migrant. I argue that in that process the ever-shifting boundaries of the nation are reworked and reinforced.
Alba’s Story
I first met Alba and her foster mother and biological cousin, Tatianna, in the summer of 2008, when Tatianna and her husband were still in pursuit of adoption and U.S. citizenship for Alba. Alba’s story was unique because it had largely been resolved outside the law enforcement and federal bureaucracies typically involved in trafficking cases. According to Tatianna, this was partly because after arriving in the United States with Alba, Esther, who had allegedly “purchased” Alba, managed to register Alba under her legal guardianship and was able to receive some support services for food and housing through the social service system without raising any red flags about Alba’s origins.19 This meant that Alba was already enmeshed in the child welfare system, a circumstance that did not protect her from the threat of deportation but did enable her to sidestep the immigration bureaucracy that would normally attend to the circumstances of a child migrant or a trafficked child.
Children who are under the custody of the child welfare system are technically vulnerable to detention and deportation if they are not U.S. citizens. However, in practice it is quite unusual for children in foster care to be detained or deported while in care, and they are formally eligible for the same treatment and services provided to citizen foster children. Undocumented parents and family members attempting to regain custody of their children did experience profoundly differential treatment within the child welfare system; these distinctions form one of the central concerns of the chapters that follow. However, during my research I never observed undocumented foster children being treated differentially or denied access to services available to U.S. citizen foster children during their time in state custody. Although foster children were almost never detained or deported, it was much more likely that this might happen once they aged out of the foster care system at eighteen, particularly given high rates of homelessness, incarceration, and unemployment for former foster youth, and thus the likelihood of their increased visibility to law enforcement officers.20
Alba’s story, as I recount it here, is full of gaps, unanswered questions, and inconsistencies. The depiction I present is primarily Tatianna’s narrative, supplemented by my own observations while Alba’s case was open, conversations with two Esperanza social workers involved in the case, case notes in Alba’s file, and documents Tatianna shared with me, including a written exchange from Alba’s biological father to Esther. However, substantial gaps in the story do remain, and without access to the county social worker’s version of events, the story is partial at best.
Tatianna, Alba’s cousin, was living in San Diego, where she had attended college. She lived in the city with her husband, with whom she co-owned a business, and their three-year-old daughter. Tatianna’s extended family, living in Tijuana, did not initially know what had happened to Alba when she disappeared. However, they were hesitant to involve law enforcement in their family circumstances, concerned that Alba might be placed in a Tijuana orphanage instead of with her extended family. Tatianna’s involvement in Alba’s case began when one of Tatianna’s aunts discovered a letter from Alba’s father to Esther, requesting more money than the funds that had already been exchanged for Alba. Based on the name and address, Tatianna’s aunt managed to locate Esther, who was living in San Diego. With this new information, Tatianna went to check up on Alba. She explained, “Look, I wanted to adopt Alba. But I would have been content to leave her there, with Esther, if things had seemed okay. But I just wasn’t comfortable.”21
When Tatianna arrived at Esther’s house she was not happy with Alba’s circumstances—she didn’t feel that the home had enough room for the whole family, she didn’t like that Esther said she was relying on welfare payments, and she wasn’t comfortable with the fact that though Esther had told Alba’s father she was married, she in fact lived in San Diego with an undocumented boyfriend. Tatianna felt that Esther had misrepresented her situation to Alba’s father and that Alba was not as well cared for as she could be. When Tatianna explained who she was and refused to leave Esther’s home without Alba, Esther called the police. Officers soon arrived, hands on their guns, to evict Tatianna from the property. Tatianna explained to the police that Esther had illegally smuggled Alba into the country, but they told her the situation was beyond their jurisdiction and would have to be settled in family court. Tatianna was then escorted off Esther’s property.22
Tatianna then began the long, arduous process of petitioning for Alba’s custody. She explained how surprised she had been that the social worker for Alba’s case did not seem concerned by Alba’s circumstances and the lack of clarity about how she had come to be in Esther’s care. Even Tatianna explained, however, that Esther’s intentions seemed good: “I really do think she just wanted another daughter,” Tatianna told me, “She wasn’t really trying to exploit her, I don’t think. It wasn’t a money situation.”23 I was never able to speak to the county social worker involved in this case, so I do not know what her perspective was on Alba’s condition and Tatianna’s claims. From Tatianna’s perspective the social worker was dismissive of what amounted to human trafficking and did not feel she had any reason to be concerned about Alba’s situation. Tatianna, for this reason, appeared to be nothing more than a hassle the social worker was forced to deal with in the context of an otherwise relatively straightforward, unproblematic case. Tatianna initiated a letter-writing campaign to Alba’s social worker and her supervisor, eventually pressuring the social worker to move Alba to a foster home while the case was pending in dependency court. Tatianna realized she needed help navigating the legal complexities of the child welfare system. She happened to see an ad for the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program in San Diego, an agency that provided volunteer advocates empowered by the court to make recommendations on behalf of foster children. Tatianna requested an advocate for Alba, and was connected with a CASA without whom she felt she would not have been able to navigate the complex legal obstacles to gaining custody of Alba.
CASAs could be requested by anyone involved in a child’s case, or by foster children themselves. They were charged with representing the interests of the child to the court, because children, according to the view of social workers and legal actors, were often not able to distinguish between what they wanted and what might be best for them in the long term. The role of the CASA was to get to know and to advocate for the child, effectively bringing the “voice” of the child into the courtroom. As the recruitment director at a CASA organization explained during an orientation session:
It is not that the paid professionals are at fault it is just that they don’t have the time, and this is why CASA volunteers are so important. You’ll be given a badge and a court order to have access to legal, medical, educational records as well as social worker and judge’s files.… [We] receive referrals for kids who need CASAs through teachers, social workers, foster parents, attorneys or even kids themselves. But, you cannot be a CASA if you work with any aspect of foster care or dependency court due to conflict of interest; the key to a CASA is that you are serving no one but the child.24
CASAs were officially appointed by the court to the cases of foster children who were determined to be the most in need. This typically included children who had experienced more placements than usual, children who were separated from siblings, children who were experiencing severe educational or emotional difficulties, and children involved in cases in which various parties disagreed about how the case should proceed. As noted above, CASAs were unique in that they had court-ordered access to all information pertaining to the child’s case, including county social worker and FFA documents, medical files, psychological assessments, and school reports. Furthermore, county social workers were compelled by formal policy to respond to any inquiries from CASAs within 48 hours. Additionally, CASAs were volunteers, not limited by time, institutional resources, or government regulations. In Alba’s case, her CASA worked with Tatianna to navigate the complexity of Alba’s legal circumstances and to advocate for her eventual adoption by Tatianna.
The legal process was complicated by the fact that Alba had no birth certificate. This missing document posed two distinct problems. First, it affected Tatianna’s ability to prove herself to be Alba’s kin. Tatianna pushed for a DNA test that the county of San Diego did not pursue. Tatianna never received