Let’s say a British family is on vacation in the US, say at a hotel at Walt Disney World. One night, other guests hears sounds of distress coming from a nearby hotel room. Police investigate, and they discover that the parents have been horribly abusing their child. Ordinarily in a situation like this, the child would be taken into state custody, at least temporarily, and authorities would try to find a family member to take care of the child while matters are sorted out. But how does this work with foreigners? Would Florida authorities contact British authorities, put the family on a flight back home, and let British authorities deal with it?
Pure speculation, but they are breaking US law so would be arrested and charged. The ‘authorities’ would have to look after the child until some satisfactory alternative can be arranged and that would most likely involve the British Embassy.
Negotiations would begin once the parents are locked up, and the child is in a safe place. I think that the British would leave any prosecution to the US, and make whatever arrangements they could to repatriate the child to relatives.
This would be much the same if it happened the other way around, with the offence occurring in the UK.
In a situation like this, the US (more precisely, Florida) has jurisdiction over the criminal law issues (because that’s where the crime was committed), while the UK has jurisdiction over the family law issues, such as whether the child is placed in foster care (because the child is British, and so is the family law relationship between the child and the parents). The parents would certainly not simply be put on a flight back home, because they clearly would have committed a crime under Florida law.
I don’t think child protection laws would depend in any way on citizenship. The usual test is something along the lines of “Is the child in need of protection?”
That can be triggered by criminal misconduct, but also in the case of a child with no visible adult support. It isn’t tied to custody rights.
So I would assume that the state child protection agency would also get involved, not just the police. After all, if the police arrêt both parents and there’s no one to look after the child, that means the child is in need of protection.
It took me a while - but I found it. To the best of my recollection, ( and I worked in CPS in Queens at the time) the issues in this case were mostly related to the diplomatic status rather than because the parents were foreign citizens. . Here’s a more recent case, also a diplomat. But if CPS can take custody of a diplomat’s children, they can certainly do so in the case of a non-diplomat foreign visitor. In fact, in these cases, the fathers were not criminally charged specifically because of their diplomatic immunity - had they been vacationing in NYC, they would have been arrested and charged in addition to CPS taking custody of the children.