Innocents Abroad:Borders, Citizenship, and What Children's Historians Can Tell Us About the World Today Nara Milanich (bio) A version of this article was delivered as the plenary lecture at the Society for History of Children and Youth at Rutgers University–Camden, June 2017. I want to begin this talk in the tiny town of Dilley, Texas, at a detention center for refugees. This detention center is rather unusual, for it is designed specifically for mothers with children who have crossed the US-Mexico border and are seeking political asylum in the United States. The facility's official name is the South Texas Family Residential Center. Critics, however, call it "baby jail." Jailing immigrant and refugee families is today a standard practice of US immigration policy. While it has antecedents further back in the past, the current system originated in 2014, when large numbers of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras began appearing at the southern border. They were fleeing the transnational gangs, narco-traffickers, and crime syndicates that have devastated communities in Central America and led to some of the highest homicide rates in the world. Gangs' targeting of children and youth—boys as recruits, girls as coerced sexual partners—made this landscape particularly deadly for young people. Widespread sexual and domestic violence, which public authorities have proven unwilling or unable to address, made it especially deadly for women. As a result, many of the refugees were minors traveling on their own or women with children: in 2014 alone, almost 70,000 unaccompanied children and an additional 70,000 family units were apprehended.1 The Obama administration panicked. The border crisis was a political liability, playing into a Republican narrative of a border out of control thanks to feckless Democrats. So officials tried to make the problem go away: they began warehousing families in temporary bunkers and summarily deporting them, with no opportunity for a hearing due to them under domestic and [End Page 153] international asylum law. Immigrant rights activists soon halted the illegal deportations, but in response, the administration began constructing two permanent facilities for incarcerating refugee families, one in Dilley, and another one in neighboring Karnes, Texas. Baby jail was born. A cheery corporate brochure describes the detention facility in Dilley as a "campus-style center designed to meet the needs of 2,400 women and children in a safe, humane and appropriate residential care center … as they await their civil due process before immigration courts."2 In reality it is a series of trailers plunked helter-skelter in a dusty field down the road from a state prison. The facility was constructed in less than three months by a private, for-profit prison company that received a $1 billion no-bid contract with the government to run it.3 Dilley is a surreal place, two parts Fort Leavenworth, one part Sesame Street. Women and children inmates are issued uniforms consisting of bright, solid t-shirts—fuchsia, yellow, and turquoise—jeans, and sneakers with colorful laces. The facility has a playground baking in the Texas sun. In one trailer there is a school, and the residential areas are divided up into areas with bilingual names like "Mariposa Azul" (Blue Butterfly) and "Loro Rojo" (Red Parrot). But the facility, which is managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is surrounded by high fences, guard stations, and floodlights, and from the road it is indistinguishable from the prison next door. Inside, women must wear ID badges, and at night guards make their rounds, shining flashlights in sleeping residents' faces and forcing children out of their mothers' beds. Last year, crayons were banned at Karnes detention center due to "damage to operator property," which is to say that some young artists must have strayed outside the lines and colored on the tables. In 2016 alone, more than 40,000 people were detained at the baby jails at Dilley and Karnes.4 A baby jail for refugee children and their mothers in a dusty town in southern Texas is a surreal place for anyone, but perhaps especially for a historian of childhood. I went to Dilley to serve as a translator with a pro bono project that provides...
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Jul 1, 2024
Tianqi Zhang 
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