By Jamie Longazel and Miranda Cady Hallett

The Homestead shelter for migrant youth in Florida was shut down in 2019. Scholars and advocates have documented the harms of detention centers like this and the overall failure of minimalist humanitarianism. Why, then, does the Biden administration plan to re-open the facility?

In a vigil on June 16, 2019 – Father’s Day – a coalition of activists and community members continued their ongoing fight to shut down the former Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. As an organizer read aloud the names of seven children who died in ICE custody, protesters ceremoniously poured water into a potted plant for each life lost. “We need justice to break through,” said Lucy Duncan of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). “We need to remember those names.”

Thanks in no small part to these advocates insisting on the humanity of migrant youth by placing them firmly within relations of kin and care, the facility closed at the end of November 2019. But now, nearly two years later, the Biden administration announced that the facility will reopen as the Biscayne Influx Care Facility.

Homestead’s history 

Operating intermittently under both the Obama and Trump administrations, the shelter was, in effect, a for-profit prison that detained Central American youth.

Its status as an “emergency influx facility” allowed Homestead to circumvent regulations under the Flores Settlement Agreement for the protection of children in government custody. Over two thousand teenagers were held at a given time for 67 days on average. Most already experienced the trauma of traveling to the U.S. on their own, or of being forcibly removed from their family under the Trump Administration’s “Zero Tolerance policy.”

The shelter became a flashpoint of controversy during the Trump administration, epitomizing the doublespeak that characterizes contemporary migration governance: the shelter purported to protect vulnerable children yet in actuality subjected them to further risks and harms.

These facilities epitomize “minimalist humanitarianism,” which characterizes contemporary migration policy. That is, officials do just enough to avoid blame and moral culpability for human rights abuses. Journalists who have visited the facility receive sanitized tours; facility staff boast of “holiday parties, talent shows and pizza and ice cream for good behavior.” In contrast, lawyers accessing the facility report that many children are “extremely traumatized.” “Some… sit across from us and can’t stop crying over what they’re experiencing,” said Leecia Welch of the National Center for Youth Law.

Racism, militarism, and materialism

As we argue in our forthcoming book, Migration and Morality, the case of Homestead should be understood in relation to larger systems of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Such a lens reveals both the systemic violence of current migration policies, and the potential of suffering to mobilize critical resistance and solidarity. From this perspective, Homestead epitomizes what Dr. Martin Luther King called the evil triplets of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism.

Homestead reflects extreme materialism in that its owners profited from incarcerating children. The government facility contracts out to service providers who use our tax money: Caliburn International Corporation and its subsidiary Comprehensive Health Services (CHS) gobbled up more than a half billion dollars of public money when the facility opened.

In terms of racism, Homestead is a manifestation of the recent revival of anti-immigrant politics, which are built on false and xenophobic narratives. The forced separation of families by the U.S. Border Patrol likewise replicates genocidal acts of seizing children from their parents in US history—the separation of Black families under slavery, and the taking of American Indian children from their families to force their assimilation at boarding schools from 1869 to the 1960s.

Compounding matters, children there are quite literally exposed to premature death due to toxins at the site. The site’s toxicity was publicly known as early as 1999. As AFSC documents, Homestead exposes children to 53 dangerous chemicals including arsenic, lead, and mercury. Situated at the intersection of racism and militarism, the toxins the children take in exist as “imperial debris,” left over from U.S. military munitions testing at the neighboring Airforce base. Detained youth also endure the unbearable sound of F-16 fighter jets taking off at decibel levels capable of causing lifelong cognitive impairment.

Then there are historical reasons why Central Americans cross borders. For over a century, the United States’ militarily and economically has destabilized the region. The bloody investments in “counterinsurgency” in Guatemala and El Salvador and extractive regimes consolidated by neoliberal reforms have helped to produce a region full of U.S.-made weapons and wracked by violence and social distress.

Time to mobilize

At one and the same time, Central America has been the epicenter of a new transnational social movement for migrants’ “right to have rights.” Organizing within the Central American exodus—supported by allies among human rights advocate networks—goes beyond demanding the recognition of the rights of asylum seekers to challenge the entire paradigm of border enforcement.

Once again using the cloak of minimalist humanitarianism, the Biden Administration claims that opening the shelter temporarily is the “best option” to keep the youth “safe.” Yet, the history of Homestead and other “mass influx” sites shows that these places not only further traumatize youth but do so fundamentally through the reproduction of systemic racism, militarism, and extreme materialism. In other words, minor reforms and more liberal language aren’t going to protect the rights of migrants.

It’s time to mobilize around the abolition of these facilities. We can look to organizing models like the AFSC campaign of 2019, or the recently-successful campaign to shut down the Berks County Family Detention Center in Pennsylvania. Faced with the systems of social death that characterize current immigration enforcement, these mobilizations enact a kind of social resurrection. By insisting on public enactments of grief, righteous rage, and solidarity, they point away from minimalist humanitarianism and towards a recognition of the right to movement, and of the right to live in the broadest sense of that term.

About the authors

Jamie Longazel is associate professor of law and society at John Jay College and of International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania (2016), the coauthor of The Pains of Mass Imprisonment (2013), and the cofounder of Anthracite Unite, a working-class collective fighting for racial and economic justice in Pennsylvania.

Miranda Cady Hallett is associate professor of cultural anthropology and research fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton. She has published a number of articles centered on Salvadoran migrants’ diasporic experiences in such journals as Latino Studies, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Journal of Working Class Studies.

The authors’ forthcoming edited volume, Migration and Mortality (June 2021 from Temple University Press) documents and denounces the violent impacts of restrictive migration policies in the Americas, linking this institutional violence to broader forces of racial capitalism.