Conclusion

Contrary to the more complex range of considerations taken up in children's and family law, immigration law figures its subjects rather bluntly, as innocent childobjects and criminalized migrant-subjects.

Their mobility defines their legal status, as child-objects are presumed to be apolitical, inert, and silent, while migrantsubjects are highly politicized, self-conscious actors willfully choosing to violate legal boundaries. In short, children moved passively, and adults move actively and by choice, rendering family groups unintelligible. Ruddick (2007a, p. 520) has argued that children's “best interests” enables a ventriloquist politics of representation, in which “the child danced around the issue with a series of partners: parents who defend their liberty to raise children as they see fit; the state, which has an abiding interest in the child as futurity; and an increasingly complex array of representatives.” As the plaintiffs' attorneys, their parents, ICE, and the judge purported to act in the plaintiffs' “best interests,” and the children gave few testimonies, Bunikyte hardly broke new ground for children's political agency. Intriguingly, however, children's “best interests” and “special vulnerability” made the case possible, as the presumed dependence of children required the creation of legal protections. Even while the child-objects figured by Flores and Plyler were not quite persons, the protections granted them go far beyond what is available to adult “aliens.” Children's and adults' legal subjectivity is mutually constitutive, so that each displaces the other while neither achieves recognition as a “person” before the law.

Immigration geopolitics unfolds in and through an asymmetrical distribution of liberal norms of rights and responsibility among unaccompanied children, families, and adult migrants. It is not the case, as others have argued that the law is suspended for those in detention but that immigration law does not afford migrant-subjects a liberal balance of rights, obligations, and punishments.

Weighing the “best interests” of 26 individual children against “the public interest,” “the rule of law,” and “border security,” the judge used the ambiguity of children's rights to create an opening for judicial affirmation of the juridico-political configuration of immigration geopolitics in the United States. Bunikyte's resolution did not, therefore, represent a shift in federal court rulings on children in immigration custody, but reveals the geopolitical implications of children's legal status, and the ways in which immigration law pits children's vulnerability against criminalized, hyper- responsibilized parents. Understanding how the legal distinctions between adults and children, accompanied and unaccompanied minors are put to work in immigration law, and enforcement is critical to understanding how geopolitical narratives create the conditions for policing, detention, and deportation practices in the

United States. Twinning children’s “special vulnerability” with perceived security vulnerabilities in the immigration enforcement system, the case displaced physical vulnerability from the US nation-state onto an anonymous population of external others and produced a “geopolitics of vulnerability.”

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Source: Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p.. 2017

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