A question was brought up to me today at work by two of my co-workers that has been gnawing at me since & I'm looking for an answer. So, if you know the answer or someone who may, please let me know. This is a question, not meant to incite any debate over the drain of the welfare system or anything like that. It's also a purely hypothetical situation and for the purposes of this hypothetical situation, it will revolve around a woman who is a widowed Mexican citizen, but whose child was born in the U.S. and therefore has U.S. citizenship just like every other baby born on U.S. soil.
Say this woman has crossed the border in order to have her baby. (Right here might lie a common misconception...just because your baby was born on U.S. soil & your baby has U.S. citizenship doesn't make it any easier for you to get it until that baby becomes 21 & may petition for a visa for you). The woman has no other family that can petition for her & she is told her case is virtually hopeless as she is deported back to Juarez before her child turns 21 & can petition for her. Now, the U.S. government can obviously not legally deport a U.S. citizen on any ground, but in an effort to keep the family intact the mother takes her child with her when she returns to Mexico (However, according to ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America an article points out that at times these children are detained and/or deported based solely on the grounds of their parents' own illegal status http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/articles/view/308). From here my question can go in two different directions...
The first is what happens if this child is entitled to welfare benefits? Now, I am by no means an expert in really anything, much less legal issues or welfare issues, but let me also remind you that this was not originally my question, it was someone else's. Is the U.S. going to send a welfare check addressed to the child in Mexico City, Sayulita, or even Juarez?
The second is what happens to that child when the mother can't provide properly for her child? Let's say that she decides it is in the best interest of the child that she forfeit her parental rights and so she ties the child's birth certificate around his neck, pushes him into the U.S. Embassy & disappears. Then what? Does he become a ward of the State?
What happens to the children caught in the middle of our nasty red tape-filled bureaucracies?
