Unsacred Children: The Portrayal of Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors as Racialized Threats

Abstract

Since the early twentieth century, children have been regarded as a protected class, legally and symbolically, in the United States. Although legal protections for U.S. children have also extended to non-citizen children, this study investigates whether the symbolic aspect of children’s protected status is undermined in the case of immigrant children. Through an examination of media reports during the 2014 entrance of unaccompanied minors from Central America and Mexico, I analyze how anti-immigrant protestors portrayed unaccompanied minors in quotes published in news articles across several online historical databases including ProQuest Historical Newspaper and the Local Historical Newspaper Archives by NewsBank. Based on this analysis, I find that the symbolic protected status normally attributed to children did not extend to unaccompanied minors. Specifically, anti-immigrant protestors mobilized forms of racialization typically employed against immigrant adults, which took four distinct forms that framed immigrant children as: (1) threats to the economy, (2) carriers of disease, (3) criminal and terrorist threats, and (4) invaders. Despite belonging to a vulnerable and normally protected group, immigrant children were racialized in ways well-established by scholars as characteristic of adult migrants by anti-immigrant protestors, who portrayed them as unsacred children unworthy of a protected status. This study contributes to our understandings of child and immigrant racialization and further contextualizes policies of detention and deportation against immigrant children.