Looked after children due to immigration

In the past 5 years, how many children (under age 18 years, who are UK citizens or have leave to remain in UK) were placed in county care due to one or more parents being detained by the Home Office relating to their immigration status?

If relevant, how many of these children were reunited with parents after the parental detention? 

Devon County Council does record the start reasons however this information is not collected in a manner that can be easily extracted from our systems.  Therefore, in order to provide an answer, we would have to manually review all Child Looked After (CLA) starts for the past 5 years.  We estimate that to carry out this exercise per individual record would take 5 minutes.  Therefore, to conclude this exercise for all 1,624 records would take approximately 135 hours to complete.

Under the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 public authorities are not obliged to comply with requests which exceed the cost limit of £450 (equating to 18 hours of time).  For this reason, we believe that Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act applies (cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limits).

However, if you were able to refine your date range to reduce the time required we would review data held.