The present "crisis" stems from the way our economy depends on separating parents from their children in order to exploit their cheap labor—and then our horror or dismay when they want to be reunited.
Maintaining inequality and injustice requires work, and the policing of the associated boundaries between the privileged and the disadvantaged. Increasingly, young people are involved in the project of exclusion—in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico, and Israel-Palestine.
A new report illustrates the tragic intersection of immigration policing and child welfare. Like the "collateral damage" brought about about by U.S.-war-making abroad, harm to children is an inevitable consequence of the ongoing "war" on immigrants characterized as undesirable.