In April, President Donald Trump signed a declaration to create the first-ever National Foster Care Month. The month of May, it said, would celebrate those who provide temporary homes to children without parents or guardians. But May would also recognize a darker reality—“the plight of innocent children who are in foster care because their lives have been disrupted by neglect or abuse.”



Today, the American foster care system is bracing for an influx of children whose lives have been disrupted by the Trump administration itself. According to a Monday report from the Washington Examiner, approximately 250 migrant children are being taken from their parents or guardians per day as a result of Trump’s new family separation policy. If that trend continues, as officials expect it to, around 30,000 children would be in the government’s custody by August. That figure doesn’t include the thousands of minors who show up at the border without a guardian every month, a number that has increased significantly in 2018.

The Trump administration insists these kids will be alright. “The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever,” White House chief of staff John Kelly told NPR in May. That’s exactly what’s happening. “As the Trump administration takes more migrant children into custody at the Mexico border,” The Washington Post reported last month, “new statistics show the government is placing a growing number in long-term foster care, sometimes hundreds of miles from their jailed parents.”

But the foster care system is already struggling to provide stable living situations for the 500,000 children who need assistance. The number of kids entering the system has increased every year for the last four years, but there hasn’t been a concomitant increase in social workers to help them and group homes or families willing to take them in. “American foster care,” the Post reported last year, “is in crisis.”

Trump responded to this growing problem in February by signing into law a massive overhaul of the system that redirects funding and resources for foster care services toward programs that keep children with their parents. But what about children whose parents have been jailed or deported by immigration officials? Can a strained system designed for abused and neglected American kids handle an influx of child migrants who are struggling with their own unique problems?