The Slow Death of Childhood For Immigrant Youth by Laila L. Hlass, 19 Harvard Law & Policy Review 539 (2025)
Abstract
As a first-ever scholarly application of slow violence theory to immigrant youth, this Article conceptualizes the “slow death of childhood” that many children experience in the U.S. immigration system due to prolonged periods of waiting, resulting in uncertainty and forms of exclusion from society. Humanitarian immigration protections have the potential to assist vulnerable children in achieving lawful permanent resident status, and eventually, citizenship in the United States. These protections ostensibly create more permanency in young people’s lives, and open up a variety of social, educational, and economic opportunities. Yet the immigration legal system might also be a site of further trauma for children described through slow violence theory.
This Article examines one example of prolonged uncertainty and exclusion for children in the immigration system, employing an original dataset of more than 200,000 digital records spanning more than a decade that is related to children impacted by the backlog for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), a humanitarian protection for abused, abandoned, and neglected children. This backlog is notable as youth must be children when they first seek SIJS and may age out of childhood while waiting to apply for lawful permanent resident status. The backlog requires waiting for protracted and unknown amounts of time to be able to access immigration protection, creating uncertainty and exclusion from a variety of social, educational, and economic institutions. Unlike acts of “spectacular violence,” the slow violence of the SIJS backlog is spread over space and time, resulting in harm that is less visible and less clearly connected to the cause of harm. Children are uniquely susceptible to slow violence due to their developmental stage and because of how the impacts of childhood trauma reverberate throughout one’s lifespan.
The slow death of childhood concept reveals how the SIJS backlog, draped in bureaucratic mundaneness and largely invisible to society, chips away at young people during a pivotal developmental crossroads, at times colliding with other adverse childhood experiences.
KJ
