Introduction
In April 2007, a group of lawyers sued the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for detaining children at the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center, a former medium- security prison in Taylor, Texas (Bunikyte et al.
v. Chertoff et al. 2007). Citing Hutto’s prison-like conditions, the plaintiffs argued that the facility violated noncitizen children’s protections under an existing legal settlement, Flores v. Meese (1997), which granted minors in federal immigration custody the right to release, unrestrictive custody environments, and a range of services unavailable in adult facilities. Because US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, the DHS agency charged with policing illegal/legal immigration) detained parents and children together at Hutto, the case revolved around the spatiality of children’s legal protections in the immigration system. Specifically, the parties to Bunikyte et al. v. Chertoff et al. debated whether existing law confined children’s protections to children’s bodies or included the (family) relationships and (private) spaces that constitute “home-like environments.” Immigration law endows ICE; however, with wide “discretion to detain,” noncitizens and federal courts have limited power to intervene in immigration enforcement practices (Coleman 2007; Varsanyi 2008). Litigated in federal court (Fifth Circuit Western District), Buniktye became a site of struggle over the limits of both ICE’s authority to detain noncitizen children and federal courts’ authority to challenge immigration enforcement practices.This struggle unfolded through broader narratives of American territorial sovereignty, childhood development, and immigrant criminality and shows how immigration law (re)spatializes US geopolitical orders.
Ultimately, family detention became untenable at Hutto, and adult women became the resident population there in 2009.
Five years later, however, a group of legal organizations sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement over lack of due legal process at a new family detention facility, the Artesia Family Residential Center in remote Artesia, New Mexico (M.S.P.C. v. Johnson 2014; American Civil Liberties Union 2014). In August of 2014, ICE opened the Karnes County Family Residential Facility in Texas, closed Artesia because of its flagrant rights violations, and, in December of 2014, opened another 2,400 bed facility in Dilley County, Texas. Considering family detention’s maximum capacity was previously 596 before being scaled back to 84 beds (at the Berks County Family Care Shelter in Pennsylvania), this expansion is dramatic. Much like Hutto’s opening in 2006, Artesia and Karnes are meant to deter families from migrating to the United States. Implemented during a high-profile “child migrant crisis” in the summer of 2014, the expansion responded to a sharp increase in families seeking asylum in the United States. Unlike Hutto and Berks, however, the Artesia, Karnes, and Dilley facilities are part of a “detain and deport” practice where parents seeking asylum are categorically denied credible fear and access to legal council (American Civil Liberties Union 2014). Thus, while closing Artesia resolved the lawsuit there, family advocates filed another lawsuit in December, 2014. A class action lawsuit on behalf of all detained families, R.I.L.R. v. Johnson (2014), claimed that the Obama Administration’s deterrence policy violated asylum-seekers’ rights to individualized reviews for release from detention. In February, 2015, a federal judge issue a preliminary injunction against the Obama Administration’s deterrence policy, finding that detaining families to deter migration did, indeed, violate their rights (American Civil Liberties Union 2015). These lawsuits were based on previous legal actions that created special protections for children, and subsequently families, in US immigration custody.Thus, Hutto and the litigation surrounding the facility exemplify ongoing, systemic problems for families in current US immigration law. Moreover, as litigation continues to be a primary tool for challenging the practice of family detention in the United States, the case has wider implications for conceptualizing the spatiality of immigration law and its geopolitical designs. “Geostrategic thinking” (O Tuathail 2003) permeated the legal reasoning of both ICE and the federal judge, who used parents’ asylum claims to map a world of vague external danger, and then twisted children’s (essentialized) vulnerability with national security vulnerabilities and “children’s best interests” with the “public interest in enforcing immigration laws.” More broadly, the case elucidates the ways in which formal immigration law includes ad hoc mappings of gang-ridden Central America, and how the blurring of these formal and informal geopolitical discourses legitimates the spatial practices of detention. These mappings echo popular media representations of the 2014 child and family migrant crisis and the US government’s response to it, illuminating the particular difficulties children and parents face when crossing borders. In particular, children’s specific legal figurations show how a “geopolitics of vulnerability” authorizes detention, family detention’s spatiotemporal ordering, and the policing practices that channel noncitizens into detention.
The chapter proceeds as follows: first, the chapter situates family detention in recent work on immigration geopolitics, children’s rights, and feminist political geography. The second section traces out how current immigration law and precedent figure a “child-object” rather than an agential child-subject. Intriguingly, the presumed innocence and vulnerability of this child-object both restricts ICE’s ability to detain children and reinforces parents’ status as criminalized migrantsubjects. The third section analyzes how the parties to Bunikyte et al. v. Chertoff et al. articulated different geopolitical visions in and through specific configurations of children’s and families’ legal subjectivity. Because immigration law is a polyvocal site of struggle (Chouinard 1994), family detention’s legal challenges provide an opportunity for feminist engagements with the geopolitics of mobility. These geostrategic discourses spatially constitute a governmental regime that maximizes precarity for external others while minimizing it for included citizens, producing what I call a “geopolitics of vulnerability.”
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