an Uzi” (Medina 2011). In the past decade, the stakes of the lawful and unlawful presence of the migrant child in particular have intensified.
A “New” Social Problem
There is an overwhelming belief among state actors and NGOs that children are increasingly on the move—migrating both with families and alone. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, formerly INS), ORR, and advocates alike contend that the rates of children migrating to the United States have risen since 2000, yet these claims are difficult to substantiate. Very little is known about flows of children across borders. Quantitative data are scarce for a number of reasons. The movement of children is often folded into the migration statistics of adults or left out entirely; conflicting definitions of the type and motivations for child migration problematize any systematic account of migratory flows; and specialist literatures on refugees, trafficking, and fostering, for example, stand in contrast to migration literature, which consolidates variation in order to trace large-scale demographic trends over time and space.
Until recently, the U.S. government has not maintained a centralized or even coordinated effort among the various government agencies and departments involved in the care and custody of migrant children to track the inflow of unauthorized migrant children, accompanied or unaccompanied. In their 2006 report Seeking Asylum Alone, Jacqueline Bhabha and Susan Schmidt make a valiant effort to gather government statistics on the volume of unaccompanied child migration to the United States.4 They found a significant lack of communication and coordination between the four government departments and fifteen agencies involved with migrating children, resulting in incomplete, convoluted, and at times misleading and contradictory data regarding the scope of child migration (Bhabha and Schmidt 2006; see Figure 1). It was not until the reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security and the transfer of care from INS to ORR in 2003 that a more systematic, though still problematically incomplete, mechanism was developed for tracking the migratory flows of children into the United States.5
While statistics on the flow of children across U.S. borders remain largely untraced, legal experts estimate that over 500,000 immigrant children enter the United States each year (Seugling 2005: 863). Central American experts have estimated over 45,000 Central American children immigrate to the United States each year.6 Estimates from the Department of Justice indicate 101,952 unaccompanied children apprehended in 2007, with four of every five children from Mexico.7 However, many children evade apprehension and pass clandestinely into the United States, joining the more than 11.9 million unauthorized immigrants currently residing in the United States (Passel and Cohn 2009). Other child migrants may successfully pass through official points of entry with fraudulent documents or without inspection. Still other migrant children enter the United States with valid documents but overstay their tourist or student visas, shifting their status from student or tourist to unaccompanied alien minor once their visas expire.
Of the 100,000 unaccompanied minors apprehended yearly, approximately 6,000 to 8,000 enter the care of the ORR. From 2007 to 2011, the number of children in ORR care fluctuated from 800 to 1,500 daily. In 2012, there was a notable increase in the number of children identified as unaccompanied and transferred to ORR custody, with estimates reaching 16,000 children annually. Even amid improved record keeping, this relatively small number of total migrant children is largely guesswork for a number of reasons. First, ICE may reclassify some unaccompanied children as accompanied and release them to family members or detain entire families together in family detention centers as a more “humane” way to keep families together in retrofitted county jails.8 Second, ICE or Border Patrol may not identify unaccompanied children as minors. Some youths lie about their age or some law enforcement do not believe their minor status, continuing to categorize them as adults subject to expedited removal from the United States, instead of benefiting from some of the specialized provisions of detention of children. Third, unaccompanied Mexican and Canadian minors are removed from the United States within seventy-two hours to their countries of origin without a hearing before an immigration judge as a result of the Contiguous Territories Agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico.9 Some Mexican youths do enter ORR facilities, but at much lower rates than their actual rates of migration. Fourth, some unauthorized youths in the juvenile justice system may be transferred to ICE and then ORR custody after serving their sentences rather than being released to their intact families who live locally.
Figure 1. U.S. government organization chart. A network of federal government departments government agencies, and myriad nongovernmental organizations are involved in the care and custody of apprehended unaccompanied children.
Since the transfer of the responsibilities from the INS to ORR in 2003, there are more reliable statistics but only for the small fraction of children who have been apprehended. Of the migrant children in ORR custody, approximately 85 percent come from Central America, primarily Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Of these, consistently 20 percent are between ages zero and fourteen and 80 percent between fifteen and eighteen. Between 74 and 77 percent are male and 23 to 26 percent are female. Table 1 shows the countries of citizenship of unaccompanied children in ORR custody since the program’s inception.
The absence of reliable or coordinated statistics is emblematic of the ways children have been overlooked in immigration; either considered as miniature adults or folded into family migration statistics. In other words, children are not worthy of being counted or of specialized treatment or care. Instead of acknowledging this critical deficit and recognizing children as contributors to migratory decisions and as migrants themselves, state discourses frame child migration as a burgeoning social phenomenon worldwide. Some legislators have advocated for a growing body of laws and system of care for this growing “social problem” of unauthorized child migration, as a U.S. representative framed it during my interview with her. The “surge” or “flood” of child migrants forcing open the proverbial American gates is an image not unlike one of European migrants at the turn of the twentieth century or of contemporary flows of adult migrants. An attorney with the American Bar Association observed, “My sense is that it is not so much that the numbers are mushrooming, but now our legal system is seeing immigrant children for the first time. They [the children] are here and we have to deal with it. The law is just late to the game but perceives child migrants as a new problem, when it really isn’t.” Children have been migrating for centuries both inside and outside of state-run programs, but not until the late 1990s and early 2000s has there been a critical shift in the “visibility” of migrant children, through which the state has begun to assign specific significance to their presence. Recognizing that with globalization come increased flows of information and commodities across time and space, child migration should come as little surprise; yet, it unsettles entrenched notions of childhood, race, legality, and agency in society and in the law in remarkable ways. This ethnography examines the contradictory nature of how and when children are seen and of which children remain invisible.
Table 1: Country of Origin of Unaccompanied Children in ORR Custody (percent, fiscal years 2004–2011)
Source: Office of Refugee Resettlement
N = total number of unaccompanied alien children in ORR custody. * Fiscal year 2009 percentages based on country of origin were unavailable.
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, the U.S. Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The act would prove to be the largest reorganization of federal government agencies since the 1947 National Security Act, which created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council and shifted the military under the secretary of defense. As part of the newly declared “war on terror,” the Homeland Security Act also consolidated antiterrorism initiatives, border security, and immigration enforcement under a single “homeland security czar.” The renamed Immigration