This article explores the mechanisms in which, through the US family detention asylum process, neoliberal ideas of citizenship are reinforced and contested. Through ethnographic research, and using a Foucauldian lens, we take a closer look at the neoliberal processes involved within so-called family detention. Specifically, we focus on legal advocates who are helping detained women prepare for their legal interviews. This paper argues that humanitarian aid work becomes knowable through attention to microlevel details and forms of practice—on the ground and at the margins. This affords a recognition of not only areas of functional solidarity or symbiosis with the state, but also those less visible forms of contestation. We claim that while legal advocates play a role within the neoliberal regimes at work inside these centres, they also contest this system in various critical ways, ensuring both access to legal representation for all detainees and their eventual release.

The modern instantiation of migrant family detention in the United States has resulted in the creation of carceral spaces in which conflict and care intermingle in everyday encounters. While legal advocates traversing these spaces offer critical aid to the detained, asylum-seeking parents and children confined within, legal advocacy is rarely recognized as caregiving work. Drawing from my ethnographic research with voluntary legal advocates working at family detention facilities in South Texas, this article demonstrates the potential for deploying a lens of care to such encounters, which I ultimately frame as “legal care.” I argue that cross-disciplinary conceptualizations of care, which emphasize its interdependency, relationality, and contested terrains (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), as well as its practices as being marked by a continuous tinkering (Mol 2010), offer windows to reconfigurations of care and power that reside amid both the mundane and unpredictable frictions that characterize these environments.