NEW YORK, NY March 31, 2006 —The child welfare system investigates about 50,000 reports of abuse and neglect each year. Immigrants in the country illegally are among the most vulnerable families within this complicated bureaucracy. Some caseworkers out in the field say these families don't qualify for the typical social service programs offered to the poor and many are living on the edge of disaster.

REPORTER: Every year the Administration for Children's Services refers thousands of the families it investigates to child abuse prevention programs. These neighborhood agencies are charged with trying to keep children safe inside fragile homes.

Patricia, a mother from Mexico attended a prevention program in Sunset Park Brooklyn for more than 4 years. She recently agreed to be interviewed there on the condition that neither her real name nor the real names of her children be used because she is in the country illegally and fears being deported:

The mother of 4 holds her squirming 1-year-old son in her arms and motions towards her 4 year old daughter who barely speaks and is coloring nearby:

PATRICIA/VOICE OVER: When my daughter was born, umm, my son umm was very sad and he thought I didn't love him so his school sent me here.

REPORTER: That was nearly five years ago. Roberto is now 12 and acts like a father to his three younger siblings. At the prevention center, he makes himself at home. While playing a computer game, he describes his regular chores:

ROBERTO: Clean, take my brothers a bath, I will do whatever she wants me to do but not too much.

REPORTER: Patricia has been in the country since 1995 and says ever since she arrived life has been difficult:

PATRICIA/VOICE OVER: More or less I've always had problems…. I always rented rooms and I keep having to move from here and there.

REPORTER: A caseworker at the prevention center says the family of five has mostly lived in single cramped rooms inside unsafe apartments where there is no space to play or exist without bumping your head or running into each other. Sometimes they've shared apartments with strangers who have made them leave on a whim. Patricia has a long history with ACS. She says she's been reported to the agency 4 different times for things like leaving the children alone at night after they go to sleep so that she can sell food on the street. The most serious case involved her 2 year old son getting burned. Patricia explains what happened:

PATRICIA/VOICE OVER: They shut off my electricity because I didn't pay the bill and I was heating up water on the stove to bathe the kids. I was going to take the bigger ones pamper off and that's when the small one stuck his foot in the bucket of hot water.

REPORTER: A family court judge ruled the case an accident and she was allowed to keep her children. Caseworkers at the prevention center also believe it was an accident but say the mother of 4 is mildly retarded and isn't capable of caring for her young children alone. Valerie Segal has supervised Patricia's case since it began. She says Patricia is difficult to help because she is undocumented and doesn't qualify for the one program that most poor people rely on for help:

SEGAL: Because she doesn't have Medicaid she doesn't really qualify for the kind of services she really needs which address the mental retardation issues.

REPORTER: Segal says Patricia needs to live in supportive housing where there is constant supervision. Currently, she and the kids are in a shelter apartment after a fire left them homeless. ACS has provided her with a homemaker who works 8 hours a day, five days a week to help care for the kids. The homemaker service is temporary and is supposed to teach a new parent how to manage a household. Segal says Patricia needs something permanent:

SEGAL: She's not fully capacitated even with a trainer or a homemaker she's not going to be able to do the carry over learning from week to week that she needs.

REPORTER: Patricia is also trying to feed her family of five on food stamps given to her three younger children born here. She and Roberto, who is also undocumented, do not qualify for the federal program. Groceries often don't last so food pantries and soup kitchens get them through difficult months. Segal says most immigrant families referred to her agency by ACS do not qualify for public assistance programs:

SEGAL: It's very common…you know the story is about how resilient these families are because they make due with very little and they persevere beyond what normal people can withstand…

REPORTER: But they don't always endure and when they don't children are the one's that pay the most devastating consequences. That point was recently noted in an annual report by an ACS panel charged with reviewing the deaths of every child known to the agency. The report says more than 10 percent of child deaths in 2004, the most recent year for which fatalities have been reviewed, involved parents who were undocumented and unable to obtain social services.

LEWIS: Our goal is to provide the same services to families regardless of immigration status.

REPORTER: Mark Lewis is the Director of Immigrant Affairs for ACS. He says his position was created last August to deal with an ever growing immigrant population. It's difficult to tell exactly how many immigrants are involved with ACS because the agency does not keep data on a family's country of origin but they do track the growing language barriers caseworkers face. Last year, caseworkers made nearly 6400 requests for translators speaking 50 different languages and dialects. That was a 25 percent increase over 2004. The agency is trying to hire more bilingual caseworkers but right now there are nowhere near enough so ACS contracts with an outside firm to provide translation services. Lewis says about 50 percent of the time caseworkers won't know a family's language before the first visit to investigate a home:

LEWIS: If a caseworker goes out to a home and someone doesn't speak English there they can have access to cell phones and they will have access to a toll free number and get access to a cell phone interpreter immediately.

REPORTER: Lewis agrees it's difficult to find services for immigrant families when they are in the country illegally, especially if they don't speak English. But he says places do exist and clinical consultants who work for the agency are supposed to be able to find them:

LEWIS: We are also working with the clinical consultants to come up with a resource directory that we would be providing to child protective workers as well as foster care and prevention programs…

EARNER: They're the ones that were left out of the loop here completely

REPORTER: Ilse Earner is a professor at Hunter college and helped design a training program for ACS workers who deal with immigrant families. She says the agency has ignored its prevention program and foster care caseworkers and they need to be trained too:

EARNER: Where do you get resources. How do you refer to an informal support network, that's part of what we train.

REPORTER: Earner says many families who are undocumented fall outside the normal system set up to help the poor. She says prevention programs need to search out smaller immigrant advocacy groups that have earned the trust of illegal immigrants often scared to interact with anyone or anything government related.

EARNER: They will find or connect you to other resources that they know about and can be in touch with and can act as a conduit to channel families to these neighborhood based services that are often culturally appropriate and bilingual.

REPORTER: Earner says this is nowhere near a perfect safety net but it's better than leaving families that are often hidden and isolated in situations that could lead to tragedy. For WNYC, I'm Cindy Rodriguez.