Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State. Lauren Heidbrink

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СКАЧАТЬ were also several cases in which ICE forcibly separated children from parents or customary caregivers because the parent was accused of a crime and detained separately or because the parent had a mandatory order of deportation for a previous unauthorized entry. Furthermore, if ICE lacks the bed space in family facilities, a child may be reclassified as “unaccompanied,” separated from his or her parents who remained in adult detention, and transferred to an ORR facility. In three cases, immigration enforcement authorities separated and deported an elder sibling or parent leaving a child deemed unaccompanied.

      Although many children outside their country of origin are without their parents or legal guardians, they may be accompanied by customary care providers, extended family, family friends, or community members, or they may be entrusted to smugglers throughout the duration of their journey. Many of the unaccompanied children with whom I worked, in fact, had parents or immediate family members who have resided in the United States for many years. Some parents, due to their own unlawful status in the United States, are apprehensive about coming forward to claim their child from federal authorities. Parents must provide information regarding their status, employment, housing, and finances when seeking custody of their child. Despite the legal or illegal presence of their parents in the United States, ORR reinforces ICE classifications of unaccompanied status if ORR determines that a parent is unfit for family reunification. This “suitability” may be determined by a pending deportation order issued for the parent, a parent’s own criminal history, or even the inability of a parent to meet the family reunification criteria for housing, employment, financial support, or child-care arrangements, much of which is informed by middle-class social norms for parenting and caregiving.

      Both ICE and ORR may (re)classify children at multiple points in their apprehension, detention, and release, in spite of the physical presence of parents or family members in the United States. Even with a notice classifying a child as an “unaccompanied alien child,” some asylum offices systematically ignore this classification once a child is reunited with his or her parent, determining a failure of jurisdiction to adjudicate the child’s asylum petition because the child is “accompanied.” While legal advocates contend this is a misreading of the federal statutes, the practice is gaining prevalence particularly in areas with large concentrations of immigrants—namely, New York, New Jersey, and California. Thus, the term “unaccompanied alien child” is not a preconditioned state but constantly vacillates based on culturally informed notions of care and kinship and on the fiscal and political interests of law enforcement. Internationally, the more prevalent term is “separated children,” which, in many ways, more accurately reflects the temporary or contingent nature of travel or living arrangements of many children. In my research, I recognize this problematic and shifting definition, but choose to enlist the juridical term “unaccompanied child” because it is a critical intersection between migrant youth, their families, and U.S. law. The legal category, constructed though it may be, becomes a useful site of inquiry into the ways the law attempts to identify and to shape the capabilities and rights of children and their relationships to extended kinship networks both in the United States and abroad.

      Children and Youth

      Immigration law defines a “child” as an unmarried person under twenty-one (a minor) who fits into one of the following categories: (1) a child born to parents who are married to each other (born in wedlock); (2) a stepchild if the marriage creating the step-relationship took place before the child reached eighteen; (3) a child born out of wedlock (the parents were not married at the time the child was born); (4) an adopted child if the child was adopted before age sixteen and has lived with the adoptive parent(s) in their legal custody for at least two years; (5) an orphan under sixteen when an adoptive or prospective adoptive parent files a visa petition on his or her behalf, who has been adopted abroad by a U.S. citizen, or is coming to the United States for adoption by a U.S. citizen; or (6) a child adopted who is under eighteen and the natural sibling of an orphan or adopted child under sixteen, if adopted with or after the sibling. In effect, a child is defined specifically by the child’s relationship to his or her parents and may forfeit certain forms of legal relief based on the child’s own marital status or the age at which a parent petitions for the state’s recognition of his or her legal status as a child.

      Scholars have shown the legal and social categories of a child and childhood to be highly problematic; U.S. immigration law is no different. For example, in immigration law, a “child” summons attributes of dependency on the actions and relationship of his or her parents; while in the country of origin, the same “child” may maintain his or her own household, work independently, and even have his or her own family—attributes often associated with adults in the U.S. context.

      To call someone a child, or a minor, is to summon specific attributes of age, dependency, agency, citizenship, rights, and responsibilities in a socially and historically informed context. For unaccompanied children, there are often-conflicting ways in which the state, political parties, NGOs, courts, households, and children themselves identify childhood and the ways the law or institutional actors specifically mobilize discourses on childhood or youth to achieve certain political ends. Because unaccompanied children explicitly and implicitly challenge the constructed legal and social category of “child,” I often interchange the term “youth” to reflect the specific social and legal positioning of young adult migrants with whom I collaborated. I contextualize how migrant youth intersect with, inform, and at times resist the social, legal, and political landscapes that make and unmake citizenship and how these landscapes may also simultaneously contradict migrant youth’s experiences as subjects of the state.

      CHAPTER 2

      Criminal Alien or Humanitarian Refugee?

      INTERLUDE

       “Sueños Rotos” (Broken Dreams)

      Sometimes, we young people get together to talk about our unrealized dreams. It is easy at times for others to assume why we are here.

      The answer is easy: for a better tomorrow. Nobody understands that even though we are young, we have the necessary maturity to confront reality. Here is a country with so many opportunities for everyone but I find myself along a road with no exit—I have only thoughts of my loved ones and of the possibility of moving forward. Yet, my worst enemy is always by my side. I am Latino and an immigrant.

      Today I find myself locked up by the laws of the USA as a criminal wearing a prison uniform. I live like a criminal with sadness in my heart. I look at American kids going to school and think, I too am an American child. I should go to school. Is being Latino so different? Is coming here for our family such a bad thing? Is this so difficult to understand?

      You will never understand that for my family, I am capable of so much more.

      —Mario, fifteen-year-old Salvadoran youth

      The Refugee Act of 1980 recognized the needs of refugee children who are unaccompanied, creating special legal provisions for their acceptance into the United States via formal refugee resettlement processes. The act established and funded specialized programs through the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (DHHS-ORR) for minors who are identified as refugees prior to entry in the United States. The State Department identifies refugee children living in UN refugee camps who do not have a parent or legal guardian. On arrival in the United States, refugee children are placed in ORR’s Unaccompanied Refugee Minor (URM) program and resettled by refugee resettlement agencies, similar to refugee adults. However, the Refugee Act of 1980 did not include “unaccompanied alien children,” as they are neither recognized prior to entry nor do they maintain legal status in the United States as their refugee counterparts do. The specialized provisions and procedures for refugee children excluded unauthorized migrant children despite their shared experiences of war, violence, СКАЧАТЬ