"It was a Sunday this past June, and Virginia Ortega was heading to work at her job cleaning hotel rooms, putting in overtime so she could pay her rent. She asked her son Cesar (a pseudonym), an autistic 16-year-old who also suffers from hallucinations, if she should find someone to watch him while she worked, but he said no, he was old enough to stay home alone."
"When Ortega returned to her squat, triangle-­roofed one-story house in southeastern Kansas City, Missouri, after work, the front door was hanging open and Cesar was nowhere to be found. Frantic, she asked her neighbors what had happened. One told her that the police had taken her son while she was at work. This article was supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism's National Fellowship and Fund for Reporting on Child Well-Being."
"Ortega, who is originally from Mexico and speaks Mixtec and Spanish, said a caseworker with Missouri's child welfare agency eventually told her that her son was taken because she doesn't have air conditioning. In Missouri, landlords are required to provide heat but not air conditioning, and her landlord has refused to get a unit for her. She doesn't have the money to buy one herself. She told me that the caseworker told her, " No es seguro vivir conmigo ": that it's not safe for her son to live with her."
Virginia Ortega, a Mixtec- and Spanish-speaking mother in southeastern Kansas City, worked overtime cleaning hotel rooms to pay rent while caring for her autistic 16-year-old son. Her house suffered disrepair and lacked air conditioning because the landlord refused to provide a unit and she could not afford one. Child welfare authorities removed her son while she was at work, citing the absence of air conditioning and deeming the living situation unsafe. Foster placement became the response to housing-related safety concerns. The situation shows how poverty, inadequate housing standards, and landlord inaction can lead to family separation, especially among immigrant families.
Read at The Nation
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