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Unintended Consequences: Reverberations of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status Journal of Applied Research on Children: Informing Policy for Children at Risk Volume 5 Issue 2 Legal Safety Nets: The Law as a Change Article 9 Agent for Children 2014 Unintended Consequences: Reverberations of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status Lauren Heidbrink National Louis University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/childrenatrisk Recommended Citation Heidbrink, Lauren (2014) "Unintended Consequences: Reverberations of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status," Journal of Applied Research on Children: Informing Policy for Children at Risk: Vol. 5 : Iss. 2 , Article 9. Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/childrenatrisk/vol5/iss2/9 The Journal of Applied Research on Children is brought to you for free and open access by CHILDREN AT RISK at DigitalCommons@The Texas Medical Center. It has a "cc by-nc-nd" Creative Commons license" (Attribution Non- Commercial No Derivatives) For more information, please contact [email protected] Unintended Consequences: Reverberations of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Walter Afable, the anonymous reviewers from JARC, and the young people and their families who generously shared their experiences. This article is available in Journal of Applied Research on Children: Informing Policy for Children at Risk: https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/childrenatrisk/vol5/iss2/9 Heidbrink: Unintended Consequences Dear Mama, I hope you are not mad. I want to help you but it’s complicated. I go to school every day. I am learning English but it is hard. I am not working. I want to but it’s prohibited. I promise you that I will do my best in everything I do. I will find a way to help you. I will not forget you. I like my mother here but you are my real mother. You will always be my real mom. I love you. —Johanna, 16-year-old Mexican girl in foster care Introduction The relationship between the state, the family, and the child is a fundamental unit of analysis in society. The law and social norms that shape this triad inform the ways adults care and provide for their children. Parents also affect the ways children are socialized into the community, allowing for social continuity over time and space. In the United States, the nature of this relationship has shifted over time as have the roles that children are recognized as playing in this relationship. The growing presence of unaccompanied children (an individual under the age of 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 how institutional and legal conceptualizations of childhood pathologize the migrant child and the transnational family. In this article, I provide an overview of the socio-legal factors that shape the relationship between the child, the family, and the state, and the ways migrant children’s lives have come to be defined and contested. The legal identity of migrant children is socially situated within a history that intertwines social movements of helping professionals, legal jurisdictions characterized by increasingly intolerant approaches to juveniles, and shifts in the treatment of unauthorized migrant children under immigration law over time. When there is a perceived rupture in the social norm of the nuclear family, particularly in moments of crisis (such as parental death, abandonment, divorce, abuse, or neglect) the state often enters and acts Published by DigitalCommons@TMC, 2014 1 Journal of Applied Research on Children: Informing Policy for Children at Risk, Vol. 5 [2014], Iss. 2, Art. 9 as the mediator of domestic relations.1(pxiv-xv),2 While historically and culturally decontextualized, child migration is increasingly identified as a threat to healthy childhood and an indication of familial rupture. For unaccompanied children in federal detention facilities run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)*, this evolving series of actions and interventions shape how ORR evaluates parental competence and fitness, and how courts make custody determinations. In a globalized world like todays, this triangular relationship between children, families, and the state is becoming increasingly complex and dynamic. Social policies and legal norms are lagging behind the diverse and fluid domestic arrangements of transnational families. As an unintended but powerful consequence, the relationships between unaccompanied children and their kin are getting strained and, in some instances, severed. I begin by tracing how creation of the juvenile court and emergence of the tutelary complex has radically shifted the notion of children as legal subjects in the United States. I analyze the legal case of Polovchak v. Meese, a critical precursor to a relatively new form of legal recourse for some migrant children—the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status. SIJ is a form of legal relief available to migrant children who have been abused, abandoned or neglected. An unauthorized child may pursue a finding of abuse, abandonment and neglect in state court, and then apply for a SIJ visa from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Through this hybrid process between state courts and federal immigration law, SIJ is the only provision in immigration law that considers the child’s best interests. However, in practice, I argue that SIJ ensnares migrant youth ** In 2003 with the reorganization of Homeland Security, the care of unaccompanied children transferred from Immigration and Naturalization Services (now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to the Office of Refugee Resettlements Division of Unaccompanied Children’s Services. While less restrictive than the rented bed space in juvenile jails that housed unaccompanied children under the INS, ORR detention facilities, euphemistically called “shelters”, are not experienced as such. Children constantly are monitored by security cameras, watched and counted continuously by staff, permitted to leave the facility only when supervised at particular staff-to-child ratios, restricted to communication with one or two preapproved family members by phone for twenty minutes per week. Most facilities have locked, alarmed doors and windows. Staff documents medical and mental health sessions, behaviors, personal communication, phone calls, and visits with advocates within the child’s institutional file, which is freely shared with law enforcement upon request. As a total institution, every action and reaction is subject to surveillance and documentation in the child’s ORR file. Staff members remind children that misbehavior will affect their “case,” widely understood by children as their release and long-term permanency in the United States. https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/childrenatrisk/vol5/iss2/9 2 Heidbrink: Unintended Consequences between competing allegiances to the state and to the family. Through the narratives and social agency of young people like Johanna, whose letter opened this article, we may recognize the gravity of these forces on the ways youth and their families navigate the complex and uneven terrain of everyday life. Research Methods Unaccompanied children are economic, political, and social migrants who arrive both lawfully and unlawfully, and originate from many countries around the globe. They face similar challenges to those of other populations of migrants, confronting 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 calls into question the state’s reliance on the nuclear family as the site for producing future citizens. The figure of the “unaccompanied alien child” challenges dominant Western conceptualizations of child dependence and passivity explicitly through their unauthorized and independent presence in the United States and implicitly in the ways they move through multiple geographic and institutional sites. Thus, migrant children become a problem remaining to be solved. This article draws from a large, multi-sited ethnography on the complex institutions and actors that emerge when children migrate clandestinely from Central America and Mexico to the United States, and the ways young people understand the law, institutional interventions, and their own best interests.3 While the larger study focuses on how young migrants navigate legal and institutional processes, this article narrows its gaze to the specific form of legal relief, SIJ, being increasingly utilized on behalf of unaccompanied children. As such, my fieldwork focused on four contexts. First, I conducted participant observation in highly restrictive and largely inaccessible spaces of immigration detention, immigration and family courts, and federal foster care programs for unaccompanied children.† I conducted multiple, one-on-one interviews with 82 detained † In order to conduct research, I secured permission not only from my university’s institutional review board and two of the organizations’ research review committees but also from the thirteen other individuals and organizations who laid claim to speak for the best interests of the child, a two year process. Although the director of the
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