Forgotten by the System : Some Immigrant Foster Children Have No Way to Gain Legal Status

Ninfa Mejia is a young woman with no country.

Nine years ago her father brought her to the United States, promising a better life in America away from the Mexico City slums where she grew up.

Instead, Mejia, now 19, found a nightmarish existence that still haunts her. She was sexually abused, treated as a slave at home and then placed in a foster home that set her on her descent into poverty and hopelessness.

Today, Mejia is one of hundreds of undocumented youths around the nation who exist in an immigration nether world, trapped by a policy that has, in essence, made them stateless.

Now living in Baldwin Park, she has no family to return to in Mexico and has no way of legally staying in the United States. She cannot legally work or receive most forms of educational aid because of her illegal status. If caught by an immigration agent, she can be deported to Mexico, even though she has spent half her life in this country.

“I’m just hanging in there now,” Mejia said recently as she sat in a sparsely furnished apartment. “I keep hoping and praying to God that one day I’ll wake up and things will be better.”

Last year, Congress approved a provision in the Immigration Act of 1990 granting permanent residency to all undocumented minors who were in foster care after November, 1990--solving the problem for future generations.

Another large group of undocumented minors who were in the country before 1982 were made permanent residents through the amnesty granted to illegal immigrants in 1986.

In the gap between the two programs exists a small group of undocumented minors who have been largely forgotten by a system that once saved them from abuse and violence at home, and then sent them out at age 18, often to face violence and homelessness on the streets.

“They really are a lost generation,” said Lupe Ross, a foster mother who has seen many children such as Mejia fall into the abyss of poverty and abuse. “Castaways is what they are.”

Underscoring the lack of attention that has been focused on their plight is the fact that no one knows how many former foster children are part of the lost generation.

“Whether there are hundreds or thousands, we really don’t know,” said Arthur C. Helton, an attorney and expert on immigration laws with the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

Most child welfare experts say their number is tiny considering that out of 360,000 foster children in the country, only about 1,000 are here illegally.

The largest concentrations of the former foster children are in cities with large populations of illegal immigrants, such as New York and Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, the vast majority are from Mexico and Central America, although there is also a smattering from other countries, including Hungary, Nigeria, Jamaica and South Korea.

These undocumented minors entered the foster-care system in various ways, but their stories contain a similar thread of abuse and violence.

Mejia’s journey into the foster-care system and the shadow world of illegal immigrants began when she was 10.

Her father had gone to the United States two years earlier, leaving behind his children and wife with relatives.

She remembers those two years with bitterness, recalling the poverty and abuse some of her uncles visited on her mother. “Seeing your mother beat up every day or hearing your brothers and sisters crying because they have no food or shoes,” she said. “I have no good memories of Mexico.”

Her father returned to Mexico in 1982 and brought Mejia and three of his other children to the United States.

Mejia’s younger brothers and sisters were sent to school, but as the oldest, she said, she was kept at home to cook and clean. She learned her first English words from her younger sister and cartoons on television--her only luxury. “Playing was something I didn’t know about,” she said.

There was something else. When she was 6, she said, a male family member had begun “touching” her. According to Mejia’s former foster mother, the girl was sexually molested after she was brought to the United States.

Mejia’s world collapsed after her younger sister told a friend about the abuse. The police were called and the children were placed in foster care.

Mejia drifted through four foster homes and was thrown out of at least as many schools for fighting. She was emancipated from foster care last year after turning 18 and since then has bounced from one boyfriend to another, living for a few months with one before moving on to another.

She has survived on false identities and fake documents, which are just good enough for her to get a part-time job to cover her $150-a-month rent.

“I never asked to come. I was brought here,” said Mejia, who hopes to become a police officer one day. “Now all my dreams are shattered, but not completely. I’m going to make it no matter what it takes.”

Even for foster children without immigration problems, the chances of success can be grim. Studies around the country have shown that a significant percentage of the homeless had spent time in foster care.

A recently published study on 55 former foster children in the Bay Area found that about one-third of the group had been homeless in the last year and about a quarter had been arrested since leaving foster care.

Since 1988, foster children approaching their emancipation date have been able to participate in a federal program that teaches basic life skills, such as balancing a checkbook, starting a bank account and applying for college.

But for some undocumented minors, the program has been a futile exercise in skills they cannot use.

“We teach them how to get jobs they’re not going to get and how to apply for scholarships they’re not going to get,” said Ross, the foster mother. “So what did we teach them?”

The immigration amnesty law passed in 1986 was a godsend to undocumented children in foster care, allowing many to become permanent residents. In Los Angeles County, 165 applications were submitted by the amnesty deadline in May, 1988.

Many others did not qualify, either because they arrived after the amnesty cutoff date or social workers failed to apply for them.

Guadalupe Villareal, now 19, was one of those who lost her chance because of inaction by the child welfare bureaucracy.

A foster child at 12, Villareal never knew she was in the country illegally until she reached 14. “I didn’t know about this immigration thing,” she said. “I thought I was a U.S. citizen.”

She learned of the amnesty program in 1987 from her natural mother, who had applied and was granted amnesty along with other relatives.

Her mother could have applied for her, but never did. She was legally a ward of Los Angeles County, but county officials never applied for her.

Villareal left foster care last month and has been temporarily staying with a friend in Long Beach. She makes about $30 a week working part time at a fast-food restaurant.

“At least give me a work permit,” she pleaded. “They were paying for me for foster care and they’d pay for me if they took me to jail. All I want to do is work.”

Jana Mason, of the American Public Welfare Assn. in Washington, D.C., said it was partly because of bungled amnesty cases such as Villareal’s that Congress granted permanent residency to undocumented minors in foster care.

Social workers were ecstatic when the law was passed last year, although it had no provision to take care of those undocumented minors who had left the foster care system before November, 1990.

“Maybe it would have made the law too complicated. Maybe it was the best deal we could strike,” said Ken Borelli of the Santa Clara County Department of Family and Children’s Services and the originator of the undocumented minor act. “Probably, no one thought about it.”

Lynn M. Kelly, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society in New York City who was active in amnesty programs for foster children, said: “For no principled reason whatsoever, we left them in limbo.”

There are always some children who are so motivated that they manage to escape the spiral of poverty and homelessness.

Aida Berduo, a 19-year-old former foster child, won permanent residency through a risky procedure known as suspension of deportation, which allows illegal immigrants who have been in the country for at least seven years to stay on the grounds that they would face “extreme hardship” if forced to leave.

To begin the process, she had to turn herself in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and be put into deportation proceedings.

Berduo, of Guatemala, agonized over the decision, but decided it was worth the risk. With the help of her attorney, she was granted permanent residency in May, in large part because of an outstanding academic record that had won her a scholarship to USC.

“I think everything I’ve done is for this,” Berduo said. “I can do anything I want now. I’m not afraid of going out.”

Her attorney, Josie Gonzalez, cautioned that suspension of deportation works in only the most extraordinary of cases, such as Berduo’s.

For many former foster children, the only option left is to wait and learn to make the best of their situation.

As one 19-year-old former foster child said: “It’s like being a rat, crawling from one hole to another.”

The youth, who was brought by his parents to this country from the Middle East, was emancipated from foster care just five months before the 1990 act was passed.

“I’m pretty unlucky. I got out and there it all goes,” he said. “If I was legal, I’d go to school, I’d have a wife, I’d have my children. Now, I’m just floating.”