It's not just an ICE/HS problem; law enforcement often ignores the well-being of children
when arresting their parents.
I ran across the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) study below (paid for by the DOJ) when I was trying to learn what the normal procedures are for arresting parents, since we have heard time and time again that the migrant families who are being separated are no different from other families whose parents are arrested. It turns out that is partially right -- the law doesn't address the needs of those children, either.
One of the most shocking examples is of the police arresting a mother and leaving a BABY in their apartment -- with only a 9 year old brother to care for the baby. The boy did his best for TWO WEEKS, until a neighbor noticed and called child protective services.
It turns out that police departments might have particular policies, but there is nothing in the LAW that requires them to ensure children's well-being or even safety, with any specificity. There is nothing in the law that requires them to keep records of any children who were present, or to report signs that children might live in the residence. So children can come home to an empty apartment, and not know why their parent is gone.
In other words, law enforcement routinely pay little attention to the needs of children. The behavior of ICE isn't an exception.
The BJA study reports some data below from a CA study; but the problems occur in all the states.
https://www.bja.gov/publications/iacp-safeguardingchildren.pdf
In spite of the need for law enforcement to closely monitor the arrest of primary caregivers, in most cases, mothers, the survey of California’s law enforcement agencies cited previously does not suggest any particular emphasis by agencies on the needs of the child of an arrested mother. This is in spite of the fact that these agencies reported that the arrested sole caretaker of a child is a woman in over 80 percent of the cases. Additionally, almost half of all law enforcement agencies (42 percent) did not know the number of mothers with minor children arrested in their jurisdictions.9 This latter fact underscores the failure of many law enforcement agencies to fully document when arrested parents are responsible for children and the importance of doing so routinely in arrest reports.
Teenagers, [she noted] are the most
vulnerable to being left alone when a parent is
arrested. Among police departments that said
they had a written policy outlining officers’
responsibility for minor children of an arrested
caretaker, only 55 percent defined “minor”
as all children under 18. The rest offered
definitions that ranged from 16 and under to
10 and under. In other words, children who
would not be permitted to sign a lease, get a
job or enroll themselves in school because of
their age were, as a matter of explicit policy,
deemed old enough to be left behind in empty
apartments.
SNIP
For many children, a parent’s arrest is the moment when their invisibility is made visible; when it is made clear to them just how easily they may be overlooked within the systems and institutions that come to claim their parents. With appalling regularity, young people have described to me being left to fend for themselves in empty apartments for weeks or even months in the wake of a parent’s arrest. In most cases, these children were not present when their parent was arrested; they simply came home from school to find their parent gone and were left to draw their own conclusions. But some told me of watching police handcuff and remove a parent—the only adult in the house—and simply leave them behind
The first time I heard such a story was
from a young man named Ricky. Like a third of
all incarcerated mothers, Ricky’s mother was
living alone with her children when she was
arrested. Ricky was nine years old, and his
brother under a year, when the police came to
his house and took away his mother.
“I guess they thought someone else was in
the house,” Ricky said, when I asked him how
the police had come to leave him by himself.
“But no one else was in the house. I was trying
to ask them what happened and they wouldn’t
say. Everything went so fast. They just rushed
in the house and got her and left.”
After the police left with his mother, Ricky
did what he could. He cooked for himself
and his brother, and changed the baby’s
diapers. He burned himself trying to make
toast, and got a blister on his hand, but he
felt he was managing. He remembered that
each day, his mother would take him and
his brother out for a walk. So he kept to the
family routine, pushing the baby down the
sidewalk in a stroller every day for two weeks,
until a neighbor took notice and called Child
Protective Services.
SNIP
It may seem obvious that law enforcement has an inherent responsibility to ensure that children of arrested parents are properly cared for, but the typical lack of law enforcement policy and procedures in this regard reflects lack of awareness by many departments concerning the process surrounding, and sufficiency of, the care that should be provided. Unfortunately, federal courts are also “unsettled when it comes to when and under what circumstance a law enforcement officer has the responsibility for the safety of minors at the time of a guardian’s arrest.”14 State statutory law addressing the legal responsibility of law enforcement officers to provide for the safety of children after a parent’s arrest is generally nonexistent or lacking in specificity.