Immigrant youth living in Massachusetts foster care are being ordered deported by immigration courts — even though a Massachusetts state court has already formally found that they were abused, neglected or abandoned and cannot safely return to their home country. GBH reports that the removal orders began reaching these young people after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in April rescinded a policy that had deferred deportation proceedings for youth who are current or future Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) petitioners for green cards.
Source: GBH News — Sarah Betancourt
Youth who already hold humanitarian relief to be in the United States legally are among those who have been ordered removed, GBH reported, and others with the same status — or with applications still in process — fear they will be summoned to a court hearing and told to leave the country.
A protection Congress built in 1990
Congress created Special Immigrant Juvenile status in 1990 for undocumented children who have been abused, neglected or abandoned by one or both parents. The process starts in a state juvenile court, which must find that the child was abused, neglected or abandoned and that it is not in the child's best interest to return home. That state-court finding lets the young person seek SIJ classification from the federal government.
Classification, however, is not itself a green card. SIJ petitioners must still wait in the visa line, and because of the backlog that wait can take years. The Biden-era policy that USCIS rescinded in April bridged that gap: while a young person waited for a green card to become available, the government deferred — paused — deportation proceedings against them. With that shield removed, removal cases against SIJ youth can move forward even though their place in the green-card line has not changed.
“These are children who are victims of extreme abuse, abandonment, neglect, trafficking, all kinds of things. And their escape to the United States was quite frankly the only option, and it is not an option that comes easily for them,” Angela Snyder, supervising attorney at the Immigration Legal Assistance program at Ascentria, told GBH. “There has been a systematic attack on the rights for these youth through the immigration system.”
Source: GBH News
The 30-day clock
Foster parents in Massachusetts say the notices are arriving with very little time to act. In a petition launched on October 25, a refugee foster mother who has fostered for more than six years wrote that youth in the foster community are receiving removal notices from immigration court and have only a 30-day window to appeal the removal order — and that without action, those notices result in deportation.
The petition makes a point that sits at the centre of the dispute: these children are in foster care because Massachusetts state courts have already determined they have no other safe option to return to. It calls on Massachusetts child-welfare leaders and elected officials to act, and on the Department of Children and Families (DCF) to make protecting these children its first priority. Advocacy groups say hundreds of children in refugee foster care are facing sudden removal — an advocates' figure that officials have not confirmed.
Why the cases are so hard to fix in time
The Shoestring, a Western Massachusetts news outlet, reported that foster parents and advocates are sounding the alarm as children with special immigration status receive removal orders. Legal service providers are overwhelmed, advocates say, and adjusting a young person's immigration status inside a 30-day window is nearly impossible without rapid legal help. Each case sits in two systems at once: a state child-welfare case, where a judge has already ruled the child cannot safely go home, and a federal immigration case that can now order the same child removed.
A state court's SIJ findings and federal SIJ classification are not the same as a green card. Classification made a young person eligible to apply for lawful permanent residence, and deferred action kept removal paused while they waited in line. Since April, that pause is gone: classification alone no longer stops an immigration court from issuing a removal order, which is why the 30-day appeal window matters so much.
What happens next
For each young person who receives an order, the immediate fight is the appeal, case by case, inside the 30-day window. Foster parents and advocates are pressing Massachusetts officials — including DCF, the state agency responsible for children in foster care — to intervene, and legal-aid groups are trying to reach affected families before deadlines pass. No statewide stay of the removal orders had been reported as of November 5. Families who receive an immigration-court notice for a foster youth should contact an immigration lawyer or legal-aid organisation immediately, because the appeal clock starts when the order is issued, not when a family finds help.