Family Detention, Law, and Geopolitics in US Immigration Enforcement Policy

Abstract

This chapter uses noncitizen family detention in the United States to show how border crossing magnifies children’s uncertain legal status. The chapter first describes the legal precedent for family detention as an immigration enforcement practice and situates it in immigration geopolitics and children’s rights literatures. Second, the chapter shows how noncitizen children are understood as “child-objects” in immigration law rather than agential, liberal subjects. In contrast, immigration law figures adults as criminalized migrant-subjects, rendering them undeserving of due judicial process. To demonstrate how this unfolds, the chapter shows how a federal district judge balanced “irreparable harm” to detained children, the “public interest,” and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) discretion to detain noncitizens. Mobilizing “geostrategic discourses” of external threat and internal safety, the judge ruled that US family detention centers are relatively safe spaces compared to families’ countries of origin, from which most families sought asylum. This move not only used asylees’ testimonies as evidence of external insecurity but also enabled a particular fusing of US national security with the “best interests of the child.” These legal, discursive, and spatial tactics are part of a broader “geopolitics of vulnerability” in which immigration and border officials seek to displace national (in)securities onto detained families and children. By unpacking the intersections of children’s legal subjectivity and immigration law, the chapter shows how children’s and families’ paradoxical legal status becomes a venue for deeper struggles over executive power and emerging spatial practices of immigration enforcement and immigration law.

Portions of this chapter appeared in “The Geopolitics of Vulnerability: Migrant Families in U.S. Immigrant Family Detention Policy.” Gender, Place, & Culture. 18(4): 477–498.