers of the propaganda piece above might want you to believe, Hispanics are racist, most especially against black people. He was able to get away with this, because the politicians, the illegal alien lobby, and far leftists who seek to profit by destabilizing the economy, the lives of Americans, game the system so illegal aliens are treated with preference, not held responsible for their crimes. One such corrupt politician threatened Jamiel's parents, they said they would slander Jamiel as a gang banger if they didn't drop their support of legislation that would amend the foul special order 40 rule that denied police the right to check the immigration status of illegal alien criminals.
Julianne Ong Hing and Seth Wessler seek to exploit black Americans, so as to use them as pawns to gain amnesty for illegal aliens. They don't respect them, their civil or human rights.. they never address them or their issues.. only seek to play divide so as to more easily conquer.
legalatina on Jul 12, 2008 at 09:41:01 said:
This report is so dishonest...these adults jeopardized the security and unity of their own families by purposefully, willfully, violating our immigration laws and committing other crimes like identity-theft and others required to continue to reside and work illegally in our country....the law finally catches up with them ...so what? They made the bad decisions that led to this...."parents" don't get a free pass from prosecution for crimes simply because they have children if that were the case...then we need to let every prisoner in our jails free if they have children.. Ridiculous.
-->Perhaps other illegal alien families would do well to start making plans to repatriate their families before they are caught and deported. The responsible thing to do would be to start the paperwork and processes necessary to do so as soon as possible.