Parenting in the Context of Deportation Risk
| Author | Liza Barros Lane,Monica Faulkner,Jennifer L. Scott,Jodi Berger Cardoso |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12463 |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
J B C University of Houston
J L. S Louisiana State University∗
M F The University of Texas at Austin∗∗
L B L University of Houston∗∗∗
Parenting in the Context of Deportation Risk
Nearly 5.1 million children younger than age
18 live with at least one undocumented parent,
about 7% of the U.S. child population. Between
2010 and 2013, an estimated 300,000 parents
of U.S. citizen children were deported. Rais-
ing children in the context of deportation risk
increases overall parenting stress for undocu-
mented Latino parents. To investigate this and
understand the experience of undocumented
parenting, the authors interviewed 70 undoc-
umented parents in two Southwest cities from
2012 to 2013. The authors frame their analysis
using the lens of the problem of “illegality.”
There are three domains of stressors associated
with parenting in the context of deportation
risk: trapped parenting, threat of family separa-
tion, and altered family processes. The authors
discuss these ndings in the context of the
Graduate College of Social Work,University of Houston,
3511 Cullen Blvd., Room 110HA, Houston, TX
77204-4013 (jcardoso@central.uh.edu).
∗School of Social Work, College of Human Sciences &
Education, Louisiana State University,330 Huey P. Long
Fieldhouse, Baton Rouge, LA 70803.
∗∗Steve Hicks School of Social Work, The Universityof
Texas at Austin, 3001 LakeAustin Blvd., Austin, TX
78703.
∗∗∗Graduate College of Social Work, University of
Houston, 3511 Cullen Blvd., Room 110HA, Houston, TX
77204.
Key Words: family processes, Hispanic/Latino/a, immi-
grants, parenting, stress.
literature on undocumented families and par-
enting stress and connect these ndings to the
current sociopolitical context experienced by
Latino families in the United States .
Dened as a denial of access to the entitlements
of citizenship, undocumented status means
exclusion from participation in the formal econ-
omy and regular employment, denial of access to
the majority of safety net and health resources,
and a continuous threat, if not the actual occur-
rence, of detention, deportation, and family
separation. These exclusions have signicant
legal and social consequences that are pervasive
in most aspects of daily life (De Genova, 2002,
2010), and their impact expands well beyond
the estimated 11 million undocumented immi-
grants in the United States. Nearly 5.1 million
children younger than the age of 18 live with
at least one undocumented parent, about 7%
of the total U.S. child population (Capps, Fix,
& Zong, 2016). In these mixed-status families,
which include members with a combination of
undocumented, authorized, and citizen statuses,
the fear of detection, threat of deportation, and
consequences of undocumented status extend to
all members in the system.
Living in the context of extreme exclu-
sion and constant risk of family separation
by deportation presents unique obstacles for
both parents and children. As Dreby (2012)
characterizes it, the burden of deportation (or
deportation risk) on children—and by extension
Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (April 2018): 301–316 301
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12463
302 Journal of Marriage and Family
their families—can be presented as a pyramid
with the most extreme outcome of family dis-
solution at the top down to a broad base of
families affected by negative associations of
“illegality” and “criminality” with their or their
family members’ undocumented status. To add
to this literature, the current study uncovers
the lived experiences of undocumented parents
and their children. We draw on De Genova’s
(2002) deconstruction of the problem of “il-
legality” and research by Dreby (2012, 2015)
and Abrego (2016) among others to shed light
on how undocumented individuals and their
children negotiate their legal status to explore
stressors related to parenting for undocumented
Latino families.
B
During the past several decades, changes to U.S.
immigration policy have expanded the capac-
ity of the U.S. government to detain and deport
undocumented people. The passage of the Immi-
gration Reform and Control Act in 1986 Immi-
gration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 8
U.S.C. § 1101 (2016), although it provided some
amnesty to some undocumented people who had
been residing in the country undocumented prior
to 1982, fundamentally changed the structure
of the immigration system by criminalizing the
hiring of undocumented people and increasing
the capacity of immigration enforcement and
internal policing of immigrant communities. The
Immigration Reform and Control Act was fol-
lowed in 1996 by the passage of the Illegal Immi-
gration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility
Act of 1996, 8 U.S.C. §§ 1221–1232 (2016) and
the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act of 1996, 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (2016).
These 1996 laws expanded the list of crimes
categorized as aggravated felonies, increased
the allocation of resources to interior and border
enforcement, and severely limited prosecu-
torial discretion by immigration judges. The
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act added Section 287(g) Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsi-
bility Act of 1996, 8 U.S.C. §§ 1221–1232
(2016) to the Immigration and National-
ity Act, which provided a legal structure
for programs such as Secure Communities
(changed to the Priority Enforcement Program
in 2014) that required local jails to check
send identity information to Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE; American Immi-
gration Council, 2014). These changes, in
conjunction with the political and economic
dynamics of the United States and sending
countries, have facilitated a dramatic increase in
deportations.
In 2012 and 2013—the years the project
data were collected—nearly 1 million individu-
als were deported from the United States, and
an additional 409,051 were returned to their
countries of origin even before they gained
entrance into the United States (U.S. Department
of Homeland Security [DHS], 2016, Table 39).
Although the precise number of parents of chil-
dren living in the United States who have been
deported remains unclear, the DHS estimated
that roughly 72,000 parents of U.S. citizen chil-
dren were deported in 2013 alone (ICE, 2014a,
2014b). Latinos, especially those from Mex-
ico and Central American countries, have been
disproportionately affected by legal efforts to
criminalize undocumented immigrants (Abrego,
2016). More than 90% of individuals removed
are from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and
Honduras (DHS, 2016, Table 40). In Texas, the
site of the current study, immigration enforce-
ment has reversed course and is now considered
to be one of the toughest in the United States.
As of March 2017, 13 Texas counties, mostly in
rural and suburban areas, applied for the 287(g)
partnerships with ICE (del Bosque, 2017).
Despite DHS’s stated priority focus of depor-
tation on immigrants with criminal convictions,
the evidence suggests that the majority of appre-
hended, detained, and deported individuals do
not have criminal records (DHS, 2016, Table
41). Mainstream media exacerbates the cona-
tion of undocumented status with criminality
by showing images of undocumented (and pri-
marily Latino) immigrants being apprehended
and handcuffed by police as they are taken
to detention or put on planes for deportation
(Abrego, 2016; Chavez, 2013). These images
have accompanied false narratives about crime
by undocumented people as rapists and drug
trafckers and used as evidence to justify the
building of a new wall on the southern border
and implement new restrictions on immigration.
The use of terms such as illegal alien and crim-
inal alien contribute to the dehumanization of
immigrants (De Genova, 2002). The resultant
animosity toward Latino immigrants, as well as
nonimmigrant Latinos, has been shown to have
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