The geopolitics of vulnerability: children's legal subjectivity, immigrant family detention and US immigration law and enforcement policy

In May 2006, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began detaining noncitizen families at the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former medium-security prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America. In April 2007, a group of lawyers sued DHS, arguing that Hutto's conditions violated children's rights. This article first situates family detention in relation to two relatively separate literatures - immigration geopolitics and children's rights - and legal precedent. Second, it shows how noncitizen children are framed more as 'child-objects' in immigration law than agential, liberal subjects. Immigration law figures adults, however, as criminalized migrant-subjects, ineligible for the due process on which liberal legal regimes are based. The article then analyzes how the judge balanced 'irreparable harm' to detained children, the 'public interest', and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) discretion to detain noncitizens. Relying upon 'geostrategic discourses' of external threat and internal safety, the judge argued that US detention represents a safe space compared to families' countries of origin. Twisting national security with the 'best interests of the child', the judge authorized a legal framework for family detention, but with specific spatial requirements. In turn, this new alignment of sovereign and children's rights expanded ICE's power to detain noncitizens. These legal, discursive and spatial tactics form what is called here a geopolitics of vulnerability in which ICE seeks to displace national (in) securities onto detained families. Tracing the intersections of children's legal subjectivity and immigration, the article illuminates deeper struggles over executive power, the spatial practices of immigration enforcement and immigration law.