sex work in Tijuana, where Tommy had been born HIV positive. Sonia said, with a wave of her hand that his mother was likely “indigente, andando por las calles” (indigent, wandering the streets of Tijuana).40 Tommy had arrived at the orphanage, like most children, without documents. He had been brought by a concerned neighbor, and it was from this neighbor that the basic circumstances of his life had been learned. This was quite common for children in Tijuana orphanages, and in fact, Sonia felt she had more information about Tommy than many of the children in her care. Although some children are brought to orphanages by relatives or concerned neighbors, others are simply abandoned at orphanage gates where young children, because they are unable to communicate with orphanage staff, are given names and assigned birthdays, their age roughly estimated by height, appearance, and basic skills. Sonia explained this process, miming measuring a child’s height with her hand, saying “Me parece como seis” (He looks about six to me).41
Tommy, like Alba, was effectively stateless and assumed to be a citizen of a nation-state from which he did not possess formal documents. Like Alba, who was afforded the protection of the child welfare system in San Diego, Tommy was provided with the shelter of his Tijuana orphanage without concern about his citizenship status. He received the same food, shelter, and medical care, and would likely follow the path of his fellow orphanage residents—out to work on the Tijuana streets in his teenage years, provided that he continued to receive the medical care needed to manage his HIV.
Although Tommy ostensibly had a right to U.S. citizenship through his perhaps still living, but, according to Sonia, likely deceased mother, there was no known relative to make that claim for him. Sonia explained that there might in fact be relatives in the United States, but there was no way for the orphanage to find them. She had, in the past, made telephone calls based on the name of a child in her care but these attempts proved entirely unsuccessful. Sonia’s institutional authority in Mexico did not translate into the leverage necessary to pursue U.S. citizenship for Tommy. Similarly, the U.S. consulate authorities had the right to make a citizenship claim on Tommy’s behalf, and to bring him into the U.S. foster care system, but Sonia laughed at the idea that the consulate workers would go through the effort of repatriating an HIV positive orphan with no known relatives.
Had there been someone well positioned to advocate for Tommy, he would have been a clear candidate for framing as a victim, deserving of U.S. citizenship on humanitarian grounds due to both his illness and his abandonment. The categories of an abandoned, neglected, or abused child would likely have been available to Tommy had he been found within U.S. boundaries. In that case, his physical presence would have necessitated the care of the state, likely resulting in Tommy being placed in a long-term foster care situation, locating any existing relatives, and attending to his medical needs. But because of his presence in Tijuana, and his lack of an empowered advocate, those categories did not have the force to move him into the United States or into a status that would enable him to draw on his ostensible claims to U.S. citizenship. Movement across state lines was theoretically possible, largely because Tommy was already assumed to be a U.S. citizen. However, unlike Alba, he lacked an advocate equipped to make those claims on his behalf. And, as discussed in further detail below, repatriation of Mexican citizens from the United States into Mexico was decidedly easier to facilitate than movement of U.S. citizen children from Mexico into the United States.
Enacting State Care
According to Sonia and other orphanage workers I spoke with in Tijuana, the challenge in addressing the circumstances of children with ambiguous citizenship claims like Tommy was not what the law allowed but rather the absence of an effective protocol for cross-border collaboration. Movement of children in social welfare systems is a complex problem due to the fragmentation of social service providers, which, in both Mexico and the United States, are governed directly at state, city, and, in the United States, county levels, and only loosely regulated at the federal level. Cross-border and crossagency collaborations are challenging not only across international borders but also from state to state or county to county. This is due to varying protocols among local agencies as well as complex funding streams that do not transition well between regions. The net result of this variation is that regional authorities are hesitant to take on the expense of caring for a child who is already being provided for by another regional agency.
This fragmentation of service providers meant that there were substantial obstacles to considering the extensive network of relatives, friends, and neighbors in which children and their families might be enmeshed, since these networks, particularly for Latina/o children, often extended across not only county and state borders but international borders as well. It presented challenges to working with families whose daily lives and social networks extended across the U.S.-Mexico border due to the practical need for individuals to be traceable and locatable in order to be provided with services. Additionally, cross-border collaboration took time, and children would often establish strong relationships with temporary care providers while waiting for agencies to work across borders. Child Welfare authorities’ prioritization of stability and permanency of relationships between children and their care providers often reduced the appeal of the lengthy process of working with family members and social service agencies across international boundaries. For children like Tommy, this fragmentation meant that his presence in Tijuana was placed solely within the purview of the Tijuana orphanage staff and the Tijuana social service agency, the DIF. His status as an alleged U.S. citizen did not in itself call forth the involvement of U.S. social service providers, nor was there a clear protocol for his care providers to collaborate with U.S. social workers to pursue other possible care options for him.
Orphanage directors had no recourse in the face of unresponsive U.S. state agents and state agents had no compulsion to be responsive. Notably, the impotence of state agents to act across borders on issues of child welfare extended in both directions. Ben, a former San Diego County social worker, told me the story of a teenage girl who had, due to allegations of abuse, been removed from her parents’ care while they were living in San Diego. While in foster care she disappeared and was believed to have returned to live with her parents, who had moved back to Tijuana. The judge, lawyers, and social worker involved in the case were concerned but had no jurisdiction to intervene across the border. They convinced DIF officials to accompany U.S. consulate staff on a visit to the girl’s Tijuana home. Ben, a native Spanish speaker, accompanied the group as the liaison between the San Diego child welfare agency and the DIF. Upon locating the girl, and speaking with her and some neighbors, the group determined that she was safe and well cared for. The U.S. consulate workers wanted to bring her back to the United States, but Ben and the DIF representatives felt satisfied she was safe from harm. Ben explained that had they found circumstances to be otherwise, there was nothing U.S. officials could have done, regardless of the girl’s status as a U.S. citizen.
Arguably, the population of U.S. citizen children abandoned in Mexico was relatively small.42 Yet while U.S. immigration law included a voluntary removal policy written expressly for contiguous states that consisted of driving unaccompanied, unauthorized minors to the border and releasing them into DIF custody in Mexico, a similar policy did not exist for Mexican authorities to send U.S. citizen minors back north across the border.43 And, perhaps more important, there were no Mexican officials with the clout or cross-border authority to put such a process into motion. In general, perceptions on both sides of the border were that government agencies, regardless of available resources, would prefer not to take on extra dependents already being cared for by other governments, unless they were forced to do so. This was not due to a lack of care for the well-being of minors. Rather, it was due to a lack of motivation to intercede in the case of a child who was already under another government’s care, and the lack of resources and state agents with the time to deal with the complexity of cross-border cases.
Contingent Worthiness
The cases of Alba and Tommy, and the cases of other children caught up in state custody in the United States and Mexico, raise questions about which children, in what sorts of circumstances, can be positioned as worthy of citizenship as a form of humanitarian protection. Here I take up Ticktin’s (2006:44) call for an interrogation of the humanitarian regime. She states:
I want to end by suggesting that in this emergent regime of humanitarianism,