case, or by foster children themselves. They were charged with representing the interests of the child to the court, because children, according to the view of social workers and legal actors, were often not able to distinguish between what they wanted and what might be best for them in the long term. The role of the CASA was to get to know and to advocate for the child, effectively bringing the “voice” of the child into the courtroom. As the recruitment director at a CASA organization explained during an orientation session:
It is not that the paid professionals are at fault it is just that they don’t have the time, and this is why CASA volunteers are so important. You’ll be given a badge and a court order to have access to legal, medical, educational records as well as social worker and judge’s files.… [We] receive referrals for kids who need CASAs through teachers, social workers, foster parents, attorneys or even kids themselves. But, you cannot be a CASA if you work with any aspect of foster care or dependency court due to conflict of interest; the key to a CASA is that you are serving no one but the child.24
CASAs were officially appointed by the court to the cases of foster children who were determined to be the most in need. This typically included children who had experienced more placements than usual, children who were separated from siblings, children who were experiencing severe educational or emotional difficulties, and children involved in cases in which various parties disagreed about how the case should proceed. As noted above, CASAs were unique in that they had court-ordered access to all information pertaining to the child’s case, including county social worker and FFA documents, medical files, psychological assessments, and school reports. Furthermore, county social workers were compelled by formal policy to respond to any inquiries from CASAs within 48 hours. Additionally, CASAs were volunteers, not limited by time, institutional resources, or government regulations. In Alba’s case, her CASA worked with Tatianna to navigate the complexity of Alba’s legal circumstances and to advocate for her eventual adoption by Tatianna.
The legal process was complicated by the fact that Alba had no birth certificate. This missing document posed two distinct problems. First, it affected Tatianna’s ability to prove herself to be Alba’s kin. Tatianna pushed for a DNA test that the county of San Diego did not pursue. Tatianna never received an official reason why her request for a DNA test was rejected but she told me that she assumed it was due to the expense of the procedure. She would have pushed the issue farther if the county agency had not eventually recognized her as Alba’s kin, largely due to Esther’s acknowledgment of Tatianna as Alba’s relative. Tatianna explained “If she [Esther] hadn’t admitted to the [social] worker, if she had just said ‘I don’t know who this crazy woman is’ then I don’t think I would have ended up with Alba.”25 Tatianna noted wryly to me that this was one favor Esther had done for the family. Second, Alba’s lack of a legal birth certificate complicated her citizenship status and unsanctioned entry into the country. The pursuit of legal status for Alba was exacerbated by the fact that she was not legally recognized as a citizen in either the United States or Mexico. Particularly because she was located by family outside the bounds of a legal investigation of child trafficking, Alba’s story exemplifies the difficult circumstances of non-U.S. citizens entangled in the child welfare bureaucracy, one in which families must doggedly pursue a legal solution to a series of illegal or unsanctioned circumstances. Thus began Tatianna’s long engagement with child welfare services, law enforcement, and immigration authorities, in an effort to gain legal custody of Alba.
Paper Trails
Although the sale of a young child followed by that child’s migration across an international border is an event unlikely to be accompanied by concrete documents, the provision of official documents for Alba, including a birth certificate and passport, was crucial to her case. Identity documents such as passports and birth certificates occupy a relationship to their holders that is partial and unstable at best.26 Documents may be entirely at odds with an individual’s lived experience and sense of self and place, and they may erase prior nationalities, birth dates, and parentage. They may be constructed in error or intentionally forged. Nevertheless, they are foundational to an individual’s claim to recognition as a citizen of a nation-state and a crucial element in making claims for protection, such as for those in pursuit of asylum or refugee status.27 Alba’s existence as a trafficked child, a child worthy of protection, could not be validated if a formal paper trail could not establish her as a resident of Mexico. In other words, Alba had to be trafficked from somewhere in order to be granted protection, in the form of citizenship, by the U.S. state. This circumstance is one that Jacqueline Bhabha (2011:1–2) refers to as “effectively stateless,” a situation where a child may in fact be a citizen of a specific nation but lacks the paperwork to prove it. As Bhabha asserts, effective statelessness is necessarily accompanied by a reduction of enforceable rights. In this sense, Alba’s ability to call on her rights as a Mexican citizen, which was a necessary precondition to be recognized as a victim of trafficking, were inhibited by her paperless status.
Eventually, with the help of the Mexican consulate, it was determined that Alba had not been born in a hospital and thus there was no legal record of her existence. This complicated both Tatianna’s claim that Alba had been trafficked and the possibility of Alba applying for U.S. citizenship—both claims hinged upon her recognition as a citizen of another nation. After some effort on Tatianna’s part, the Mexican government issued Alba a certificate for unregistered births, a document Tatianna referred to as a “retrospective birth certificate.” The Mexican consulate in San Diego also worked on Alba’s case to verify that there were no missing person searches out for Alba within Mexico. This was necessary in order for the U.S. dependency court to terminate parental rights without the presence of Alba’s parents, as neither parent could be located by Mexican authorities despite the cooperation of Alba’s extended family in the search. The court eventually determined that Alba’s presence in Esther’s custody, and the lack of missing person inquiries, were sufficient to establish that she had been abandoned by her parents.
The determination that Alba had been abandoned was central to Tatiana’s ability to frame her as a child both eligible for, and worthy of, citizenship. I suggest that it was through Tatianna’s advocacy work to narrate Alba’s abandonment and her subsequent trafficking experience, that Alba was effectively positioned as a victim of mistreatment. As such, she belonged to a broad category of children in need of protection, a category that was distinct from the care or treatment she may have actually received under Esther’s custody. Once Alba’s position as a victim was established, she was eligible, via Tatianna’s advocacy, to be salvaged from the precarious status of statelessness (Kerber 2007) through a retrospective assertion of Mexican citizenship. Tatianna described the period during which Mexican authorities searched for Alba’s biological parents as a time of great anxiety for her, as she held the erroneous belief that the Mexican government would want Alba to be returned to Mexico. However, Tatianna came to understand that the Mexican government not only lacked the authority to repatriate Alba but was also not inclined to intervene in a situation where a child’s care was being addressed by her country of residence. As I discuss below, this is not a circumstance particular to the Mexican government. Rather, it reflects the limits of repatriation and nation-states’ abilities to intervene extraterritorially on behalf of their citizens.
Statelessness
It was not Alba’s position as a Mexican citizen that made her the responsibility of a specific nation-state or government agency. It was, rather, her status as a child in need of protection, officially due to “abandonment” by her father, and her physical presence within U.S. borders that made her potentially eligible for the protection of U.S. child welfare services.28 As such, the territoriality of state protection, activated through Alba’s physical presence within U.S. borders and compelled by Tatianna’s efforts, came together with universal principles of humanitarianism and the generalized state responsibility to protect “vulnerable” children. Ironically, Alba’s ability to take full advantage of this form of protection ultimately hinged on the Mexican state formally recognizing her as a citizen. In this way, Alba’s worthiness seemed
