Marita Canedo
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Ever since President Donald Trump took office promising mass deportations, immigrant parents have been navigating an aggressive new enforcement landscape that raises a difficult question: If they are detained, what will happen to their kids?
“It would be my worst nightmare in the whole world to be separated from my daughter,” said a Venezuelan woman who came to Burlington as an asylum seeker in 2021. Her daughter is 4 years old. “Just thinking about it causes me anxiety, but I have to be prepared.”
A new program is helping parents do just that. Since January, a team of 20 volunteer attorneys has fanned out across the state to assist immigrant parents in assigning a legal guardian for their child in the event they are detained by immigration authorities. Without it, the kids could become wards of the state’s overburdened Department for Children and Families, which is not well-equipped to reunite kids with parents who have been deported to other countries.
It’s estimated that hundreds of children in Vermont are growing up with parents whose legal status in this country is tenuous.
“It would be my worst nightmare in the whole world to be separated from my daughter.”
A Venezuelan Vermonter
“The piece the community does not know, the piece that shocks people, is if an undocumented parent is picked up and their child is a U.S. citizen, that child will not be deported,” said Barbara Prine, an attorney at Vermont Legal Aid.
Prine and her team have held six legal clinics so far this year, meeting with families in offices, churches and private homes to educate them about the program and guide them through the guardianship paperwork. Some 60 families, accounting for more than 100 children, have signed up so far. More call her office every week.
“We’ve had a couple of clinics where so many families have shown up wanting this security, wanting to know that there is a plan for reunification with their children, and terrified if they wouldn’t have it,” Prine said. “You just feel the urgency.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “does not separate families or deport U.S. citizens,” a spokesperson told Seven Days in a statement. When parents are deported, they may choose to take their children with them, regardless of the child’s immigration status, the spokesperson said.
Given the history of family separations during Trump’s first term and the unpredictability of current enforcement efforts, parents are taking matters into their own hands.
Vermont Legal Aid launched the guardianship program during the first Trump administration, but few families used it then and Vermont law did not explicitly outline the process for setting up a guardianship in advance.
With Trump’s return to office and a renewed interest among parents, Prine, in partnership with DCF, appealed to state lawmakers to pass legislation last session formalizing the so-called “standby guardianship” program. Prine said Vermont’s policy was modeled on similar programs in New York and New Hampshire. The bill passed with broad support, and Gov. Phil Scott signed it into law in May.
Parents must find a temporary guardian — ideally a U.S. citizen or green card holder within Vermont — who agrees to care for their children if they are detained. The guardian, usually a family friend or relative, also commits to reuniting the children with their parents according to their wishes, in this country or another.
Once the legal paperwork is signed and notarized, it gets set aside and is only filed in probate court when a parent is detained.
“That’s why it’s called a ‘standby guardianship,’” Prine explained. “It’s waiting to stand by until it’s necessary.”
It was initially intended for parents without legal status, Prine said, but as the Trump administration has expanded enforcement — detaining not only undocumented immigrants but also green card holders and asylum seekers — families with a variety of legal statuses have been using it.
A few weeks ago, the Venezuelan woman called Vermont Legal Aid to ask about setting up a standby guardianship for her daughter. The woman, who Seven Days agreed not to name, said even though she and her husband have been granted asylum and have green cards, recent news of Venezuelans being arrested and deported has made them uneasy.
Under other circumstances, the woman’s mother, who also lives in Vermont, would make a great caretaker. But because she is undocumented and at risk of detention, the woman had to find someone else. She reached out to a close friend she met when she arrived in Vermont four years ago.
“I said, ‘I’m so sorry to ask you for this, but under the current situation, Venezuelans are being targeted. If something happened to us, I would really appreciate if you could take care of [our daughter].’”
The friend, who is a U.S. citizen, agreed. They plan to meet with a lawyer soon to make it official.
“Knowing if something happens to me she will still be safe with people that she knows, and that love her, is giving me a sort of peace,” the woman said.
So far, none of the standby guardianships have had to go into effect, Prine said. But immigrant parents have already been detained this year, leaving their children in limbo.
Barbara Prine
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Recently, Prine has gotten two separate calls from DCF about children whose parents were detained by U.S. Border Patrol. In both instances, she rushed to check her files to see whether the children had a standby guardian lined up to take them. None of them did.
“DCF does not want to take children who are not being abused, neglected or exploited,” Prine said. “But if there is not a plan, then they don’t have a choice.”
The hardest part of setting up a guardianship, Prine says, is finding someone who meets all the criteria: a Vermont resident whom the parents trust and who is also a U.S. citizen. That’s especially the case for more recent arrivals who may not know anyone well enough to entrust them with their children or to ask them for such a favor.
Given the demand, some people have agreed to be a guardian for more than one family.
Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, who works as the migrant health coordinator at the University of Vermont Extension, is one such person. She works directly with migrant workers and their families across Vermont, helping them navigate the health care system.
Through her work, she has noticed a recent surge of newcomers filling workforce gaps in Vermont’s construction and service industries. In many cases, they’re families with children setting down roots in parts of the state that previously attracted few immigrants.
“There’s been a pretty significant shift in migration patterns to the state of Vermont in the past few years, and the number of families that could potentially benefit from having an emergency family plan has more than quadrupled,” Wolcott-MacCausland said.
During the first Trump administration, she signed on as a guardian for two families she knew through her work who were unable to find anyone else to fill that role, she said. Now she’s a guardian for three. She said her decision to do so came from “understanding some of the worries and challenges immigrant families face.”
“But then also just being a community member myself and wanting to be of support to families that are my neighbors,” she added.
“We’re all in this together, and we’re going to take care of each other.”
Marita Canedo
Wolcott-MacCausland has also been personally affected by the changes in the Trump administration’s posture toward immigrants. Her husband is a green card holder, she said, and she has felt a new sense of anxiety any time he travels out of the country.
“That’s a change that’s affecting a lot of people,” Wolcott-MacCausland said, describing the worry that “what we knew to be true about how immigration status would protect us, or protect those people, may not hold up.”
Julia Doucet is the clinical and program director at Open Door Clinic, which offers free care for people without health insurance in Middlebury. She has become the standby guardian for three different families. Some have children as young as 1 year old.
Doucet has three children of her own, but they are all in college now. Some of the families to whom she’s offered help have relatives and friends nearby who would help her care for the kids if their parents were detained. But as a citizen, she is the preferred legal guardian.
“I’m taking full advantage of my citizenship here to make sure everybody’s taken care of,” Doucet said.
Community groups continue to spread the word about standby guardianship. Marita Canedo, an organizer for the advocacy group Migrant Justice, said many parents have reached out to them for guidance.
“We are having a lot of difficult conversations,” Canedo said. But in the process, families are reminded that they aren’t alone.
“It creates a bigger sense of community and unity and integration,” Canedo said. “We’re all in this together, and we’re going to take care of each other.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Standing By | Vermonters who fear deportation are lining up legal guardians for their children”
The post Fearing Detention, Immigrant Parents Assign Legal Guardians for Their Kids appeared first on Seven Days.