The Impact of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Surveillance Technology on the Well-being of the Children of Immigrants

Abstract

While existing scholarship examines how Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) electronic monitors (EMs) harm immigrants, less is known about the effects of these surveillance technologies on their children. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations with 39 Latin American immigrant parents monitored via EM between 2015 and 2018 in Los Angeles, California, this study asks: How do ICE’s EMs operate as surveillance tools that spill over to impact parent–child relationships and children’s well-being as their parent’s experience criminalization, punishment, and exclusion? The findings demonstrate that this supposedly “humane” alternative to detention and deportation is responsible for distinct childhood distress. Specifically, EMs impact children’s well-being in two ways: by producing fear that parents will be apprehended and deported and by functioning as visual stigmas that signal criminality and engender shame and anger. EMs also deteriorate the quality of children’s relationships in two ways: by inflicting stress and fear upon parents and by contracting children’s social networks because parents shackled to EMs often become a liability to co-ethnic community members.