Green cards go unclaimed by many youths in foster care

Abused children throughout California and the nation who are undocumented but entitled to green cards are frequently not receiving them -- putting them at risk of deportation and drastically limiting their educational and work opportunities.

Under federal law, certain abused, neglected or abandoned dependents of the state are eligible for legal residency, but officials in many counties are unaware of the benefit. As a result, many youths leave foster care as illegal immigrants, social workers and advocates say.

After a childhood of abuse, Viridiana Garcia, 23, spent her teenage years in and out of group homes, mental hospitals and foster families. She should have received her green card and become a U.S. citizen years ago. Instead, Garcia, who lives with her 5-month-old twins in Santa Barbara County, is still undocumented.

“It’s hard because I want to walk like a free person,” she said. “I’m worried I might get caught and sent back to Mexico.”

Congress passed the law in 1990 to grant legal status to several classes of vulnerable children.

Los Angeles County is among the few areas where the law works well, experts said. The county’s program is seen as a model nationwide, because social workers, judges, immigration officials and pro bono lawyers work together to ensure that eligible juveniles get green cards.

But elsewhere around the nation, the law is not implemented as consistently, according to a 2006 report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which supports programs that help vulnerable children and families. The report cited several problems, including unnecessary delays by immigration officials.

To get a green card, the youths must be unmarried, under 21 and abused, abandoned or neglected. Youths in dependency or delinquency proceedings or in Probate Court are eligible.

Though the government doesn’t specifically track the number of young people who receive Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, 634 Juvenile Court dependents nationwide were granted permanent residency in 2004, 679 in 2005 and 912 in 2006, according to the Office of Immigration Statistics.

Advocates say they do not know how many more youths nationwide may be eligible, but estimates are in the thousands.

“If you look at the number of immigrants coming into this country and the number of unaccompanied minors coming into the country, it’s shocking,” said Sally Kinoshita, a staff lawyer at San Francisco’s Immigrant Legal Resource Center who wrote a manual about the benefit. “The number of people who have received Special Immigrant Juvenile Status is not at all a reflection of the number that would be eligible for it.”

The failures -- though unwitting -- are an abrogation of the counties’ commitment to children they have brought into their welfare systems and agreed to help raise, said Ken Borelli, retired deputy director of Santa Clara County’s Department of Children and Family Services, who helped draft the law.

“What are their options if their legal status isn’t resolved?” Borelli asked.

To raise awareness, advocates and government officials are conducting training sessions for judges, social workers, lawyers and youths around the country, including in rural areas where immigrants are just beginning to settle.

“It just takes one person to identify that someone is eligible,” said Kristen Jackson, a lawyer at Public Counsel in Los Angeles who has represented hundreds of juveniles.

Karen Grace-Kaho, ombudsman for foster care with the state Department of Social Services, said some undocumented foster youth may be better off in their native countries if they have supportive relatives. But many were brought to the U.S. when they were young and don’t speak their parents’ native language, Grace-Kaho said.

“That would be a severe hardship for them to go back to their country,” she said.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tight controls on immigration, said the benefit was necessary for some children but added that green cards should be approved sparingly.

“Some judges are going to be somber, careful and use it as a last resort,” Krikorian said. “Others are going to see it as an opportunity to do whatever they want to do.”

Fany Almendarez received her green card last year, just before she turned 21. Raised in Honduras by her grandmother, Almendarez sneaked across the border as a teenager to live with her mother in Los Angeles. But soon after her arrival, she said, her stepfather abused one of her sisters and she was placed in foster care. Then her mother died of cancer.

Almendarez’s social worker started the paperwork for her green card in 2005. Though Almendarez wanted to move in with her boyfriend, she decided it was more important to stay in foster care and wait for her green card.

“I knew I was going to lose this chance to get my residency,” said Almendarez, who lives in Rialto and works at a children’s day-care center. “Now I have my car, I have my driver’s license. And if one day I don’t want this job and I want another, I know it’s going to be easy for me.”

Almendarez’s sister, Karol, 20, who was also in foster care, ran away before her paperwork could be completed.

“I wanted my independence,” she said. She got a job dancing at a club, where she met her boyfriend. She got married and had a baby. She remains undocumented.

In Los Angeles County, more than two-thirds of the youths who get Special Immigrant Juvenile Status are Mexican and about 15% percent are from Central America. The rest come are from countries around the world, including Vietnam, Ukraine and Nigeria. Some escaped abusive homes in their native countries and crossed the border by themselves; others were abused or neglected by parents after they arrived in the United States. Still others became orphans when their parents died in car accidents or from AIDS.

“What we are concerned about are the children -- that’s it,” said Judge Michael Nash, who presides over the county’s Juvenile Court. “It doesn’t matter what their nationality is. If they come into our care, we obviously want to see that they leave our care in as healthy a situation as possible.”

Cecilia Saco, a supervising social worker who heads a special county unit dedicated to these children, cross-checks databases and works closely with her staff to identify eligible youths. Because the process can take up to a few years, Saco files the applications as early as possible. If they age out of the child welfare system as illegal immigrants, she said, they are unable to work legally and are more vulnerable to exploitation.

“How can they ever survive and be successful without being legal?” she said. “It’s impossible.”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials in Los Angeles said they streamlined the process, accepting applications directly and scheduling interviews well ahead of an applicant’s 21st birthday.

“ ‘Age out’ issues are of concern,” said Dan Clippinger, supervisory adjudications officer. “In order to prevent that from happening ... we try to shorten that processing time frame as much as possible.”

The Los Angeles office sees a few dozen special immigrant juvenile cases each month. But elsewhere in the country, other offices rarely see such cases and may not be as familiar with how to handle them, a CIS spokeswoman said.

The process to get a green card is twofold.

First, a Juvenile Court judge must sign an order saying that it is not in the child’s best interest to be sent to his home country and that the child cannot reunify with his parents because of abuse, abandonment or neglect.

Second, the Citizenship and Immigration Service must approve the application for the special status. If it does so, the youth is eligible for a green card immediately and for citizenship five years later, if 18. If the application is denied, the youth can be deported -- more likely for teenagers who have committed crimes and are in delinquency proceedings, lawyers said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security must give consent to allow youths in federal custody to go to Juvenile Court for a judge’s order. Immigration lawyer Peter Schey of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Los Angeles, who has filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, said the department does not have expertise in assessing abuse and shouldn’t be denying these children what may be their only chance at legalization.

Garcia, the mother of infant twins in Santa Barbara County, began her path to foster care when she was a child in Mexico. Her mother physically abused her and then took her across the border when she decided she didn’t want her anymore, Garcia said. The teen moved in with her father in Santa Barbara.

Within months, Garcia said, her father began sexually abusing her. After contacting police, Garcia said, she was placed in foster care. Her father was arrested and served time before being deported.

While in foster care, Garcia fought, ran away from group homes and tried to kill herself, resulting in placement in mental hospitals. She dropped out of high school and aged out of foster care. Using a fake Social Security number, she worked at a McDonald’s.

She may be able to get legal status through another program designed for undocumented crime victims who cooperate with law enforcement, lawyers said. But for now, Garcia lives as an illegal immigrant with her boyfriend, who supports her and their daughters by working as a sushi chef.

She fears being deported to Mexico, where her father is living. “I’m scared that I am going to go over there and he is going to hurt me,” she said.

anna.gorman@latimes.com