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After release from immigrant detainment centres in the United States, a select group of unaccompanied immigrant children enter a community-based programme known as 'post-release services' (PRS) because of an identified vulnerability. Despite the name, post-release services do not confer actual services – only a referral for them. We use an intersectional lens to examine the tension for service providers within PRS policy between the rights of the child and the stigma and increasing criminalisation of being undocumented. This paper is based on document analysis of all public federal documents on unaccompanied children, ethnographic fieldwork in four PRS serving sites in the US, and interviews with 20 unaccompanied children, 17 sponsors, and 13 employees of the government subcontracting agency. Drawing on these unique data sets, we consider how age and legal status intersect in shaping the implementation of services for unaccompanied children and subsequent outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although immigration is the domain of the federal government, recently there has been a movement to introduce anti-refugee legislation in state legislatures across the country. In 2017 and 2018 there were 86 anti-refugee state-level bills introduced to limit refugee resettlement in the US. We examine public testimony from South Carolina's 2016 anti-refugee bill, S-997. Building upon the literature on racist nativism, we find those who sought to eliminate refugee resettlement reconstructed the meaning of a legal status, refugee, to be synonymous with Brown, Muslim, Terrorist, Third World, by presenting these population categories as unified in a legal status in opposition to the white, Christian, civilized, United States. We show how even those who supported refugees and refugee resettlement engaged in and supported the logic of white Christian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the unintended consequences of the US refugee resettlement program is that it separates extended families through the resettlement process. Although the Trump administration has focused on what types of familial relationships 'count' as family in resettlement and family reunification, extended families have long been a point of contention and difficult to navigate under US resettlement policy. The policy and consequent debates draw upon US-normative assumptions about refugees, family, and what it means to live apart from family. Drawing upon a multi-sited ethnography of a Somali Zigula refugee community in the US and their loved ones in Tanzania and Kenya, this paper examines how refugees negotiate and maintain extended familial relationships after US resettlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]