In response to the growing number of migrants that entered the United States as minors (“childhood arrivals”), my dissertation titled The Diaspora of US Childhood Arrival Immigrants: Illegalization, Criminalization, and Deportation of US Americans by the Country They Call Home scrutinizes the limited legal options for this group. It addresses the legal penalties to which they may be subject, specifically deportation, and ancillary consequences associated with deportability. It draws attention to a range of ethical-oriented concerns regarding the legal treatment of this group. With a preeminent objective to draw attention to those who have been left out of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and proposals of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, my dissertation centers on the voices of childhood arrivals who have already been affected directly by the merging of the immigration and criminal justice system, detention, and/or deportation.

This dissertation asks how US childhood arrivals theorize illegality, deportability, criminalization, and deportation, focusing on the politics of belonging & affect. To answer this question, I conducted fieldwork in Tijuana, Guadalajara, and California as part of a UC Davis- based digital storytelling project titled Humanizing Deportation. My dissertation project draws from the Humanizing Deportation project. It engages in textual and audiovisual analysis of digital stories (testimonial audiovisual shorts) elaborated by migrants that entered the US as minors (“childhood arrivals”). These first-person narratives realized by childhood arrivals demonstrate the contemporary phenomenon of mass deportation of a generation of immigrants that express feelings of belonging in a country that raised them yet does not legally recognize them.

My dissertation argues that childhood arrivals migrated as minors, implying that they could not be held legally responsible even if they were conscious of migrating without documents. Moreover, once they have, as children, spent enough time in the country to which they have arrived, attending school, learning the language, participating in the culture, and developing a sense of belonging, they effectively become cultural citizens.

Through thematic chapters, I focus on the issues this group raises. I analyze their stories through the Childhood Arrivals Critical Theory (CACrit) framework and the childhood arrivals diaspora, concepts inspired by the stories elaborated by US childhood arrivals that make up the Humanizing project. CACrit is a framework that draws from childhood migrants’ embodied knowledge evident in their own expression; it elicits textual and audiovisual analysis that seek to understand rhetorical and symbolic strategies of narratives authored by immigrants. The childhood arrivals diaspora argues that this group’s deep-rooted membership in the US complicates integration processes after deportation and makes their return to their countries of origin a traumatic and enduring experience. This dissertation contributes to a growing body of work illustrating the human consequences of border and migration control regimes through knowledge produced by immigrants living and theorizing on these processes. It argues that deportation is a punitive apparatus for this group and should be reevaluated in all cases. Through the stories that make up this work, it is evident that a more inclusive approach to the discussions of childhood arrivals is needed.