Introduction

      It was Esperanza¹ Foster Family Agency’s annual holiday party and I was sitting with Liliana, Bailey, and Emma’s foster father, Trevor. We were eating enchiladas and listening to Trevor speak about the challenges and rewards of being a foster parent, the “high highs and the low lows.” Emma, not quite two years old, had been leaning between the knees of her other foster father, Josh, while Trevor spoke. Partway through his speech she toddled over to Trevor and put her arms up. He reached down and scooped her up with one arm and she laid her head against his shoulder, one small hand on the back of his neck. The room was filled with a collective sigh—here was a perfect moment between father and daughter, an image of the sort of relationship that Esperanza Foster Family Agency stood for. I knew Trevor and Emma well and Trevor certainly felt like Emma’s father to me. Emma’s pending adoption would be finalized soon, and Trevor and Josh would be Emma’s permanent family.

      Yet as I sat watching them under the glow of the lanterns and the warm San Diego evening sky, I thought about all the other relationships in which Emma was embedded. Her biological mother and father meeting her at Chuckie Cheese the next week, still hoping for her return. Her grandmother who had wanted to take her in but felt too old to do so without help. Emma’s older siblings, placed with various extended family. The broader social networks that connected her back to family in Honduras, a set of legal relationships that would be severed by her pending adoption and new legal birth certificate, which would list Trevor and Josh as her parents.

      I tried to imagine how the scene would feel if Emma’s biological parents and siblings were in the room. They had been neglectful and unstable, but they had not been violently abusive. Emma’s social worker had eventually ruled out reunification with Emma’s parents, but she had considered the possibility of placing Emma with her extended family right up until the last few months, when she determined that no relative was able to take in Emma permanently. So Emma had never been simply Trevor and Josh’s child, and, in fact, had been in another foster home prior to placement with Trevor and Josh. She was removed from that home due to an allegation of physical abuse, which was later determined to have been unfounded. There were many ways her case could have gone, many lives she could have led. This is the case for all of us, but for foster children and families, the numerous trajectories one might experience are made more visible. And the traces of those other possible lives remain, shadowing families that are made through the awkward, fumbling, haphazard intervention of the state. The webs of social relatedness in which children and families are embedded, the networks that are interrupted, and the decisions that bring a child to one possible future while foreclosing others are the subject of this book. The central contention of this book is that in the context of child welfare, through relations that are ostensibly about protecting children and preserving families, vulnerability, inequality, and the contours of belonging, race, and citizenship are produced and reinforced.

       Interventions

      I initially met Trevor, Josh, and Emma, along with the other foster families, children, and social workers who are the primary subjects of this book, through Esperanza, a small foster family agency in San Diego that focused on Latina/o children and their families. Foster care, at its most basic level, is the site of one of the most concrete, heavy-handed state interventions into the private, intimate lives of families. Social workers are empowered to make decisions about whether children face a threat of danger, and if so, to remove them physically and legally from their parents’ care. As I describe in more detail in Chapter 4, social workers are given broad latitude in enacting or deferring these forms of intervention—there is no protocol detailed enough to capture the complexity of family circumstances that bring children and their parents under the purview of child welfare authorities.² In the San Diego region, these interventions are deeply entangled with immigration policy and politics. Practices of detention and deportation, alongside racializing processes and structural violence, construct national boundaries as they position particular families as more likely to be subjects of state intervention. This book focuses on the everyday experiences of Latina/o families whose lives are shaped at the nexus of child welfare services and immigration enforcement.

      “The state” is, of course, not a monolithic, faceless force but, in the context of child welfare services, is enacted through daily interactions among social workers, lawyers, judges, children, and families. Policy and political climate shape the terrain in which these interactions take place. But because social work, like many other fields in which the state operates, is a highly discretionary practice, foster care is also a means through which precariousness is produced for people’s lives in ways that activate social relations of race, citizenship, and nationality. Social workers’ assessments