2026 Theses Master's

The Violence of Protection: Legal Frameworks and the Debilitation of Migrant Children with Disabilities in U.S. Detention Centers

Llopis-Guevara, Sara

This work examines how legal protections for migrant children with disabilities in U.S. immigration detention may simultaneously function as sites of harm. Focusing on the Lucas R. Settlement Agreement, it situates recent reforms within broader critiques of the immigration detention system and its divergence from child welfare principles and international children’s rights standards.

Drawing on a debility framework, as developed by Jasbir Puar and Jonathan Mitchell, this paper argues that harm within the system is not incidental but structurally produced through mechanisms that are framed as protective. Methodologically, the study employs an interdisciplinary human rights legal analysis combined with document analysis. A close reading of the settlement agreement is paired with a triangulation of academic literature and nonprofit reports documenting the lived experiences of children with disabilities in detention.

This approach enables an assessment not only of the legal text itself, but of its practical effects and underlying normative assumptions. The analysis identifies three interrelated sites of harm: prolonged detention resulting from procedural timelines, constrained consent procedures that limit meaningful parental involvement, and spatially enforced family separation through placement practices.

These findings and the discussion of their potential implications, ultimately demonstrate how harm is not incidental but structurally produced within the system itself, disproportionately negatively affecting children with disabilities. The work concludes by calling for a fundamental rethinking of how care and protection are conceptualized and implemented for vulnerable populations in immigration detention.