The humanitarian crisis on the border could easily transition into a tragedy for all foster-care children — foreign and American — forced to live in a seriously broken system further burdened by the surge.
As it is, many of the approximately 400,000 American foster-care children face “permanent temporary” lives of going from one placement to the next to the next. Many are cycled through so many placements that when they age out of the system at age 18, they cannot count their placements. For children who age out of the system, life prospects are bleak: 24 percent of children report being homeless on aging out of foster care at age 18; 42 percent of males and 20 percent of females report that they have been arrested; and 42 percent will not have a high-school diploma at age 19. Such outcomes, unfortunately, should not be unexpected. During their foster-care stays, many foster-care children fall further behind in school at the same time their emotional and mental problems are aggravated by their unstable lives.
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