The idea of being criminally locked up seems contradictory to the nature of childhood. However, that is the reality of what is happening to migrant youth in the United States - being locked away in a bleak system that moves slowly, offers little reprieve, and is, under the current administration, viewed as a threat. Over recent years, tensions surrounding the immigration debate have heightened, especially leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Throughout then-candidate Trump’s campaign, his promise to “build the wall” was a major focus. He wasn’t the only one - according to Pew Research Center, immigration was one of the top voting issues in that election.
Since then, border issues continue to be seen at the top of many headlines. Most recently, children have been at the forefront of the immigration debate in the U.S. The images to the left showcase this increased focus on the experiences of children at the border. In the top photo, a child housed in migrant detention responds with a drawing to a question asking them to describe the conditions of their detention. They drew stick figures behind bars, frowning.
In the bottom image, a photojournalist documents the experience of young migrants held in a migrant detention center in El Paso, Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. There are children behind bars, again frowning. Children in cages have become the face of the harsh administration policies and harsher rhetoric under President Trump’s administration. In response, public outcry has manifested itself in mass protests and poignant displays, such as the one made during the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show when children sang from cages – a direct reference to the images being circulated throughout the media.
Separated and unequal
In May of 2018, the Trump administration implemented a zero-tolerance policy regarding immigration. Under this policy, the Department of Justice prosecuted all immigrants crossing the United States border with no documentation and made no exceptions for individuals seeking asylum or with children. What followed was weeks of families separated from their children, resulting in mass media frenzy, public outrage, and images of crying children circulating throughout the country, before the president finally signed an order reversing the policy in late June. Why were families separated as a result of this policy? This stems from prior legislation governing the detention of youth: the Flores Settlement Agreement. In 1997, the U.S. voluntarily entered into this agreement, which sets the basic standards of care for unaccompanied minors entering the United States, with immigration activist groups [1].
Because the standards called for as part of the Flores Settlement Agreement do not align with being held in federal custody, and the Trump administration order called for adult migrants to be criminally prosecuted - inevitably landing them in federal custody - the policy had the additional effect of separating children from their families. When this happens, these children become unaccompanied minors in the eyes of the legal system, and move forward in the system alongside those actually unaccompanied children. This type of family separation, with children in the limelight of the public controversy, is not new to the United States. Elián González’s image swept the country at the beginning of the new millennium and the conversation that ensued sparked a new discussion of child immigration conflicts [2]. Images of children can and are often used to construct a narrative surrounding an issue and place it in the context of a larger issue [3]. In the current context, the children who appear at the forefront of the controversy elicit a similar response. These children, locked behind bars, whether they came alone or not, represent a form of criminality that the United States bestows upon children from the Global South - one where they’re part of a punitive system in which no matter the circumstance, children are punished, not protected.
Small children, big challenges
Both unaccompanied and accompanied child migrants to the United States face a host of challenges that, in the Western way of thinking, are not at all appropriate for a young person to be dealing with. For Central American migrants, the journey north towards the United States is incredibly dangerous. Women and children are particularly vulnerable to assault, robbery, and abduction. When encountering police along the way, many migrants fall victim to extortion or abuse. By the mere transportation standpoint, many migrants travel through Mexico by riding on top of the cars of “La Bestia”, or The Beast, a train that travels north throughout Mexico [4]. Once arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, migrant youth and families again face great difficulty, as crossing the desert is dangerous and costly. Those looking to cross the border are almost always forced to use the exploitative services of “coyotes”; without them, arriving on U.S. soil is often unattainable.
By no means is the journey easy nor advisable for children, yet many continue to make the trip. Children face these many stressors and difficult situations, oftentimes alone, before entering the United States into an immigration system that although it claims, as per the Flores Settlement Agreement, to be protecting the welfare of children, appears to be doing just the opposite - placing children in the distressing situations of family separation, detention, a complicated legal system, and more. Beyond this, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which describes in detail the many rights of the child, asserts the necessity of nations to ensure the wellbeing of children and, pertaining to the plight of children who face family separation, goes so far as to explicitly state that children should not be separated from their families unless it is in the child’s best interest. 196 countries across the world have signed and ratified this treaty, signifying international acceptance for the standards set forth in the document. The United States is the only country not to have ratified this document, though it has been signed. This fact alone provokes conversation - why does the U.S. adopt policies such as the Flores Settlement Agreement while at the same time failing to ratify a document so widely agreed upon across the world like the UNCRC?
An argument is to be made here that the U.S. is cognizant of its harsh treatment and inhumane policies towards children of the Global South, and thus, by foregoing ratification of such a treaty, eliminates the moral guilt the country would inevitably face by failing to uphold the standards of the document. Policies that result in children being housed behind bars, having committed no crime besides the crossing of made-up lines, show how criminalization of migrant youth doesn’t stem from wrongdoing. It stems from policies put into place that disadvantage bodies from the Global South in favor of bodies from the Global North, by no choice of their own, and then fails to treat them in a way that emphasizes basic human rights. When children are forcibly removed from their families at the border or are immediately forced to navigate the complicated immigration legal system alone, the government fails in upholding its promises to the wellbeing of youth - both at the level of national agreements, like the Flores Settlement, and of international expectations.
“Unaccompanied alien children”
Under law, these unaccompanied minors are referred to as “unaccompanied alien children”. In definition, these are children under age 18 who “lack lawful immigration status in the United States” and who are without a parent or guardian or without a parent or guardian able to provide care. With the rise of family separation following the zero-tolerance policy, many more children are viewed under this status in the eyes of the law. This puts unaccompanied minors in a unique circumstance because, although seen as minors in the law and dealt with as minors in the U.S. immigration system, these children, being unaccompanied, have acted far more as autonomous adults than what one would consider a “child” to be. At the same time, the opposite is true for some children who are unaccompanied as a result of family separation. While before, these children were traveling alongside family or friends, once separated they are forced to act far more autonomously than they would under any other circumstances. In the immigration courtroom, this can result in mere toddlers, as young as 3, appearing alone.
However, although the U.S. sees unaccompanied minors and treats them as they would a child - which, due to family separation, some very well are - the immigration system does not function in a way that ensures their wellbeing. Instead, these children are continually criminalized. Although unaccompanied minors are not housed in the detention centers run by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol that adults are kept in, the “immigrant children’s shelters” are no less problematic. With a huge influx of unaccompanied minors, or perceived unaccompanied minors following the family separation policy, entering the United States, youth shelters, particularly in 2018, were overcrowded and near capacity, forcing the government to open massive temporary shelters. One such shelter, in Tornillo, Texas, was nothing more than a massive tent city in the desert, that prior to its closure in January 2019, housed nearly 3,000 children aged thirteen to seventeen at a time.
Forcing children to live in such conditions due to their documentation status is no less criminalizing than the striking image of children behind bars that is seen when migrants first arrive in the United States and are initially held. Furthermore, such treatment towards migrant youth by the U.S. government, coupled with the dehumanizing official language referring to unaccompanied minors as “alien children” is indicative of the United States' view of foreign children, particularly from the Global South as less human than their Western counterparts. As Dorfman and Mattelart point out, this view toward the child is one that is based upon the Western tendency to see children, especially from the Global South, through the trope of the “noble savage” [5]. The “noble savage”, according to Dorfman and Mattelart, is primitive, a person of color, with simple dwellings, among other characteristics. It is evident that when looking at migrant youth through the housing that has been provided, the policies that have been created, and the language that has been used, the United States actively participates in this historically colonizing view.
From children to aliens and back
In exploring the experience of migrant youth throughout the journey from leaving their home country to arriving in the United States, to becoming part of the complicated immigration legal system, a curious transformation of status occurs. Over the course of the journey, unaccompanied minors (or unaccompanied alien children, in the official terms) - both those who have arrived unaccompanied and those who have become unaccompanied through the result of family separation - experience a system in which the perception of childhood is altered across spaces. While the physical journey to the United States causes some children to be seen as adults, their official status in the United States is as a minor. For others, the physical journey represents a time where they are cared for by family and subsequent arrival to the U.S. marks a switch in their status to one of greater autonomy. While all of these children have an official status in the United States as a minor, their experience differs when they are forced to present in immigration court proceedings alone. While a migrant might be forced to present in immigration court proceedings alone, at the same time others are playing pretend games with toys in detention, as is described by multitudes of lawyers when asked to speak about the conditions of working with migrant youth.
Childhood has a fluidity across this experience, where migrant youth often shift between spaces of greater adulthood or greater childhood. However, although this status experiences such shifts - one thing remains the same. Children continue to be criminalized by the inhumane immigration legal system. Throughout the experience, they are locked behind bars. While the U.S. is considered the world’s sole hegemonic power, its current treatment of migrant youth in the United States pales in comparison to the treatment and high standards for other children across the Global North. With the unwillingness of the country to ratify the UNCRC, it’s not a stretch to suggest that the U.S. takes advantage of its power to continually discredit foreign youth on American soil. By locking up migrant youth based upon the crossing of imaginary lines, the U.S. sides with a history dating back to colonialism of ignoring the human rights of children from the Global South.
What will it take to change?
[1] Philip G. Schrag, Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).
[2] Karen Dubinsky, “The National Baby: Creating Monumental Children in Cuba, from Operation Peter Pan to Elián González,” in Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 23-56.
[3] Patricia Holland, “Pictures of Children: Images of Childhood,” in Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery (I.B. Tauris, 2004), 1-23.
[4] Hille Haker, “Going it Alone: Political Ethics and the Rights of Unaccompanied Migrant Children,” in Unaccompanied Migrant Children: Social, Legal, and Ethical Perspectives, ed. Hille Haker and Molly Greening (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019), 201-223.
[5] Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, “From the Child to the Noble Savage,” in How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, Trans. David Kunzle (New York: International General, 1975 [1971]): 41-47.