and policymakers across multiple sites, including in El Salvador and Mexico.14 Many of these individuals were eager to engage in thoughtful reflection on their work with migrant children and the structural challenges they face in serving this population. Many stakeholders (facility staff, legal service providers, voluntary agencies, guardians ad litem, policy researchers) are funded almost exclusively by ORR, which significantly and financially dissuades public critiques or lawsuits regarding the care and custody of children. Confidential interviews for a study approved by ORR provided simultaneous anonymity yet institutional blessing for stakeholders’ candid observations.
Table 2: Country of Origin, Gender, and Location of Children Participating in Study
I collected and analyzed the various types of institutional paperwork produced by governmental and nongovernmental “stakeholders” tracking the presence of unaccompanied youth in federal custody in the United States, including custody transfer forms between ICE, ORR, detention centers, and families; immigration applications and rulings; and fingerprint and photographic records—each asserting the lawful or unlawful status of the youth’s tenuous presence in the United States. I analyzed the marks of the state through genres of writing and practices connecting youth to the state. This focus on institutional paperwork and shifts in the law and legal practices provides a critical space in the analysis of youth agency as it provides an avenue through which to consider how youth are shaped by and shape institutions they encounter. While the law is often assumed to be impermeable, youth as social actors dynamically interact and engage with the law and legal practices. By focusing on the persistence of certain legal notions of youth over time amid specific moments of legal change, I examine how the law simultaneously reflects change and continuity in the space of youth, even as it shapes their daily lives (James and James 2004).
Third, I maintained regular communication with children released from detention who remained in California, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Texas, Illinois, and New York and with unauthorized children who evaded apprehension altogether. Tracing the social and familial networks of migrant youth was particularly challenging given the transnational and mobile character of children’s lives. Many of the youths circulated between households in multiple living arrangements, requiring creative methods and fluidity inherent in a multisited project. At other times, I was astounded by what appeared, at first glance, to be pure chance of encountering the same youths in multiple locations or once again in immigration detention. While I expected children detained in one location to be released in other localities, I did not anticipate the remarkable extent of mobility of non-detained children or children following their release from federal custody. Children moved quite frequently between households, jobs, cities, and even countries. Their transnational social networks and their nimble ability to foster new social ties facilitated their movement to improved living arrangements or employment opportunities. The sedentary demands of childhood customary in the West rarely applied to the children and youth with whom I worked.
Given the variations in experience and social and legal trajectories, my interactions with youths and their families varied over time and space. Some youths would maintain weekly phone or Skype contact with me for extended periods of time, while others would come in and out of communication with me, and I would receive a text message after three or four months of no contact. For many youths following their release, I served as a cultural interlocutor, assisting them in securing copies of documents from ORR, enrolling in school, and facilitating legal referrals, or navigating health care needs. In the days and weeks following their release, many youths and their parents would call me daily to ask questions, seek translation assistance, or simply say hello. My phone number was passed to family members, friends, and neighbors, identifying me as “a person who helps.” I continue to receive phone calls from Georgia, Maryland, and Indiana with requests for assistance. Many youths with whom I worked moved multiple times, changed phone numbers routinely, or lacked the financial resources to charge their prepaid cellular phones. Tracking down updated contact information proved extremely difficult, so I relied on the youth keeping me informed of changes in residence. Because of the geographic distribution and mobility of many youth, I was restricted to only occasional in-person visits with youth and their families in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Texas, and New York. For released and nondetained youth living in the Midwest, communication was much more predictable and regular. I attended school events, family picnics, soccer games, religious celebrations, doctor’s appointments, meetings with attorneys, and court hearings. Unable to “leave the field,” I continue to communicate with several youths, now ranging from twenty-one to twenty-six years, as they secure legal status, enter college, get married, and start families.
Fourth, I conducted interviews with members of the Guatemalan and an communities in Maryland and Illinois with whom I have worked for over a decade, and I spent several months in El Salvador (2007) with children deported from the United States and with the families of unaccompanied children who remain in the United States.15 With convoluted and ambiguous directions from detained youths, I located some families in El Salvador in an effort to understand not only the specificities of the local situations and networks of these youth, but also the national context that informs both the motivations for migration and the state and home communities’ reception of repatriated youth. I encountered several youths who had migrated and had since returned or been deported to El Salvador. Their experiences on return added depth I had not anticipated. I met with several governmental and nongovernmental actors who provided assistance to returned migrant youth, as well as two research institutions that were coordinating efforts on migration both into and out of El Salvador. Many of the migrant youth I encountered in El Salvador were Nicaraguan children who had come to El Salvador in search of work or Salvadoran children who had recently returned from Mexico and the United States, often planning their next trip. Since the completion of this project, I have initiated a study with deported youth in the highlands of Guatemala. Their experiences of deportability and removal have added dimensions of experience and complexity to this work.
While a multisited ethnography was an imperative given the mobility of both detained and nondetained youth, there are inherent limitations to ethnography as a methodology, particularly for researching a structurally decentralized federal custodial system.16 A multisited ethnography proved critical for a number of reasons. I sought to explore the differing sensibilities and anxieties about unaccompanied children between the “border” and the “interior”; the varying personalities and capabilities between subcontracted voluntary agencies; the conservative Fifth Circuit Court versus a more moderate Seventh Circuit Court; the localized tensions between state-run Children and Family Services and the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement; and the local court jurisdictions’ receptiveness to the Specialized Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status—a hybrid form of relief that requires a dependency finding in state court to pursue federal immigration relief. SIJ is a step in immigration law toward identification of unaccompanied minors by permitting unauthorized children to stand before the law as primary petitioners in cases of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. In spite of these variations, trends emerged across three countries and five states where I conducted research. These trends are further refined by my subsequent communication and visits with staff and children at an additional twenty-six programs and facilities from my applied work as a guardian ad litem.17
As I map out the actors, organizations, state and federal institutions, and international governments and organizations involved with unaccompanied children in the United States, the sheer number is dizzying. The overlapping and at time conflicting responsibilities and interests consistently trap children and their families in untenable situations with few alternatives and marginal opportunities to voice their desires and concerns. Forced to navigate this “Kafk a-esque” network, as Bhabha and Schmidt (2006) describe, that espouses a simultaneous desire to care for and to remove them, unaccompanied children, as I argue, exercise their agency as social actors to challenge, shape, and reformulate the very laws that define them.
Anxieties of Power
There is a critical power imbalance that pervades research of marginalized populations by Western, privileged researchers. These differentials are only magnified when engaging in participatory research around