The Centrality of DACA Youth in the New Sanctuary Movement

• In Event: 1547 - Young People Constructing Identities

Abstract

This paper examines the centrality of families impacted by DACA to the ideals and practices of a sanctuary movement in Western Massachusetts. Movement members provids sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, advocate for immigration reform, manage an immigrant hotline, and partake in community aid and deportation resistance. This paper shows how the sanctuary movement offers a space for the articulation of family desires and mobilizes resources to materialize these desires. Existing literature emphasizes the historically transnational and divided nature of immigrant families. Building on this research, my paper shows that sanctuary movements revolutionize family arrangements among the DACA community by creating sanctuaries that allow families to stay together. Using meeting- and militant-ethnography and in-depth interviews, I argue that for the DACA community the realms of family life and political life mediate each other profoundly. Having a (nuclear) family offers undocumented immigrants a measure of recognition as a political subject. Mixed-status families (especially those with DACA and US-born children) occupy a central role in the realm of undocumented immigrant community activism, precisely because those families most closely approximate the ideal of the American nuclear family ensconced by a white picket fence. Movement participants collectively construct a shared imaginary of family life. It is through these real and imagined equivalences in the emotions around family life that the movement builds bonds of affinity between its DACA activists and citizen allies and makes demands for the equal treatment of immigrant populations by the state.

Author

• Ghazah Abbasi, UMass Amherst