Why Are Latinas So Overrepresented In The Foster Care System?

At 8, Child Protective Services removed Elvira Laguna from her mother’s house and placed her in a foster care home in Pasadena, California, with around 60 other kids. Laguna’s mother struggled with addiction and wasn’t capable of taking care of her children. In that home, Laguna, who is Afro-Puerto Rican and Indigenous Mexican, suffered abuse from the staff, including sexual abuse, which manifested into drug addiction and self-harm. Until the age of 16, Laguna bounced from institutionalized home to institutionalized home, not quite understanding the system she was in and how to navigate it. Laguna’s story is common, particularly for Latinas in California, where 14,103 Latina girls are in foster care, according to a 2023 report. In 2021, Latine youth made up 22% of the foster care system population in the U.S., an overrepresentation in comparison to the Latine population in general, which accounted for approximately 19% of the total U.S. population in the same year. 

Being put into the system diminishes a child’s chances of having a bright future. According to data from the state of California, foster youth have worse educational outcomes compared to their peers, are less likely to attend a four-year college or university, and are three times more likely to become homeless. These statistics are both an indictment against the system and a self-fulfilling prophecy for youth in foster care — unless there’s a meaningful intervention that shows them that their life could be different. For Laguna, this came at 16. Living in her last foster home, a middle manager, a woman she now calls “Meemaw” and visits regularly in Louisiana, showed her kindness. 

“I was blessed when I was in Pomona [because] I feel like the staff really cared about me. It was the first time where an individual genuinely cared about me,” Laguna tells Refinery29 Somos. “I was so bad and [Meemaw] was always like, ‘I'm still here for you; you're worth it to me. I don't care what you do. I'm still gonna be here.’ So that was I think my breaking point when I realized that someone can genuinely care about you. There's someone that can actually want the best for you and is not always trying to get something from you. And then I graduated high school and she supported me with that even after I left.”

Laguna is one of many Latinas who have gone through the foster care system because the state considered their parents unfit to take care of them. Despite the promise of improving the care given to previously neglected children, Alicia Mendez, a research assistant professor at Boston University School of Social Work, explains that the system actually criminalizes and punishes immigrant families for struggling to make sense of U.S. society and culture. 

“The child welfare system was created under the guise of supporting families,” Mendez tells Somos. “However, we have lots of research and numbers that show that [the system] at best prioritizes family preservation for white families. There is language in our policies that punitively harm Latine families.”  

Built on racism and xenophobia, the foster care system measures immigrant families through a normative white American standard when determining whether they are "good" parents. “In many ways, these systems are punishing them for not assimilating quickly enough and for a lack of understanding due to cultural differences,” Mendez says. Language barriers can result in misunderstandings — or complete lack of knowledge — of the law that might come across as bad parenting to the state. For example, school attendance is usually mandatory by law across the U.S. from 6 to 16 years old, but in some countries this law doesn’t exist. Still, the child welfare system criminalizes families that had no knowledge of the law and, therefore, didn't comply. Additionally, poverty and precarity are often understood as unfit parenting, while many of these families are low-income. “And these families continue to be under-resourced. In some cases, families are fleeing places that they don't want to flee because of settler colonialism. It's their home, but they don't really have any other choice [but to leave]. And they have to come to the United States and deal with a system that is unfamiliar to them.” 

The intersection of poverty, immigration, and racialization results in a lack of knowledge and resources to navigate a system that does not take these families into consideration. And the higher likelihood that Latine families will encounter law enforcement, either due to non-assimilationist behavior or immigration enforcement, helps inflate the number of families that end up separated under the guise of child protection. But within the system, children are also at risk of experiencing more abuse. 

“This system is designed to harm these families and pull them apart,” Mendez adds. “There is a general understanding that once children enter the foster care system, often for forms of abuse, they are at an increased risk of experiencing abuse once children enter into long-term care settings. However, we don't have clear rates of how often this occurs. The current research says it occurs between 2% to 25% of the time.”

On top of the lack of stability and proper care, the abuse children suffer in foster care compounds how they transition into adulthood. Nancy Correa, who entered the foster care system at 5, says that the struggles of Latinas in the system relate to language, lack of resources, and immigration status. “I saw all the struggles that my parents faced just because they were both undocumented, which added another layer of complexity for them trying to navigate the system,” Correa says. Born in Mexico, her parents brought both of their kids to California to improve their family’s life — but they had little knowledge of U.S. culture.  

“There was a language barrier, then they had to go to multiple court dates, and being there and trying to understand the jargon that [the court] uses, and even though there were interpreters, [they] just didn’t understand the rules,” Correa says, referring to a particular incident where her parents took them outside California during a weekend when the state allowed them to see their kids. “They decided to take us to Mexico. The state took that as kidnapping and they took us away again.”

CPS separated Correa from her family because of a false allegation made against her parents, which spiraled into foster care and court battles that her parents couldn’t navigate. Despite her parents fighting to prove they could take care of Correa and her two other siblings, she bounced from one foster home to the next, experiencing mental, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of the adults responsible for her. This affected Correa’s relationships after she finally returned home at 12.

As an adult, Correa founded Remarkably Us, a California-based organization that focuses on empowering Latinas in the foster care system through storytelling and community events. Correa started the organization once she became comfortable with talking about her experiences; in the process, she has built a community that serves as support, representation, and connection among Latina girls in the foster care system and Latina women who previously navigated the system and beat the odds by going to college and starting a career. 

Remarkably Us also organizes events to connect children in foster care with professional women who can show the girls that there’s a life after being taken from their families. “We work with organizations that cater to foster youth to identify Latinas within those organizations, and then we build workshops around our different professional backgrounds,” she says. “And then we continue to work with them to identify other interests. … We bring these experiences to them and then they get to connect with professionals who have been in their shoes?” 

Like Laguna, who serves in the Remarkably Us board of directors, Correa believes one person can change the course of a foster child’s life through genuine connection and care — two things that are often lacking in the system. She hopes her organization will inspire Latinas in the system to dream about a future that can now seem abstract and uncertain because of the instability of their current situation. When she was in foster care, Correa had a mentor. She credits that connection for her successful change of path.

“Pilar Pinel, founder of Embracing Latina Leadership Alliances (ELLAS), took me under her wing when I was 15 years old,” Correa says. “She realized I was a troubled student, doing decent grades but demonstrating particularly introverted, rebellious behavior. She talked to me about ELLAS and started involving me in volunteer opportunities. She was a mentor that ultimately turned into a friend because she believed in my potential.” 

Fostering this kind of connection for young Latinas specifically addresses the cultural traumas they might be experiencing in foster care. “Culturally we're taught, as communities of color, to just suck it up and understand that our parents came from worse [conditions],” Mendez explains. “And that means that our system involvement or our struggles aren't worth talking about, because at least I didn't have to do X like my parents or like my abuelita, so there’s also this intergenerational aspect that I think weighs on the Latino population within the child welfare system. Because in many ways, folks might see themselves as better off than what their family experiences, but better off doesn't mean that it's good.”