Fragile Families. Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez

of the procedure. She would have pushed the issue farther if the county agency had not eventually recognized her as Alba’s kin, largely due to Esther’s acknowledgment of Tatianna as Alba’s relative. Tatianna explained “If she [Esther] hadn’t admitted to the [social] worker, if she had just said ‘I don’t know who this crazy woman is’ then I don’t think I would have ended up with Alba.”²⁵ Tatianna noted wryly to me that this was one favor Esther had done for the family. Second, Alba’s lack of a legal birth certificate complicated her citizenship status and unsanctioned entry into the country. The pursuit of legal status for Alba was exacerbated by the fact that she was not legally recognized as a citizen in either the United States or Mexico. Particularly because she was located by family outside the bounds of a legal investigation of child trafficking, Alba’s story exemplifies the difficult circumstances of non-U.S. citizens entangled in the child welfare bureaucracy, one in which families must doggedly pursue a legal solution to a series of illegal or unsanctioned circumstances. Thus began Tatianna’s long engagement with child welfare services, law enforcement, and immigration authorities, in an effort to gain legal custody of Alba.

       Paper Trails

      Although the sale of a young child followed by that child’s migration across an international border is an event unlikely to be accompanied by concrete documents, the provision of official documents for Alba, including a birth certificate and passport, was crucial to her case. Identity documents such as passports and birth certificates occupy a relationship to their holders that is partial and unstable at best.²⁶ Documents may be entirely at odds with an individual’s lived experience and sense of self and place, and they may erase prior nationalities, birth dates, and parentage. They may be constructed in error or intentionally forged. Nevertheless, they are foundational to an individual’s claim to recognition as a citizen of a nation-state and a crucial element in making claims for protection, such as for those in pursuit of asylum or refugee status.²⁷ Alba’s existence as a trafficked child, a child worthy of protection, could not be validated if a formal paper trail could not establish her as a resident of Mexico. In other words, Alba had to be trafficked from somewhere in order to be granted protection, in the form of citizenship, by the U.S. state. This circumstance is one that Jacqueline Bhabha (2011:1–2) refers to as “effectively stateless,” a situation where a child may in fact be a citizen of a specific nation but lacks the paperwork to prove it. As Bhabha asserts, effective statelessness is necessarily accompanied by a reduction of enforceable rights. In this sense, Alba’s ability to call on her rights as a Mexican citizen, which was a necessary precondition to be recognized as a victim of trafficking, were inhibited by her paperless status.

      Eventually, with the help of the Mexican consulate, it was determined that Alba had not been born in a hospital and thus there was no legal record of her existence. This complicated both Tatianna’s claim that Alba had been trafficked and the possibility of Alba applying for U.S. citizenship—both claims hinged upon her recognition as a citizen of another nation. After some effort on Tatianna’s part, the Mexican government issued Alba a certificate for unregistered births, a document Tatianna referred to as a “retrospective birth certificate.” The Mexican consulate in San Diego also worked on Alba’s case to verify that there were no missing person searches out for Alba within Mexico. This was necessary in order for the U.S. dependency court to terminate parental rights without the presence of Alba’s parents, as neither parent could be located by Mexican authorities despite the cooperation of Alba’s extended family in the search. The court eventually determined that Alba’s presence in Esther’s custody, and the lack of missing person inquiries, were sufficient to establish that she had been abandoned by her parents.

      The determination that Alba had been abandoned was central to Tatiana’s ability to frame her as a child both eligible for, and worthy of, citizenship. I suggest that it was through Tatianna’s advocacy work to narrate Alba’s abandonment and her subsequent trafficking experience, that Alba was effectively positioned as a victim of mistreatment. As such, she belonged to a broad category of children in need of protection, a category that was distinct from the care or treatment she may have actually received under Esther’s custody. Once Alba’s position as a victim was established, she was eligible, via Tatianna’s advocacy, to be salvaged from the precarious status of statelessness (Kerber 2007) through a retrospective assertion of Mexican citizenship. Tatianna described the period during which Mexican authorities searched for Alba’s biological parents as a time of great anxiety for her, as she held the erroneous belief that the Mexican government would want Alba to be returned to Mexico. However, Tatianna came to understand that the Mexican government not only lacked the authority to repatriate Alba but was also not inclined to intervene in a situation where a child’s care was being addressed by her country of residence. As I discuss below, this is not a circumstance particular to the Mexican government. Rather, it reflects the limits of repatriation and nation-states’ abilities to intervene extraterritorially on behalf of their citizens.

       Statelessness

      It was not Alba’s position as a Mexican citizen that made her the responsibility of a specific nation-state or government agency. It was, rather, her status as a child in need of protection, officially due to “abandonment” by her father, and her physical presence within U.S. borders that made her potentially eligible for the protection of U.S. child welfare services.²⁸ As such, the territoriality of state protection, activated through Alba’s physical presence within U.S. borders and compelled by Tatianna’s efforts, came together with universal principles of humanitarianism and the generalized state responsibility to protect “vulnerable” children. Ironically, Alba’s ability to take full advantage of this form of protection ultimately hinged on the Mexican state formally recognizing her as a citizen. In this way, Alba’s worthiness seemed to rely upon circumstances that were outside the bounds of citizenship, yet Mexican membership was central to her ability to advance these claims.

      Alba’s status as a child in need of state protection, coupled with her position as a Mexican citizen abandoned in the United States, made her eligible for further protection through immigration relief. Because of the uniqueness of Alba’s history, she in fact had several possible paths by which she could qualify for U.S. citizenship. Because she had allegedly been sold to Esther and then brought into the United States, she was potentially eligible under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) as a victim of human trafficking. This act, established in 2000 and reauthorized in 2008, was intended to decrease the number of individuals being returned to their home country without assessment of whether they had been victims of trafficking or had legitimate claims to asylum.²⁹ With respect to children, it provided for the transfer of minors from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) custody to the Office of Refugee Resettlment (ORR) within 72 hours and specified procedures for assessing claims for protection. However, a narrow definition of trafficking and uneven application of interview and assessment protocols have limited the reach of this provision.³⁰

      A second available pathway was Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), a provision created in 1990 and expanded to its present form in 2008. Referred to as the “J-visa,” it provided the most readily available path to citizenship for children who were dependents of the state or victims of abuse, provided they were unable to reunify with at least one of their parents and that it was deemed in their “best interest” to remain in the United States. Though SIJS is notable for centering the “best interest” of the child and the right to protection from abuse, this provision is not without its limitations.³¹ SIJS is complicated by the fact that it relies on coordination between state and federal courts—state courts make the initial dependency ruling before federal immigration courts approve or deny the SIJS application. There is confusion among child welfare authorities and legal actors in terms of the initiation and coordination of the SIJS application, which has drastically reduced the number of children benefiting from this unique form of relief.³² Alba could qualify for this status due to her “abandonment,” her presence in state custody, and her likely history of neglect due to parental drug use. Or she could simply immigrate, though, of course, she was already present in the country, as the adoptee of U.S. citizen parents. Tatianna and her husband, in consultation with Alba’s CASA and attorney, chose citizenship through adoption for Alba because it was the simplest and quickest route,