This dissertation sheds light on a facet of migration world-wide that prior research, focused almost exclusively on adults, has largely neglected: the rise of unaccompanied child migration. In the past 10 years alone, over 400,000 children migrated to the U.S. without their parents, with 2019 seeing Central American unaccompanied minors once again arriving in record numbers. Based on ethnographic research in legal clinics and in-depth interviews with unaccompanied minors and their advocates, I trace these youths’ experiences from the moment of their escape from violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, during their interactions with the U.S. immigration agencies that process and detain then, as they navigate legal struggles with the support of immigration attorneys to apply for refugee status, and as they experience the impact of these legal struggles on their subjectivities and on multiple facets of their lives as young immigrants in the United States. My research builds on scholarship in the fields of international migration and the sociology of law by examining how protections based on age in U.S. immigration law shape immigrants’ access to legal status and incorporation.

Unaccompanied minors inhabit dual legal and social positions in the US. On the one hand, as minors –and children who enter the US alone, without their parents—, they are seen as deserving and protected by policies that grant them more favorable access to the asylum process than adults. However, as non-citizens –and immigrants from the Global South—, like adults, the state perceives them as suspicious asylum-claimants and even criminalizes them as potential gang members, seeking to exclude them. My research shows how these two forces —protection and exclusion —are in tension with one another in the volatile U.S. context, as advocates’ demands that the state respect human rights norms and protect vulnerable children compete with state prerogatives to limit overall levels of immigration. Protection continuously ebbs and flows, crucially affecting the life outcomes of immigrant youths and their odds of obtaining asylum at any given moment in time. These odds have become increasingly slim as the Trump administration intervenes to systematically dismantle the rights of unaccompanied minors and asylum-seekers. To obtain refugee status and other humanitarian forms of relief, unaccompanied minors must satisfy narrowly defined legal criteria and comply with a series of behavioral restrictions. Youths who cannot do so remain unprotected, undocumented, and at risk of deportation, despite their vulnerability. By exposing the gaps between protections for unaccompanied minors on the books and their implementation, this research has important implications for immigration policy and for the lives of children who migrate on their own.