On May 17, 1972, Border Patrol agents in Guadalupe, California detained an undocumented Mexican worker and expeditiously scheduled him for “departure” from the United States. His deportation order for May 19 came just one day before a public meeting on the issue of discrimination in the Guadalupe Union School District. It was a case of state-sponsored retaliation. He had been fired from his job of more than two years at a local dairy farm and apprehended by federal immigration authorities for protesting insidious practices in the administration of a program for migrant students and demanding that his two children be provided a safe, non-discriminatory schooling environment.
The implementation in 1965 of the Migrant Education Program (MEP), a federal education policy aimed at ensuring access to quality schooling for the children of migrant workers, had created a little-known data collection technology that stored intelligence that could be used to quickly locate migrant students’ families. Despite its originally good intentions, the MEP ended up producing novel forms of precarity for the growing numbers of undocumented children and parents that ended up in U.S. public schools in the 1970s.
This late-20th century data collection helped to transform schools into early school-to-deportation pipelines. Debates around migrant children revealed that the politics of childhood can be wielded for vastly different ends—ranging from humanitarian to punitive—in a single moment in time, a phenomenon that continues to have reverberations today. Divergent conceptions about migrant minors exposed the extreme malleability of childhood innocence and, ultimately, its racial exclusivity.
Even though the majority of Latin American immigrants to the United States during the 1970s were adult males, children increasingly migrated or were brought north in search of family unity, educational opportunities, work, and safety after 1965. The termination of the guestworker Bracero Program and the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act severely limited the availability of lawful avenues for migration, causing millions of Mexican adults and children to enter the United States without authorization. In fact, it was during the ‘70s and ‘80s that immigration authorities started to immediately incarcerate unaccompanied minors in immigrant detention centers and jails.
At the time, the educational enrollments of undocumented children, which was estimated to be at least 40,000 in California and anywhere between 20,000 to 120,000 in Texas, inspired deeply contradictory responses from U.S. citizens, local child welfare advocates, and liberal policymakers.