Unintended Consequences: Reverberations of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status

This paper details the socio-legal factors that shape the relationship between the child, the family, and the state, and the ways unaccompanied migrant children’s lives have come to be defined and contested. The legal identity of migrant children is socially situated within a history that intertwines social movements of helping professionals, legal jurisdictions characterized by increasingly intolerant approaches to juveniles, and shifts in the treatment of unauthorized migrant youth under immigration law over time. In a globalized world, this triangular relationship between children, families, and the state becomes increasingly complex and dynamic. Social policies and legal norms often lag far behind the diverse and fluid domestic arrangements of transnational family ties. The article begins by tracing how the creation of the juvenile court and the emergence of the tutelary complex have radically shifted the notion of migrant children as legal subjects in the United States. Through the legal case of Polovchak v. Meese and the advent of the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status, the author argues that the law and institutional practices ensnare youth between competing allegiances to the state and to the family. It is critical to understand the gravity of these forces on the ways youth navigate the complex and uneven terrain of everyday life. Key Take Away Points Examines of the socio-legal history of contemporary response to unaccompanied children Traces of the emergence of the Special Immigration Juvenile status Analyzes of the unintended consequences of SIJ that ensnare unaccompanied children between competing allegiances to the state and to their families

Recasting the Agency of Unaccompanied Youth

This is Chapter 6 of Emerging Perspectives on Children in Migratory Circumstances: Selected Proceedings of the Working Group on Childhood and Migration June 2008 Conference, published by Drexel University Department of Culture & Communication. Click for full-text. Excerpt from the book abstract: Most of the pieces provide in depth points of view from child migrant perspectives—data that is often difficult to obtain and portray sensitively. Child-centered data is exceptionally valuable in helping us to grasp the micro-forces by which childhood is changing through migration and how children experience or activate agency under trying conditions...Lauren Heidbrink [discusses] Spanish speakers in immigration detention in the U.S

“Why would anyone leave?”: Development, overindebtedness, and migration in Guatemala

Over the past two decades, policymakers have expressed considerable optimism about the capacity of international development to curb transnational migration, yet there is a dearth of research examining how and under what conditions development interventions impact migration decisions. Enlisting a case study approach in the Maya-K’iche’ community of Almolonga, this article examines divergent meanings and practices of “development” and its impact on the migratory aspirations and outcomes of Indigenous families in Guatemala. Government authorities and international development experts exalt Almolonga as a prosperous example of a globalized, agrarian-based economy. Key to its ‘success’ is the growing microcredit industry which advertises loans as a means to invest in small businesses and to enable household purchasing power. Yet, as our survey finds, this credit often cascades into over indebtedness, leading to significant out-migration. In contrast, local understandings of development arerooted in the K’iche’ concept of utz k\u27aslemal, a system of complementary economies and intergenerational knowledge-sharing through education and entrepreneurship in an effort to create pathways to ‘el buen vivir.’ By tracing the conflicting meanings assigned to development, we argue that over indebtedness resulting from microcredit not only reinforces but likewise exacerbates existing social inequalities in Guatemala and, contrary to development claims, induces migration

Forced Family Separation: U.S. crimes against Indigenous Peoples

Forced family separation under the U.S. Zero Tolerance policy is not only a crime against humanity, but also a crime against Indigenous Peoples, which includes the Maya. Rooted in white supremacist ideologies and settler colonialism, contemporary forced family separation continues historical violence inflicted upon Maya Peoples by the U.S. government. Submitted to the International Criminal Court, this amicus brief contends that the Court should investigate and hold the U.S. accountable for crimes against Indigenous Peoples under the U.S. Zero Tolerance policy. The amicus brief begins with an overview of Maya Peoples in present-day Guatemala and the meanings and practices of indigeneity. We then trace key historical periods that evidence the United States’ willful and systemic violence inflicted on Indigenous children and families over time. Periods include, among others, 1) removal of Indigenous children and placement in boarding schools; 2) U.S. support of military dictatorships during the 36-year armed conflict and genocide of Maya Peoples in Guatemala; 3) the intercountry adoption of children from Guatemala predominantly to U.S. families; and 4) ongoing punitive immigration policies that harm and in some instances kill Maya children. Perpetuating the U.S.’s long history of disappearing Indigenous people and culture, the Zero Tolerance policy specifically and U.S. immigration policy more generally is a patterned product of genocidal logics and state-inflicted harms by the United States designed to criminalize and terrorize families as a tool of deterrence

Protecting Undocumented Students Post-Election

5 pages; news article from a websit

Integration of unaccompanied migrant youth in the United States: a call for research

Between October 2013 and July 2016, over 156,000 children travelling without their guardians were apprehended at the U.S.–Mexico border and transferred to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). During that same period, ORR placed over 123,000 unaccompanied migrant youth – predominantly from Central America – with a parent or other adult sponsor residing in the U.S. Following placement, local communities are tasked with integrating migrant youth, many of whom experience pre- and in-transit migration traumas, family separation, limited/interrupted schooling, and unauthorised legal status, placing them at heightened risk for psychological distress, academic disengagement, maltreatment, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, fewer than 10% of young people receive formal post-release services (PRS). This paper addresses the paucity of research on the experiences of the 90% of children and youth without access to PRS. To bridge this gap, this article: (a) describes the post-release experiences of unaccompanied youth, focusing on legal, family, health, and educational contexts; (b) identifies methodological and ethical challenges and solutions in conducting research with this population of young people and their families; and (c) proposes research to identify structural challenges to the provision of services and to inform best practices in support of unaccompanied youth

An absent presence: Separated child migrants’ caring practices and the fortified neoliberal state

This paper explores the ambivalent positioning of separated child migrants in the UK with a focus on the care that they provide for each other. Drawing on interview data with state and non-state adult stakeholders involved in the immigration-welfare nexus, we consider how children’s care practices are viewed and represented. We argue that separated children’s caring practices assume an absent presence in the discourses mobilised by these actors: either difficult to articulate or represented in negative and morally-laden terms, reflective of the UK’s 'hostile environment' towards migrants and advanced capitalist constructions of childhood. Such an examination sheds light on the complex state attempts to manage the care and migration regimes, and the way that care can serve as a way of making and marking inclusions and exclusions. Here we emphasise the political consequences for separated child migrants in an age of neoliberal state retrenchment from public provision of care and rising xenophobic nationalism

Humanitarian Refugee or Criminal Alien?: The Social Agency of Migrant Youth

This article is part of a three-year (2006-2009) ethnography that questions the idealized notion of stability and the pathologization of mobility among Central American and Mexican migrant children as they navigate a convoluted network of institutions and actors involved in their care and custody as unaccompanied immigrant children