Normativa internacional en conflictos armados

In the following section I will discuss the characterization of migrant children advanced by Democratic representatives when the focus of their narrative shifts to the scene of the journey and the United States, where American observers come into contact with child migrants for the first time. I will argue that the trope of tremendous

vulnerability and innocence discussed in the previous section continues to inhere across the journey scene and across the Mexican-American border. Within the initial scene of the migratory trajectory, many Democrats employ personalized examples of named children who experience appalling violence during their journey, reinforcing the narrative’s characterization of UACs as eminently helpless beings. For example,

Representative Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX) introduces multiple tropes of childlike innocence in his statement of despair in

“[hearing] that the body of a young boy from Guatemala was found in the desert, just a few miles from our Southern Border. According to news accounts, this boy was found with the rosary still around his neck and his brother’s Chicago phone number scribbled on the inside of his belt buckle. This child had hoped to reunite with his brother in Chicago” (“Unaccompanied Minors” 88).

Hinojosa’s choice of this particular example instantiates the Democratic narrative with an image of a young child vulnerable and solitary in his journey and death, without the assistance of others who could have prevented his death. The boy is symbolized as a victim of the destruction of yearning, childlike hopefulness dashed through his untimely death. His possession of two talismans of hope—his rosary and the phone number of the brother with whom he desired to be reunited—demonstrates an idealistic, childlike faith in the possibility of surmounting the incredible obstacles of navigating hundreds of miles of land, crossing a national border, and reaching his brother in Chicago despite the vagaries of the U.S. immigration system and the distance between the border and Illinois. Such a characterization of the great innocence of child migrants and their motives of hope serves to direct attention away from any oppositional claims to UACs’ knowing

Several Democrats include specific examples of their experiences with migrant children in immigration detention centers near the southern border that heighten the affective power of UACs’ characterization as having experienced great adversity during their journey north. For example, Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) tells the story of meeting “a 6-year-old boy who traveled from I think it was Honduras with his 2-year-old sister, and during the journey they were separated and this kid was torn up because he thought his sister had died” (“Children Migrating” 8). Here, Castro characterizes this boy as still traumatized by having been forced to experience the devastating realization that his sister may be dead. Such a construction brings the plight of unaccompanied minors and the specific, detailed harms they face across all narrative scenes to the fore, and conditions an understanding of child migrants as loving individuals focused on being close to their family members above all. As such, Castro’s story similarly provides a counterexample to the Republican claim of child migrants’ desire to abrogate and take advantage of American immigration law.

As Democrat Senators and Representatives describe their meetings with unaccompanied minors in the border region in general, they advance a construction of identity characterized by staticity in age, gender, and exceptional vulnerability, in sharp contrast to the dynamism of identity Republicans ascribe to child migrants, mapped along the trajectory of movement from Central America to the United States. In this way, several Democrats describe unaccompanied minors in terms that highlight their extreme youth, continuing to reinforce the image of child migrants’ absence of criminal intent to subvert American immigration law. In this way, discussing the immigrant detention centers charged with housing unaccompanied minors, Representative Jackson Lee states,

“These are lollipops. I took lollipops, along with my colleagues, into these detention centers where children were. I wasn’t armed. I wasn’t fearful for my life. This is not a National security crisis. This is a humanitarian crisis”

(“Unaccompanied Minors” 85).

With these statements, Jackson Lee constructs an image of unaccompanied minors as still inhabiting a state of youthful innocence, in need of adult figures to care for them and demonstrate affection to them. Such a construction eliminates any logic in confronting the “crisis on the Texas border” as a crisis of national security instigated by wholly autonomous individuals intent on infiltrating the U.S. in willful violation of the law, as these individuals are too young to care for themselves, let alone to understand and

threaten the intricacies of the convoluted American immigration system. Echoing Jackson Lee, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) argues, “we seem to be barraged on a daily basis by troubling images of vulnerable children, many still clutching their dolls and teddy bears, crossing the border into the United States and being immediately

apprehended by Border Patrol” (5). Thompson explicitly invokes the vulnerability of unaccompanied minors and additionally characterizes them as fearful and apprehensive in their clinging to the simple comfort of a doll or teddy bear as a substitute for the

protection of caring human agents. Such a discursive construction, detailing the height of artless, unknowing vulnerability, paints as incoherent the Republican claims to the criminal agency of unaccompanied minors’ act of migration.

Another node of direct opposition between the disparate rhetorical

characterizations of unaccompanied minors in the Republican and Democratic narratives involves the gender and age balance of the population of UACs as a whole. While the Republican narrative, within the American scene, emphasizes that the majority of

unaccompanied minors are male teenagers over the age of fourteen, the Democratic narrative introduces a temporal comparison of the current population with past migrations by large numbers of children into the U.S. In this way, Representative Lofgren claims, “In the past, the majority of kids coming alone came from Mexico, and they tended to be older children, 16-, 17-year-old boys. That is no longer the case … It contains a lot more girls, lots more younger children than have come in the past” (“An Administration Made” 7). It seems unlikely that Lofgren would introduce a distinction between the various ages and genders of unaccompanied minors unless this distinction had some narrative bearing on the characterization of the motives and actions of unaccompanied minors. In this way, Lofgren’s statements exhibit a similar implicit willingness as the Republicans to

demonize older, male teenagers by implying their lesser innocence and thus the

corresponding potential that their motive for crossing into the U.S. may involve harmful or criminal intent. However, Lofgren’s introduction of these previous characters, and thus her expansion of the Democratic narrative’s temporal depth, allows her to indicate the great average vulnerability and youth of the current population of child migrants. Thus, while the Republican narrative’s discursive characterization of child migrants involves a diminishing innocence across space, the Democratic characterization suggests an

increasing innocence across time and a static innocence across space.