Advocating for Latinx Children’s Rights and Supporting Their Healing from Trauma: School Social Workers as Nepantleras

Abstract

United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet took an unusually direct approach on July 8, 2019, when she condemned the U.S. government’s treatment of migrant children (Cumming-Bruce, 2019). Bachelet stated that migrant children should not be placed in detention facilities and never be separated from their families. She also expressed her shock at the conditions in those facilities including severe overcrowding, little access to health care or food, poor sanitation, and children sleeping on floors in cold cages referred to as “ice boxes” by migrants (Bochenek, 2018). Bachelet warned that detaining children has serious consequences for their development and is causing damage every day. The Office of the Inspector General (2019) recently released a report noting that the situation in detention facilities is an “immediate risk to health and safety” and called for the Department of Homeland Security to take immediate steps to address the conditions and prolonged detention of children and adults. This current policy context affects not only those children in detention, but also Latinx U.S. citizens, and those children living in mixed-status families.Latinx youth make up approximately onefourth of the public school population, and more than half of Latinx youth live in immigrant families (Foxen, 2019). The anti-immigrant context challenges school social workers to expand and consider the ways in which we serve immigrant children and families, and subsequent generations. As Zayas (2015) pointed out, the lived experiences of U.S. citizen children are shaped by the constant threat of their parents’ deportation and are the “collateral damage”of those policies.The antiimmigrant climate can be considered a form of state violence (Solis, 2003) and contributes to the feeling of marginalization among Latinx youth as they are challenged to construct their social identities in the midst of this social context (Villarreal Sosa, 2011). Immigration policy and the various ways in which the current policies have a negative effect on children is complex. For example, Palmary (2019) states that the real danger to children is not in the migration process, but rather the view of foreigners as “threats” and the treatment of migration as a security threat.The view of immigrants as “threats” and “criminals” shapes current policy responses to migration and allows for the use of extreme and illegal practices such as the extended period of time in detention, the inhumane conditions, and other human rights violations. As Palmary (2019) states,