This article is an incredible description of the foster system from survivor Tomas Rios. It appeared in Pacific Standard. It is well worth a read. Here's the beginning:
New York City child-welfare system for some extra college money I didn’t trust would be there, or get the hell out and claim a terrifying bit of freedom.
I first landed in the system a few days after my fifth birthday and my mother’s second overdose—she didn’t survive that one. As for my father, he never made the trip with us over the border and, even then, I knew damn well I’d never see or hear from him again. So I entered foster care a five-year-old undocumented immigrant who could speak all of a few words of English. The next 13 years were spent going through about a dozen placements of variant misery and a couple of uniformly neo-Dickensian institution stays, so trusting the system to back up its promised college stipends and scholarships required an optimism that I’d long since beaten out of myself.
And so I went through some motions with a disinterested child-welfare drone that made the dream of teenaged liberation mine. Liberation that came with all the attendant realities of being a dumb kid supporting himself with no support system. A private scholarship to my first-choice college was waiting for me, but that mostly meant I was one bad semester away from losing the support that made not just college a possibility, but basic survival. Without it, my only housing option would have been a homeless shelter—it’s an easy tumble down society’s ladder when you don’t have anyone or anything. Still, compared to most anyone who ages out of America’s myriad child-welfare systems, my exit is exceptional only because of how obscenely lucky I was to have somewhere to go.
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