3 Zero Humanity The Reality of Current US Immigration Policy toward Central American Refugee Children and Their Families Jacqueline Bhabha introduction Many months have passed since the Trump administration’s initial ruthless separation of more than 4,300 babies and children from their parents at the United States’ southern border.1 Since that time, partly under the guise of public health concerns prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the administration has continued to impose draconian rights-violative policies on migrant children – not just family separation but summary deportation.2 Irrespective of changing circumstances, the underlying administrative philosophy – that deterrence is the solution to humanitarian emergencies that drive forced migration – remains in place. This philosophy subordinates American constitutional values and international obligations to non-citizens to the instrumental goal of reducing access to US soil for people fleeing life-threatening violence, however strong their claim to protection. By doggedly implementing policies that block, detain, deport, and humiliate humanitarian migrants, the United States is participating in what the authors of Chapter 6 in this volume have usefully termed “a system of global apartheid.” Moreover, just as South African apartheid encouraged the development of a movement to overthrow racist state oppression, local and underground at first but global over time, so is global apartheid encouraging the development of alternatives to racist migration exclusion. Smuggling networks, caravans, global migration compacts, trafficking rings, Facebook-mediated migration itineraries, and heroic 1 2 “Attorney General Announces Zero-Tolerance Policy for Criminal Illegal Entry,” United States Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, April 6, 2018, www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ attorney-general-announces-zero-tolerance-policy-criminal-illegal-entry. “Family Separation Policy Continues Two Years after Trump Administration Claims It Ended,” Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org/news/2020/06/18/family-separationpolicy-continues-two-years-after-trump-administration-claims-it-ended; C. Dickerson, “10 Years Old, Tearful and Confused after a Sudden Deportation,” NY Times, May 21, 2020, www .nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/coronavirus-migrant-children-unaccompanied-minors.html. 35 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press