Since the early twentieth century, children have been regarded as a protected class, legally and symbolically, in the United States. Although legal protections for U.S. children have also extended to non-citizen children, this study investigates whether the symbolic aspect of children’s protected status is undermined in the case of immigrant children. Through an examination of media reports during the 2014 entrance of unaccompanied minors from Central America and Mexico, I analyze how anti-immigrant protestors portrayed unaccompanied minors in quotes published in news articles across several online historical databases including ProQuest Historical Newspaper and the Local Historical Newspaper Archives by NewsBank. Based on this analysis, I find that the symbolic protected status normally attributed to children did not extend to unaccompanied minors. Specifically, anti-immigrant protestors mobilized forms of racialization typically employed against immigrant adults, which took four distinct forms that framed immigrant children as: (1) threats to the economy, (2) carriers of disease, (3) criminal and terrorist threats, and (4) invaders. Despite belonging to a vulnerable and normally protected group, immigrant children were racialized in ways well-established by scholars as characteristic of adult migrants by anti-immigrant protestors, who portrayed them as unsacred children unworthy of a protected status. This study contributes to our understandings of child and immigrant racialization and further contextualizes policies of detention and deportation against immigrant children.

自 20 世纪初以来，在美国，儿童在法律上和象征性上都被视为受保护的阶层。尽管对美国儿童的法律保护也扩展到非公民儿童，但本研究调查了儿童受保护地位的象征性方面是否在移民儿童的情况下受到破坏。通过检查 2014 年中美洲和墨西哥无人陪伴的未成年人入境期间的媒体报道，我分析了反移民抗议者如何在多个在线历史数据库（包括ProQuest 历史报纸和当地历史报纸档案）的新闻文章中引用无人陪伴的未成年人新闻银行。基于这一分析，我发现通常赋予儿童的象征性保护地位并没有延伸到无人陪伴的未成年人。具体来说，反移民抗议者动员了通常用于针对移民成年人的种族化形式，这些形式有四种不同的形式，将移民儿童定性为：（1）对经济的威胁，（2）疾病携带者，（3）犯罪和恐怖主义威胁， (4) 入侵者。尽管移民儿童属于弱势且通常受保护的群体，但他们以学者公认的方式将移民儿童种族化为反移民抗议者的成年移民特征，他们将他们描述为不配受保护地位的不神圣儿童。