36 Jacqueline Bhabha individual voyages are just some of the current modalities. Others will develop over time, as vigorous and ambitious populations, intent on saving their lives and sharing the all-too-visible bounty generated by a global capitalist commons, refuse enduring and oppressive sequestration. But, as it was in South Africa, the process is protracted and arduous, and hugely costly in terms of human lives and suffering. As they tried to access safety, nearly 19,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean from 2014–2019,3 2,243 perished in the deserts between the United States and Mexico, and tens of thousands faced excruciating detention conditions in rogue jails in Libya.4 The US-bound exodus of Central American children and their families, from some of the poorest and most violent countries in the world, and the US government’s responses provide a case study of global apartheid in action. In what follows, after outlining the United States’ key legal obligations toward non-citizens, I will track some of the policies deployed by the Trump administration to block or otherwise deter the entry of humanitarian migrant children and families. I will suggest that these policies are not only inhumane and in violation of binding legal obligations, but also futile. I will conclude by outlining what I consider more rightsrespecting and effective alternatives. The United States’ International and Constitutional Obligations to Non-citizens The United States is an outlier when it comes to ratification of international treaties. No better illustration exists than the situation regarding its stance on children’s rights. Alone among member states of the United Nations, the United States has not ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the cardinal international human rights treaty consolidating the principles that apply to children.5 Central among these principles is the prohibition on discrimination and the obligation to make the child’s best interests a primary consideration in actions and policies affecting them. Because these principles have been consistently applied by an overwhelming majority of countries for well over half a century, they may be considered customary international law, and therefore cannot be disregarded by the US government. In practice, failure to ratify the CRC has reduced the leverage of international institutions such as the Committee on the Rights of the Child and UNICEF, and US-based child rights advocates, to press for enforcement of fundamental rights for 3 4 5 “Migrant Deaths and Disappearances,” Missing Migrants Project: International Organization on Migration. November 8, 2019, https://migrationdataportal.org/themes/migrant-deaths-anddisappearances. “Libya Immigration Detention,” Global Detention Project, August 18, 2018, www.global detentionproject.org/countries/africa/libya#_ftn4. Convention on the Rights of the Child, November 20, 1989, 1577 U.N.T.S. 3, www.refworld .org/docid/3ae6b38f0.html. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press