Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests

Chapter 5. The Shadow State

CHAPTER 5 The Shadow State I N T E R L U D E There is the righteous one. Here is a ruined me. See how far one is from the other. What links to piety and righteousness have guided my way? There is the sound of the sermon, I hear the melody of its instrument. But, my heart grows weary of this cloister, The hypocrites cloak. Where is the monastery of the Magi? Where is the pure wine? The days of my vision are gone. Let them be my joyful memories. Where once was an affectionate glance Instead, I find reproach. What can the enemy’s heart find in my tired face? Here in my eyes is the extinguished candle of hope. —Pascal, sixteen-year-old Guinean youth 110 Chapter 5 In this chapter, we enter the labyrinth of federal immigration detention for migrant children called “shelters,” in which the federal government subcontracts with NGOs to provide for the everyday needs of children. At the point of apprehension, ICE makes a series of assessments. Is the child accompanied by a family member to whom they can be released? Is the child a Mexican national with no credible fear of return and thus imminently deportable? Does the child pose a threat to the community and warrant ongoing detention ? Or, is the child unaccompanied by a parent or guardian necessitating transfer to the ORR Division of Children’s Services? As I explained previously , the “unaccompanied alien child” is simultaneously a constructed legal and administrative category and subject to significant discretion by ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In 2012, ORR maintained custody of over 2,000 children daily in a series of seventy facilities. This has only increased since that time, with an anticipated 26,000 unaccompanied migrant children entering into ORR custody in fiscal year 2013. New facilities open almost monthly. The statistical majority of children entering ORR custody are from Central America and are apprehended crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. However, an increasing number of children are apprehended internally in the United States as a result of increased workplace raids, partnerships between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, and collaboration between the juvenile justice system and immigration enforcement . As a result, recently arrived migrant children are commingled with youth who have grown up in the United States from a very young age. The result is a complex and dynamic population of children and youth (ranging up to eighteen years old) from around the globe placed in programs that struggle to provide for the diverse social, cultural, therapeutic, developmental , and legal needs of children and youth. In some instances, U.S. citizen infants are held in immigration detention facilities to preserve the parentchild unity while detaining the parenting teenager. Facility sizes range from ten beds in programs working with homeless and “troubled” youth to three hundred beds in facilities exclusively for unauthorized children. Despite its being perpetually in “draft” form, ORR has developed a set of national protocols and procedures that guide subcontracted NGOs to provide daily care, including education, recreation, medical care, and mental health services. Charged with implementing the conditions of the Flores Settlement Agreement, facility staff takes seriously their commitment to provide for the physical needs of children and attempt to provide a safe place where children can heal from their journeys and pursue renunciation The Shadow State 111 with family members or a sponsor. In addition to obligations of care, facility staff are also responsible for detaining children, restricting their movements, regulating behavior, closely monitoring their communication with others, and evaluating a child’s suitability for sponsorship or limited placements in foster care or group homes. While this decentralized network of facilities functions with limited supervision from ORR or from states licensers, my research has identified patterns of care and strategies of control across multiple sites over time. Through four ethnographic vignettes that exemplify these trends, I demonstrate the tensions between how the state structures interventions, how organizations imagine a child’s well-being, and how children exercise their social agency. I detail how ORR policies and the everyday practices of their subcontractors pathologize children’s mobility and negate their social agency in order to curb perceived “problematic” and “unattached” behaviors; at the same time, these policies and practices structurally reinforce these behaviors . In many ways, youth agency is highly constructed and scripted by the rules and regulations of facility...