Children on the Move

      In November 1999, a fishing boat rescued a five-year-old boy clinging to a small raft in the waters south of Florida. His mother and stepfather died while traveling from Cuba to the United States when their vessel capsized. A fisherman took young Elian Gonzalez to the home of his great-uncle living in a Cuban enclave of Miami. For the next seven months, a transnational battle between family members, U.S. immigration enforcement, and Cuban authorities ensued, each claiming to serve Elian’s “best interests.” Family members in the United States claimed that a life of stability embodied by regular schooling, family, and Disney World was best for Elian—not political turmoil under dictator Fidel Castro, which spurred his treacherous maritime journey. Yet Elian’s father and stepmother insisted he belonged with his biological parent in a nurturing home and in a supportive community. While the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) considers Cuban nationals a unique category of political refugee, Elian’s alien presence revolved around his status as a dependent minor, who under U.S. immigration law could not independently stand before the law. Declining a congressional offer for political asylum, Elian’s father, still residing in Cuba, requested Elian’s immediate return. Despite a political asylum application filed on his behalf by his uncle, Elian was ultimately repatriated to Cuba, though only after an armed raid by immigration officers “freed” Elian from the captivity of his extended family members in Miami. Images of a masked law enforcement agent aiming a semiautomatic rifle at Elian and his uncle filled the front pages of international newspapers. The “unaccompanied” migrant child entered the U.S. public imaginary with tremendous force, as if Elian were the first child to arrive alone on U.S. shores.

      The figure of the “unaccompanied alien child”—an individual under age eighteen who has no lawful immigration status in the United States and who has no parent or legal guardian to provide care and custody—challenges dominant Western conceptualizations of child dependence and passivity, explicitly through these children’s unauthorized and independent presence in the United States and implicitly in the ways they move through multiple geographic and institutional sites. Unaccompanied children are economic, political, and social migrants who arrive both lawfully and unlawfully and originate from nearly every country around the globe. They face similar challenges to those of other populations of migrants who confront language barriers, intergenerational conflict, cultural assimilation, and limited access to resources, but what remains unique are the ways the law and institutions frame children seemingly without parents or kinship ties. Independent, or unattached, migrant children bereft of family or kinship networks therefore threaten the notion of how children can and should act. Their unauthorized presence and exercise of “independent” agency threaten the state’s reliance on the nuclear family as the site for producing future citizens. Thus, migrant children become a problem to be solved.

      In response to their independent presence, the state provides care for youth including food, shelter, and medical attention; yet simultaneously, due to their unauthorized entry, state institutions initiate deportation proceedings against unaccompanied youth. Deportation (often framed erroneously as “repatriation”) itself could be seen as a form of care in which the state seeks to reunify children with their families or their country of origin; however, as I will elaborate, in practice, the law may separate children from their families who remain in the United States. In stark contrast to domestic child welfare protocols, there are very few safeguards at the state and the federal levels governing the repatriation or deportation of children, minimal resources invested to confirm the risks of abuse or neglect of even the availability of care on arrival, nor is there basic knowledge about how children are received in the short and long term by governments, communities, or families.¹ More commonly, there is little known about children who are returned to their countries of origin. Some families manage to claim their children on arrival or at shelters for deportees. Some research participants from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras report being abandoned on the tarmac, detained in local jails until a family member could pay a fine or a bribe to secure their release, or, in one extreme case, institutionalized in an asylum for children until a family member located the child three weeks later. In short, with only minor differences, migrant children are removed from the state just as their adult counterparts are, but they face additional risks because of their minor status.

      As such, youth encounter the state as both paternal protector and punishing