Latinas Are Overrepresented In The Foster Care System

At 8, Child Protective Services removed Elvira Laguna from her mother’s house and placed her in a foster care home in Pasadena, California, with around 60 other kids. Laguna’s mother struggled with addiction and wasn’t capable of taking care of her children. In that home, Laguna, who is Afro-Puerto Rican and Indigenous Mexican, suffered abuse from the staff, including sexual abuse, which manifested into drug addiction and self-harm. Until the age of 16, Laguna bounced from institutionalized home to institutionalized home, not quite understanding the system she was in and how to navigate it. Laguna’s story is common, particularly for Latinas in California, where 14,103 Latina girls are in foster care, according to a 2023 report. In 2021, Latine youth made up 22% of the foster care system population in the U.S., an overrepresentation in comparison to the Latine population in general, which accounted for approximately 19% of the total U.S. population in the same year.