Why the Legal Strategy of Exploiting Immigrant Families Should Worry Us All

This article applies a family law lens to analyzing current immigration policy, an approach that sheds light on the reality that all families are affected and harmed by modern shifts in state power, action and rhetoric directed specifically at immigrant families. In so doing, the author argues that current immigration policies threaten constitutional norms and position the state as an “incendiary agent perpetrating family trauma.” The article provides insight into and constitutional analysis of the implications of many policies under the Trump administration including the family separation policy, the treatment of pregnant immigrant women and the lived realities and vulnerabilities of mixed-status immigrant families. It argues that the state is acting under “parens patriae power,” or the state as “parent of the nation,” in immigration matters, and that these powers, which exact harms on immigrant families, would be considered abusive if deployed by a parent. The article concludes that it is “constitutionally dissonant for the state to use its powers to intervene in families for intentional harm, not merely as a bystander to collateral consequences of immigration laws and policies on existing stratifications and vulnerabilities.” (Patrick Bloniasz for The Immigrant Learning Center’s Public Education Institute)

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