Unsacred Children: The Portrayal of Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors as Racialized Threats

Abstract

Since the early twentieth century, children have been regarded as a protected class, legally and symbolically, in the United States. Although legal protections for U.S. children have also extended to non-citizen children, this study investigates whether the symbolic aspect of children’s protected status is undermined in the case of immigrant children. Through an examination of media reports during the 2014 entrance of unaccompanied minors from Central America and Mexico, I analyze how anti-immigrant protestors portrayed unaccompanied minors in quotes published in news articles across several online historical databases including ProQuest Historical Newspaper and the Local Historical Newspaper Archives by NewsBank. Based on this analysis, I find that the symbolic protected status normally attributed to children did not extend to unaccompanied minors. Specifically, anti-immigrant protestors mobilized forms of racialization typically employed against immigrant adults, which took four distinct forms that framed immigrant children as: (1) threats to the economy, (2) carriers of disease, (3) criminal and terrorist threats, and (4) invaders. Despite belonging to a vulnerable and normally protected group, immigrant children were racialized in ways well-established by scholars as characteristic of adult migrants by anti-immigrant protestors, who portrayed them as unsacred children unworthy of a protected status. This study contributes to our understandings of child and immigrant racialization and further contextualizes policies of detention and deportation against immigrant children.

“Racism Masked as Safety Concerns”: The Experiences of Residents of Color With Racialized Coveillance in a Predominantly White Neighborhood

“…However, police are not always present with racialized coveillance. As we find, while racialized coveillance sometimes involves policing, nonstate actors can monitor and racialize people (Romero 2022) without the presence of police. Here, the monitoring occurs from mostly White residents who live in Rockville.…”

Migration and Racialization Part I: Constructing and Navigating a Hostile Terrain

“…Interestingly, in Luis Romero’s (2022) article on media coverage of unaccompanied minors, the author finds a pattern that contrasts with what Bailey-Hall and Estrada identify. Here, instead of portraying migrant children as children, they are “adultified” by anti-immigrant protestors.…”

Malleable detention: The restructuring of carceral space within U.S. immigration detention

“…Research on the expansion of immigration enforcement and detention has focused on policy (García Hernández, 2014;Wilsher, 2012), privatization (Ackerman and Furman, 2013;Conlon and Hiemstra, 2017;Doty and Wheatley, 2013), and antiimmigrant racialization (Chavez, 2013;Mohamed and Farris, 2020;Romero, 2022) as reasons for this growth. Yet, an aspect of immigration detention that remains understudied is how the U.S. has maintained the necessary space for the record number of detained migrants, especially in the midst of pressure from anti-detention movements, a breakdown in the partnerships between immigration enforcement agencies and local governments and calls from Congress to reduce the number detained migrants (Lanard, 2019).…”

“…Similar to prisons in the criminal-legal system, immigration detention has been marked by regimented routines, surveillance, abuse, isolation and shaped by private prison companies (Romero, 2021). Current research on detention underscores the resemblance to incarceration, including the use of power by immigration officers (Bosworth, 2019; Campesi, 2015), solitary confinement (Franco et al, 2020), feelings of imprisonment in detention (Russell and Rae, 2020), and the use of legal systems to maintain detention (Broeders, 2010; Haddeland and Franko, 2021).…”