Buses carried the mother and son for much of their journey to the United States from Chile, but when they reached Panama, there were no vehicles to bring them through the isthmus’s jungles.
For three days, they walked. When the 4-year-old tired, his pregnant mother carried him, driven forward by the promise of a life with more opportunities. Surrounded at times by a thousand strangers, the pair never separated.
That changed on Feb. 1, after the family arrived in Massachusetts, when the Department of Children and Families took custody of the 4-year-old and the infant, who was born in December. The trigger was the mother’s hospitalization for postpartum depression, but her lawyer called that a misdiagnosis stemming from her poor knowledge of English and misunderstanding of health care workers’ questions. Because her husband was staying at a men’s shelter at the time, she had no one else to care for them.
Although she was only hospitalized for six days, the family remains separated four months later.
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“When I talk about it I feel very sad,” said the mother, who is from Haiti.
Lawyers, social workers, and health care providers worry about the trauma inflicted on already traumatized migrant families involved with Massachusetts’ child protection system. While intervention is sometimes warranted, they say, migrant families can find themselves involved with DCF because of a lack of resources, or due to ignorance of American parenting standards. Language barriers and cultural misunderstandings also led to referrals to DCF or family separations, said providers, including a DCF social worker who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Recent migrants, they’re trying to lay a foundation for their family in terms of meeting the basic needs of school and health care and housing,” said Jacob Chin, a lawyer with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, which represents parents investigated by DCF. “The added layer of DCF is just unnecessary for most of these families.”
While national experts acknowledged migrant families’ situations can be complicated, and options limited, cases such as the Haitian mother’s highlighted how resources, such as easier access to care or treatment options that don’t require a parent’s isolation from their child, are lacking. Without them, unexpected emergencies for parents can quickly turn catastrophic.
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“The state, in intervening, isn’t providing those supports,” said Lisa Washington, a University of Wisconsin law professor who has written about the intersection of immigration and child protection. “In your most vulnerable moment, when you need medical attention and care, getting that attention or care might start or trigger this cascade of intervention.”
The Globe interviewed two mothers from Haiti who shared stories of losing children while receiving inpatient care shortly after arriving in Massachusetts. The parents spoke through interpreters and asked not to be named, fearing their comments could hinder their chances of reuniting with their children.
“[Women are] losing their children, and it could be for minor stuff that is not ultimately their fault,” said Carline Desire, executive director of Dorchester’s Association of Haitian Women, which provides support and advocacy to Haitian immigrants.
DCF does not track cases by immigration status or nationality, or record how many complaints involve children living in shelters, making it difficult to know how often DCF is involved with immigrant families. Statewide, though, more than 3,000 children with open DCF cases in the last months of 2023 primarily spoke a language other than English, DCF’s quarterly data showed. That’s almost 9 percent of DCF’s total workload, compared to just over 6 percent of all cases five years earlier.
There were 630 Haitian-Creole-speaking children and adults involved with DCF at the end of 2023, 35 percent more than five years earlier. Massachusetts had the country’s third largest Haitian population as of 2021, according to a recent study, and it has only grown in the recent immigration wave.
A DCF spokesperson noted that foreign-language speakers are not necessarily new immigrants to the United States. Better record keeping by DCF could also account for some of the increase, officials said.
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Many migrant families’ reliance on social service providers for everything from housing to health care can expose them to scrutiny that leads to DCF’s involvement. Advocates see some families unknowingly run afoul of American parenting standards. People who work with immigrant families, including some raised by Haitian parents, say other cultures may have different standards over how closely children should be supervised, or what kind of corporal punishment is acceptable. The Globe has reviewed police logs in several communities and found police-filed 51A complaints, which trigger a DCF review, included cases where children were left unattended in hotel rooms and instances of domestic violence. DCF’s response — close surveillance, home inspections, or family separation — can be punishment when, in some cases, education would suffice.
“We’re not helping those families,” said the DCF worker, who requested anonymity to avoid retribution at work. “We’re actually making things worse for them.”
More than 11,600 immigrants arrived in Massachusetts last year alone, 11 times more than just two years earlier. Maria Mossaides, director of the Office of the Child Advocate, a watchdog agency that evaluates the effectiveness of state services for children, said state agencies recognized last year the challenges that the wave of new immigrants in difficult circumstances would pose. Her office has not seen any troubling patterns in cases involving immigrants.
“The last thing we wanted to do as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was add more trauma to people who were already traumatized, by removing their children,” Mossaides said.
There may be cases where mandated reporters have little choice under the regulations but to call DCF, said advocates such as Desire.
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In February, Kingston police notified DCF of two children unattended in a hotel room. The heat was set to 76 degrees and the room smelled of urine and trash, according to the police report.
Local advocates’ concerns about migrants and the child protection system are echoed by experts nationally, who say child protection agencies have a track record of overreporting families that don’t fit into a “white middle class frame,” Washington said. Black and Latino children 17 and younger make up about 29 percent of all Massachusetts children but account for almost half of all open DCF cases.
“It would be sort of out of the ordinary if somehow the system, when it came to recent migrants, was being very sensitive,” she said.
The mother who trekked across two continents with her child shared medical records saying she had depression and suicidal ideation, which led to her hospitalization. She was not suicidal, though, she said in an interview.
Now, DCF wants her to receive therapy before reuniting with her children, she said, but she can’t find an appointment.
The other mother interviewed by the Globe, who received inpatient psychiatric care about three months ago, said she wishes she hadn’t told her therapist she was experiencing depression.
“I have only one person here,” she said. “It’s my child.”
She was parted from the child on March 4, the mother said, the day she told a doctor about her depression.
On her son’s first birthday in mid-March, someone from DCF brought him to a Mattapan church to see her briefly. She brought a birthday cake and took photos to celebrate.
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“I will never be fine without my son,” she said. “Paradise is not sweet for me.”
A still-pending 2021 federal civil rights complaint claimed the agency failed to provide sufficient language access for families. A lawyer involved with the suit said little has changed in three years, though DCF did increase spending on interpretation and translation to more than $1 million in the last fiscal year, and in 2022 increased its vendors providing interpretation.
Recently arrived families, too, need education in how DCF works and American parenting standards. DCF does outreach to educate recently arrived parents, but several advocates said the effort is insufficient.
“The families need to understand what to do and what not to do,” said Abdirahman Yusuf, executive director of Roxbury’s Somali Development Center, an immigrant resettlement organization.
Other experts worry about a lack of training among mandated reporters, professionals including physicians, teachers, and therapists, legally required to report suspicions of child mistreatment.
“People want to offer services but they’re not doing it with cultural sensitivity,” said Carlot Celestin, a psychologist with Mattapan’s Immigrant Family Services Institute, a nonprofit that serves recent immigrants.
Aura Obando, a medical director at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless program, said physicians treating immigrants should consider whether involving DCF will improve a family’s situation.
“Health care providers end up being a little quick to report without thinking of the consequences of that,” she said.
Obando described one patient who refused therapy for depression because she feared DCF would take her children.
Mossaides could not speak about specific cases, but said DCF and the courts prioritize the long-term safety of children.
“Our concern is always, ‘Is the parent situation now stable enough that the child can safely be reunited?’ " she said.
That concern can be cold comfort for parents waiting to reunite with their children.
For the mother of two children still in state custody, Massachusetts has not been what she and her husband hoped. They live together now, but have not found work. Home is a hotel turned shelter. She only sees her children during Friday visits.
“I thought that being in the US would be a great opportunity for me to take care of my children,” said the father.
Now, they have doubts.
“I am really questioning the decision to come to this country,” the mother said. “I cannot understand what is happening.”
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described the federal civil rights complaint related to language access in DCF. The Globe regrets the error.
Jason Laughlin can be reached at jason.laughlin@globe.com. Follow him @jasmlaughlin. Deirdre Fernandes can be reached at deirdre.fernandes@globe.com. Follow her @fernandesglobe.