Bureaucratic neglect: the paradoxical mistreatment of unaccompanied migrant children in the US immigration system

ABSTRACT

After release from immigrant detainment centres in the United States, a select group of unaccompanied immigrant children enter a community-based programme known as ‘post-release services’ (PRS) because of an identified vulnerability. Despite the name, post-release services do not confer actual services – only a referral for them. We use an intersectional lens to examine the tension for service providers within PRS policy between the rights of the child and the stigma and increasing criminalisation of being undocumented. This paper is based on document analysis of all public federal documents on unaccompanied children, ethnographic fieldwork in four PRS serving sites in the US, and interviews with 20 unaccompanied children, 17 sponsors, and 13 employees of the government subcontracting agency. Drawing on these unique data sets, we consider how age and legal status intersect in shaping the implementation of services for unaccompanied children and subsequent outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Social policy
• migration/immigration
• unaccompanied children

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The arbitrary definition of vulnerability under PRS means that many children received PRS referrals for relatively minor health needs while some children with specialised or acute health needs did not receive a PRS referral.

2 Figure 2 focuses on PRS processing. For a complete picture of how unaccompanied children move through state bureaucratic care, please see (Heidbrink 2014; Roth and Grace 2015; Terrio 2015; Byrne and Miller 2016; Crea et al. 2018).

3 It should be noted here that the US is the only United Nations member state that has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, although the US has been a signatory since 1995. See: http://indicators.ohchr.org/.