How Immigration Status and Foster Care Are Connected

Fostered or Forgotten is a Teen Vogue series about the foster care system in the United States, produced in partnership with Juvenile Law Center and published throughout National Foster Care Month.

Laura, whose name and others used in this story have been changed for privacy purposes, is a Latinx woman. When she was 16 years old, she went into foster care. Though she prefers not to share the details of what led her to be taken from her mother’s home, it involved an incident that made clear it was no longer safe for her to stay there. Laura confided in a trusted adult, who alerted child welfare officials, and before she knew it, she was in a temporary foster home, waiting for a judge to decide where she would live permanently.

Child welfare agencies must try to place a kid with a suitable relative when removal from the home becomes necessary, so Laura was hopeful she’d soon get to move in with her grandmother, who she saw as a second mother. But there was a problem: Laura’s grandmother was undocumented, and even though this didn’t necessarily disqualify her from being considered as a caregiver, it made things more complicated. Because she had no Social Security number, she wouldn’t be eligible to receive the subsidies needed to cover the costs of raising Laura, nor could she show she was working legally, which child welfare workers wanted to know.