Don't speak the lingua franca = lose custody of your kids???

Apparently there's been a number of cases in the U.S. where this has been held, the most recent to get on the radar being in Mississippi. From Time:

[T]he state Department of Human Services (DHS)… ruled that Baltazar Cruz was an unfit mother in part because her lack of English "placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future."

Wow. That's not too far away from sounding like an article on The Onion, but it is in fact real.

A quote by Mary Bauer, the legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which helps people like Baltazar, points out the ridiculousness of this rather nicely:

Bauer points out that children have been raised safely in the U.S. by non-English-speaking parents for well over a century. Had they not, thousands of Italians and Russians would have had to leave their kids with foster care on Ellis Island.

Indeed, such a rule would have resulted with my own father ending up in foster care.

Luckily these cases seem to alway get overturned and the children reunited with their parents, but to subject anyone to this in the first place is absurd.

Links: Can a Mother Lose Her Child Because She Doesn't Speak English? [Time]