1 There is a debate that circulates among academics, intellectuals, and activists in the United States and beyond: should we think of Donald Trump as a singularity, a phenomenon unto himself, or as a further symptom of the rightward drift of the United States since the 1970s and 80s, rising racism and xenophobia globally, and a growing repression of non-traditional family forms (Mercieca 2020, Stiglitz 2021)? One context for answering this question is to ask whether his forms of engagement with reproductive politics represent a break with earlier US politicians, or continuity, particularly in light of my historical research in How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, which found that in the fifty years before Trump’s election, reproductive politics (from welfare reform to abortion) consistently dominated the headlines (2017). In the alternative, we can set Trump’s approaches to reproduction in governing alongside Latin American and European’ tactics from the authoritarian and neo-fascist Right (Butler 2024, Morgan and Roberts 2012, Morgan 2019).
2Stories about mothers and children have been crucial to politics in the United States in the past 50 years. As part of conservatives’ case against funding a social safety net, they argued that the children of so-called “welfare mothers” grew up to be unemployed and criminals. When the backlash against immigrants began in the 1980s, it was focused on a Clinton appointee who had hired an undocumented nanny and housekeeper. We saw a defense of banks in the 2008 financial crisis that insisted that people who had gotten deceptive and predatory mortgages deserved to lose their homes, focusing on Black and immigrant single mothers, who, critics claimed, were too naïve and uneducated to understand loan documents. So, as the Trump administration took power, it seemed likely that he too would mobilize narratives of reproductive politics (Briggs 2017).
3Yet when Trump faced his first big political test in 2020, reproductive politics were conspicuous by their absence. He and Republicans in Congress sought to get rid of a universal health care program passed under the Obama Administration and called the Affordable Care Act. The vote count was very tight, and Trump gave a speech to try to get people behind him. Surely, many of us thought, he would deploy the familiar rhetoric of think-tanks and politicians, and say something about how it was an expensive program that allowed Black women to get doctors’ appointments for all kinds of wasteful and unnecessary care for their children without having to have a job. Instead, Trump gave a boring speech and Republicans lost (Costa and Goldstein, 2017). While we might celebrate that many people continued to receive subsidized health care, these events early in the first Trump presidency raised the question: did mothers and children lose their privileged place as the key to U.S. politics? Does Trumpism represent a radical break with the political trajectory that All Politics laid out?
- 1 ––––––––––––––––––––– I take Trumpism to function as Robert Paxton (2005) argues fascism does: it i (...)
4This piece argues that despite the Trump administration’s initial lack of interest in engaging with narratives about reproductive labor — the economics and hard work of caring for children and elders and the bodily labor of bringing them into the world — by his 2024 campaign, reproductive politics had become far more important to the Trumpian worldview and the forces he brought into his coalition, in and beyond the United States.1 This move began with his alliance with the Federalist Society in his first term, following its recommendations for his appointments to the US Supreme Court, selected with the goal of overturning the court’s ruling that there is a right to abortion embodied in the federal constitution, in Roe v. Wade (1973).
5This article also makes the case that Trumpists have not (just) taken up the previous half-century’s neoliberal reproductive politics that have dominated Republican Party platforms as an anti-welfare state project, now represented most fully by the Heritage Foundation (Cooper 2017, Kelley 2012). Instead, this article follows Sonia Corrêa, Judith Butler, and others in noting the influence of gender ideology, which comes to Trumpism via the Catholic Church and networks with the Latin American and European Right. In the US, gender ideology burst onto the scene as a set of claims closely linked to anti-immigrant animus, anti-trans politics, and what MAGA and its fellow travellers call “critical race theory.” In this piece, we suggest that gender ideology can be characterized more broadly as an emergent neo-fascist position being forged from the Americas to Europe. It brings together new forms of public policy claims on behalf of conservative religious groups, a form of reproductive governance that yokes anti-trans, xenophobic, racist, and anti-gay politics to reproductive rights.
6 Methodologically, we are using historical analysis to understand three things roiling politics these days, whether in Europe, Latin America, the United States, or beyond. The first is the use of debt and regimes of austerity to radically redistribute wealth upwards. The second is the rise of a racist, authoritarian, nominally religious, Right-wing nationalist populism (I say “nominally religious” because if these theocratic regimes were in fact based in religion, theology, or ethics, we would predict that their Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic manifestations would be significantly different, and they are not.). The third is explicit conflict over reproduction and the family, resulting in global Right-wing efforts to limit abortion, medically assisted reproduction, and contraception while promoting childbearing among whites in particular. To understand and study the contemporary shape of politics and governance — and governance here is not limited to the state, but takes in civil society, religious, and other sectors that drive ideology, belief, and cultural common sense -- we need to think these problems together.
7Reproductive governance is a term we learned from Lynn Morgan and Elizabeth Roberts, US anthropologists who work mainly in Latin America. In 2012, they began with the same premise that we have here, that economy, politics, and the ways reproduction is contested are inextricably linked. In their important article, “Reproductive Governance in Latin America,” they noted that since the middle of the 1990s, “in the context of neoliberal economic reforms,” the region has seen “a barrage of constitutional, civil, juridical and legislative initiatives to both liberalise and curtail reproductive and sexual behaviour through new moral regimes and rights claims” (Morgan and Roberts 2012, 241).
8They go on to define reproductive governance as “the mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors — such as state institutions, churches, donor agencies, and non-governmental organization (NGOs) — use legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor and control reproductive behaviors and practices” (243). As a primary example, Morgan and Roberts cite Andrea Cardarello’s work on how the association of poverty in Brazil with criminality makes it easier to send the children of impoverished households abroad for adoption, even in the absence of consent from their families. One imagined moral and social good — ending crime and poverty — is substituted for another — not taking people’s children without their knowledge or consent (Morgan and Roberts 2012, 242; Cardarello 2012). I want to point out that the moral language is critical here — this is not a technocratic or instrumentalist rationality, but a claim about defective families, often headed by single mothers, who produce criminality by not having proper fathers.
- 2 ––––––––––––––––––––– Indeed, Roberts herself did this several years ago, revisiting the argument a (...)
9We can update Morgan and Roberts, as the processes they marked out have intensified over the past 12 years.2 I also want to add the United States to our considerations, since it casts an outsized shadow across the whole of the Americas, not only because of the size of its economy but also because its military and intelligence services worked with the Latin American Right throughout the 1960s and 70s to instantiate neoliberalism. The financial institutions and dominance of the United States in the decision-making of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank have played a huge role in hobbling state sovereignty in Latin America (Sen and Gown 1987, Cavallero and Gago 2021). Cold War anti-Communism justified dictatorships, military rule, kidnappings, torture and killings throughout the Caribbean and Latin America (Grandin 2007). There were tightly entangled relationships between the military and intelligence agencies in the United States and those of other nations in the region (Cowan 2016). As we know, Jair Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil was a direct inheritor and vocal supporter of the military dictatorship and neoliberal economic policies, as of course, is Argentina’s Javier Milei (Londoño, Darlington and Casado 2019, Levey 2024).
10The United States has an emergent neo-fascist formation in Trump. Interestingly, as I gestured to above, many of Trump’s initiatives were easily defeated in 2016-2020, including his attempted self-coup in 2020, like Fujimori’s autogolpe in Peru, which was then borrowed in turn by Bolsinaro’s supporters in Brazil (Reich 2020, Call 2020, Damanhoury and Jones 2024). In an effort to be more effective in his second term, Trumpists are borrowing liberally from the Latin American and European far-Right. As historian Ben Cowan has argued, since the Cold War, the moral campaigns of the far Right in the US — from its anxiety over homosexuality and pornography to its concerns about female-headed households — have had deep roots in Brazil (Cowan 2016, 2019). Those links between the two countries are not just in the past; Steve Bannon, Trump’s close advisor, has worked with Olavo de Carvalho and Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s son, whom Bannon designated the leader of “The Movement” of the far-Right in Brazil (García 2019). Just as Jair Bolsonaro pulled together a coalition that was anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, pro-evangelical and conservative Catholicism, and anti-Communist, building on a Right-wing agenda with roots in the dictatorship of the 1960s, Trumpism has coalesced around similar issues. Both countries have also seen cultural attacks on educational institutions and journalism, conspicuously the Right’s attacks on “fake news,” historical facts, and, in the name of ending “gender ideology,” attacking education about gender and sexuality, calling it “early sexualization” in Brazil and “grooming” in the United States (Cabrera 2022, Duarte 2019, García 2019). We can also note that both Trump and Bolsonaro have been indicted for fraud and criminal activity, following remarkably similar efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power (Damanhoury and Jones 2024, O’Kruk and Merrill 2024).
11The U.S. American neoliberal Right has created a playbook for the Trump administration called Project 2025 that is enacting decades-old conservative fantasies of destroying state agencies and institutions of higher education. A think-tank called the Heritage Foundation has led the effort, coordinating with dozens of Rightist organizations to produce a 900-page document that lays out multiple (at times conflicting) agendas (Dans and Groves 2023). It is, some have argued, essentially a blueprint for ending Constitutional democracy and replacing it with a neo-fascist Christian nationalism and destroying powerful civil society organizations (Ward and Przbyla 2024, Wong 2024, Casey, 2024).
12The document names four principles that it says the United States must adopt, beginning with an account of reproduction and gender. First, it argues, the US must “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; second, “dismantle the administrative state”; third, “defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats,” by which they mean immigrants; and finally, to “secure our God-given individual rights to live freely,” by which they mean cis-gendered, straight white men. The language of restoring the family and protecting our children, it says, means making “family authority, formation, and cohesion” foundational, and using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to what they call “transgenderism” is “pornography” and must be banned (Dans and Groves 2023, 1-16).
13Since 2015, the Heritage Foundation and other Right-wing players in the United States have been learning from Latin America and the Catholic Church how to use the language of alarm around “gender ideology” and instrumentalize it through reproductive governance to transform relationships of power and family. As Brazilian feminist Sonia Corrêa points out, the idea that there is something that the Right can call “gender ideology” has circulated in the region since the Catholic Church lost a vote at the 1994 Cairo Conference on contraception and gender-based empowerment. Since then, “gender ideology” has been used to characterize an international feminist and LGBT conspiracy (Corrêa 2017, Daudén and Brant 2016). In 2015 in Brazil, “gender” was deleted from policy documents at the state and federal levels. In 2016 in Colombia, the presence of the term “gender” in the proposed peace accords with the FARC was used to defeat them in a popular referendum. In 2017 in Chile, anti-gender campaigns emerged in the fight to liberalize abortion laws. It has even been assailed from the Left — in 2013, the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, used his weekly radio program to explain how gender ideology was being used to destroy the family (Corrêa 2017).
14Judith Butler argues in Who’s Afraid of Gender that the idea of gender itself has become a phantasm around which a host of fears cluster. Child sexual abuse is relocated from its horrific history in the Catholic Church to the outcome of learning about gender and sexuality in schools. Gender theory seems to them vaguely Marxist — so they call it gender “ideology” — but it is also somehow totalitarian, associated with challenging the unbridled authority of white men, causing the collapse of white supremacy through birth control and then vaguely linked to the right of asylum for immigrants and the rights of Black and other impoverished people to be free of violent policing. The encounter with the mere idea of gender, distinct from a belief in a natural sex into which we are all born, is seen as teaching children to use drugs and to be gay or trans. Gender upends the nuclear family and the economic security it provides in the face of increasing austerity and the removal of public services. If a so-called traditional view of sexed bodies locks people into the intimate violence of home and family and its reliance on taking women’s emotional and other social reproductive labor, it also promises otherworldly salvation through claims about God’s plans (Butler 2024).
15Thus, we could say that the emergent form of transnational Right-wing reproductive governance is to make “gender” as an idea, and feminists, trans people, and queer folks as its embodiment, into a kind of enemy to be chased out of the body politic, much as it has in both the past and present used anti-Jewish pogroms and anti-immigrant and anti-Black mob violence to invigorate fascist and authoritarian politics (and, as scholar of fascism Timothy Snyder has argued, the Trump campaign again what the administration calls “antisemitism” in higher education is itself a kind of anti-Jewish pogrom [2025]). These Right-wing figures insist that the sexed body naturally gives rise to a certain kind of theology, family, and public policy. They argue that a sexed hierarchy, with men at the head of the family and the state, is natural. They seek to eliminate gender studies, critiques of rape and femicide, gay marriage, trans rights, and reproductive rights. They want to remove these ideas from education, medicine, and public health. They also want to fix families that don’t embody this ideal — the gay families, the female-headed families, the trans parents.
16This idea of correcting the family and our ideas about it, by force if necessary, has a long history on the political Right in and beyond the United States. It has particularly been done to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, as well as impoverished people. One of the ways it has been done is by taking children and forcibly relocating them to white middle-class families, in hopes that they will become proper citizens and ultimately form nuclear families themselves. Only one kind of family -- heterosexual, cis-gendered, with multiple children and a father at its head -- is said to be natural, while female-headed, childless, and queer families are unnatural. That it requires heavy-handed, authoritarian state intervention to form a natural family seems contradictory, and it is. But this has been the position of the Catholic and Evangelical churches for a long time, and they have sponsored and organized orphanages and adoptions, supposedly for orphans but also for the children of single mothers and gay folks, alongside Communists, whose children were taken during the Cold War (Briggs 2012).
17 In the name of opposing gender ideology and proposing a theocratic view of public policy, the far-Right in the Americas (and elsewhere, including, conspicuously, Russia, Poland, and Hungary) has been attacking abortion rights (Strawiska 2024, Parker 2022, Gessen 2017, Shevchenko 2023). In much of the Caribbean and the Americas, the criminalization of abortion continues and has even intensified, including in Brazil, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Haiti (Zulzer 2023, Amnesty International 2009, Braunschweiger and Wurth 2019, AP 2024, Jackson 2023).
18In the past two years, the United States has experienced a seismic shift since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to restrict abortion rights. In about half the states, abortion has been criminalized more or less completely. While advocates of abortion rights have ensured that many people have been able to get mifepristone and misoprostol, either from doctors in other states or pharmacies outside the United States, people who have pregnancy complications like miscarriages, preeclampsia, or ectopic pregnancies have had horrific troubles, denied care, forced to have cesarean sections without consent, compelled to carry doomed pregnancies even when it puts their lives in danger. Many have had to travel long distances for abortion care. Some people who have stayed pregnant while facing life-threatening health conditions have died.
19Many who have experienced pregnancy complications incompatible with a live birth have been forced to wait for labor to commence and given birth to very premature infants who lived for a few minutes or hours, and those who have given birth have spent time in intensive care and sometimes been unable to get pregnant again. People who have miscarried have also been charged with crimes. Physicians, activists, feminist journalists, and social media have ensured that those who care about reproductive rights and justice know about these changes in US obstetrics and abortion care and its criminalization, even as such struggles have long been routine for impoverished people and those with less access to abortion care (Baden, Dreweke and Gibson 2024, Kavanaugh and Friederich-Karnik 2024, Valenti 2024, Taft 2022).
20 It is very clear that these emerging fascist or authoritarian forms of linking political power are also conducive to taking children to punish or “fix” families. For example, in February 2022, Texas governor Greg Abbott issued an order that the state Department of Family and Protective Services open investigations into the families of trans teens who have sought gender-affirming care for their children. Within a month, at least seven families were under investigation for “child abuse” because people who knew them suspected that they had sought puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery for their children (ACLU 2022). Civil liberties attorneys sued to stop the ongoing investigations, and, as of this time, the efforts to remove their children are on hold (Tucker and Riess 2024). Still, the Texas attorney general has tried repeatedly to access medical records at health facilities around the country, fishing for information about Texas youth (Melhado 2024).
21While these accounts of the family and fetuses would seem to be far afield from how these emergent authoritarian regimes think about economies, political theorist Melinda Cooper helps us understand how “family” might be central to economists, too. After all, she argues, the “enormous political activism of American neoliberals in the 1970s was inspired by the fact of American changing family structures” (2017, 8). Although this shift in family form was a U.S. one, in which growing numbers of Black mothers and a somewhat smaller number of white ones were unmarried, the effect of this conservative activism was global, played out most significantly in Cold War Latin America, where military dictatorships and civil wars gave many neoliberal economists from the University of Chicago an opportunity to try out their theories. Cooper cites, for example, Gary Becker, “the Chicago school economist singled out as exemplary by Michel Foucault” (8), who wrote: “The family in the Western world has been radically altered, some claim almost destroyed, by events of the last three decades” (7). Primarily, they blamed feminism.
22There were a number of reasons why single mothers and queer families disturbed neoliberals, most significantly because women working for pay shifted some of the care labor burden for elders, people with disabilities, anyone who became ill, and children away from the heterosexual nuclear family (read, women and feminized people) to society at large and the state. In the 1980s, just as neoliberals were winning their battle to make health care an individual responsibility and gutting states’ public health infrastructures, the AIDS pandemic threatened to remind everyone why society wants the state to have responsibilities for health and care for people who are sick or disabled. Neoliberal economists turned their frustration on gay people at large, suggesting that anyone who had gay sex had implicitly agreed to take on the risk of AIDS, and thus the syndrome and its diseases were their personal responsibility (167). In these ways, neoliberal economists and their business constituencies became the steadfast allies of the Evangelical and Catholic far-Right, and both favored fiercely anti-Communist politicians, because, whether Christians or capitalists, they saw their institutional counterparts shut down in the Soviet Union and Cuba.
23 Much has changed since the early years of neoliberalism, with its authoritarian governance experiments discredited by the terror visited on their populations — the torture, imprisonment, and murder of political opponents, the attempted genocide, as in Guatemala, of some racially minoritized indigenous groups (Klein 2007). In the United States, Richard Nixon’s deployment of National Guard troops that killed students, the draft that attempted to silence young people by conscripting them, and his role in encouraging the military overkill and dishonesty with the press in Southeast Asia, together with his efforts to illegally gain intelligence on politicians in the Democratic Party in the Watergate break-in, resulted in an impeachment process and his ultimate resignation from the presidency (Kastenberg 2019).
24This was also the era of the massive Cold War child kidnapping and adoption programs in Chile, El Salvador, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Honduras, and in the US, the Indian Adoption Program, which explicitly took Indigenous children and put them in white adoptive homes (Briggs 2012).
25The breach in the US political order caused by the impeachment and resignation of Nixon was ultimately filled by Ronald Reagan and his counterpart in Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, who offered a kinder and gentler face of neoliberalism than Nixon in the US or the divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric (“rivers of blood”) mobilized by Enoch Powell in the UK. In contrast to Nixon, for example, Reagan had dealt with student protesters more subtly and effectively in the 1960s, simply by raising tuition and cutting aid, thus forcing those who sought to study to take on debt, compelling them to finish faster, disengage from protests, and find a job quickly, much as he subsequently shaped economies and societies in the global South through IMF austerity programs. Thatcher, singing the same tune, replaced the threat of the “rivers of blood” response of Powell to immigration with a more anodyne appeal to law and order (Cooper 2017, 215-249, Hall et al. 1978).
26So what we are arguing here is that the recent rise of neo-fascism globally relies significantly on its roots in the mid-20th century, in the Americas as much as Europe, during which time it built links between authoritarian state forms, religious nationalism, the use of debt and neoliberal economics to weaken the power of middle and working class people to object to authoritarians, anti-feminism and assaults on the freedom of gay and trans people, and terror and violence directed at immigrants and racially minoritized people. The recent forms of the defense of “the family” — albeit only some families — represent a revival of this older political form. As we have seen, in its renewed, louder, more emotive form it circulates around a fear of what they call “gender ideology,” which stands in for a certain kind of freedom and flexibility around family forms. This conjunction organizes contemporary reproductive governance for authoritarian populism — limiting access to abortion and contraception, on the one hand, in order to create heterosexual, male-headed nuclear families, on the one hand — and the taking of children on the other.
27I also want to note the force of the resistance to these rightward trends. I could talk about the formidable activism in favor of abortion rights, or the unprecedented resistance in the US to the unlimited arming of Israel (Sidhwa, Feroze, 2024), but instead I will focus on the growing movement to stop the taking of children from impoverished households. What precipitated the current wave of resistance by scholars and activists in the United States was the first Trump administration’s efforts to halt asylum claims, mostly from people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This also became the best-known of the Trump administration’s family policies, now echoed in his second administration (Isacson and Flórez, 2025).
28Because anyone who says they fear for their life should they return to their home country must be granted a hearing for asylum under US and international law, the Trump administration believed they could not just summarily deport people who presented themselves at the border and petitioned for asylum. However, they could try to terrorize them into just returning to their home country. As a result, an estimated 5,500 foreign-born children were separated from their parents and relatives, while perhaps another 1,000 U.S. citizen children were separated from their immigrant parents, all in hopes of persuading their parents to leave the US (Jordan 2023).
29In an effort to end this policy, scholar-activists fought for a sense of history, making the claim that we knew this kind of reproductive governance, and that it was, at its core, a white nationalist formation. It was a way of marking both its novelty — the hard Right has not dominated mainstream American politics in at least a half-century — and its continuity with earlier forms of imperialism, racism, and xenophobia. We have been down this road before, and we know its horrors. We would argue that resistance is necessarily local, and so will speak narrowly of the United States in this next section. We could just as easily be talking about the protesters who turned out in UK streets in August 2024 to support Muslims and other immigrants targeted by false rumors and racist riots. They too explicitly invoked a history of racial violence in the early and mid-20th century fascist past in their call for the violence to end (Sinmaz, Dodd and Halliday 2024).
30Just as in the 2024 election, the conflict over immigration in 2018 and 2019 in the US was raw. Members of the Trump administration and its supporters considered the asylum process a farce, a ruse that allowed people who transparently had no right to be in the United States to enter. Trump’s people regarded them as illegal immigrants who were trying to manipulate the law by calling themselves refugees, and they complained that special rules on the treatment of children made bringing a child with you basically a get-out-of-jail-free card. They celebrated their strategy of deterring “illegals” by taking squalling children from their parents and caregivers, calling it “zero tolerance.” “Womp, womp,” said former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, mocking the story of a child with Down’s syndrome separated from her mother (Haag 2018). Administration officials made no effort to relieve overcrowding and squalid conditions in Border Patrol shelters that continued to house thousands of children even after a court order demanded the end of the child separation policy. When influenza and mumps ripped through shelters, killing three children, they announced that they would not offer vaccinations (Bursztynsky 2018).
31Activists and journalists who opposed the policy protested in ways that were no less emotional. Protestors held up photos of children and parents separated from each other, downloaded pirated audio of children crying in shelters as Border Patrol officers laughed at them, and carried their own babies to demonstrations (Thompson 2018). The sounds and images of sobbing mothers and babies torn from their arms were everywhere.
32In all this emotion, leftist opponents of the policy repeated a very old move, reaching directly for historical parallels. Like their 19th-century counterparts, they attempted to use the contradictions within these regimes of reproductive governance — in which some people’s mothers and children mattered, and others did not — to contest them. Consciously and not, they borrowed one of the most successful tactics from the movement to abolish slavery. They tried to compel any audience they could get to imagine the fear and grief that stalked children and parents at the moment they were separated from each other, and for the rest of their lives. They put that vulnerability and terror alongside the ugliness of the political ends of those who took babies and children. History became one of their levers.
33In fact, some critics deliberately pointed out relationships between taking children of asylum seekers at the southwest border and the histories of slavery, Indian boarding schools, Japanese internment, Nazi concentration camps, mass incarceration, and anti-Communist wars against civilian populations in Latin America. Lance Cooper, a Flint water activist, tweeted what became a viral image of an enslaved mother reaching for a child being carried away by a white slave trader, writing, “Don’t act like America just started separating children from their loving parents.” Catholic clergy and laity holding a mass protest in a US Senate office building carried large images of children who died in immigration detention in 2018 and 2019, a deliberate echo of the protests in the 1970s and ’80s by mothers of the disappeared in Latin America. In Oklahoma, Japanese American, Black, and Native activists protested the opening of a detention camp for immigrant children on the site of a former World War II Japanese internment camp and, before that, an Indian boarding school (Blackhawk 2019, Cooper 2018, Brown 2018, Hunter 2018, Lang 2018, Miller 2018, Ocasio-Cortez, 2019).
34These kinds of activism sought to fill a void in centrist political discourse about the history of separating children from parents. One of the refrains that too often punctuated the liberal response to the policy was “This isn’t America. We don’t separate parents and children” (Clinton 2018).
35On the other side, the supporters of the Trump-era border policy, including the president himself, sought to emphasize the continuity since the 1980s of immigration policy. Trump insisted dozens of times that the Obama administration had also separated children from parents at the border. Except that it had not. Obama’s administration took pride in the fact that it detained parents and children together. It did deploy other harsh tactics against immigrants and asylum seekers, however; there was a reason La Raza head Janet Murguía called him the deporter-in-chief. His administration expelled record numbers of immigrants in each of the first five years of his presidency, numbers even the Trump administration did not match. It housed unaccompanied minors at military bases, detained small children and their mothers in camps, urged expedited removal for unaccompanied children without asylum hearings, and even attempted to put children in solitary confinement to punish them for engaging in a hunger strike to protest their detention (Schriro 2017, Johnson 2015).
36Trump’s misstatement seemed designed to assail Democrats in order to defend his own party. What he was evading was that it was a Republican administration, George W. Bush’s, that had first separated asylum-seeking parents from their children. The Bush administration, as it securitized its immigration and refugee policies after September 11, 2001, also stepped up its punishment of children. It opened the notoriously abusive T. Don Hutto Center in Texas, where children were allegedly beaten by guards, separated from their parents, and held indefinitely until the administration was forced to stop by an ACLU lawsuit (Schriro 2017). Bush’s predecessors — Reagan, the first Bush, and Clinton — vanished into the haze beyond the horizon of the conversation, although they, too, had put immigrant and refugee children in detention camps (Becklund 1982, Shull, 2023, Olivas 1990).
37Meanwhile, Central America — the original home of nearly all the asylum seekers targeted by the Trump administration to lose their children before 2020 — was astonishingly missing almost entirely from the public conversation. A few remembered that the United States had been involved in fighting civil wars in the region for four decades in the middle of the twentieth century. But the wars’ aftermath — the fact that criminal organizations, including Mexican drug cartels and Los Angeles gangs, had spent a decade taking over civic spaces in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, sowing violence in small towns and big cities alike — was nowhere to be heard in the US conversation. Neither was the role of US military aid in Plan Colombia in pushing the multibillion-dollar drug industry from Colombia and the Caribbean to far more lucrative routes through Central America and Mexico, all culminating in the massive U.S. market (Paley, 2014, Vogt, 2018).
38Decades of intervention by international financial institutions, the World Bank, the InterAmerican Development Bank, donor nations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to shrink and replace the functions of federal states in Central America had, by design, dramatically weakened Central American governments in order to promote free markets. Power abhors a vacuum, and the cartels rushed in. In many places, local officials, the police, gangs, and international crime syndicates increasingly blurred into one. Murder rates skyrocketed for impoverished people at the hands of all these groups, as punishment for failing to pay “la renta” — extortion money — for the privilege of, say, driving a taxi or running a store, or for real or imagined loyalty to rivals. People of humble means — particularly women, queer and trans folk, youth, and children — fled in droves, seeking asylum in the United States and Mexico (Way 2021, Nazario 2019a, 2019b, Balaguera, 2018).
39We need a different conversation about the separation of children from their kin and caretakers. This conversation needs to be grounded in the histories of how we got to camps on the southwest border. These places — sometimes the literal land on which tent cities were erected — have a history of detaining other children. There is in the American hemisphere a powerful racialized haunting: generation upon generation of children who have lost parents, and parents, children. Sometimes this has looked like preventing even the existence of children, as in the nineteenth century, when Asian American “bachelor societies” came to be the form of immigrant communities in the United States as US policies deliberately created an extreme gender imbalance to prevent the creation of the only kind of families that officials could imagine: heterosexual, married, nuclear. They wanted sojourners who returned home, not babies, not elders (Shah 2001).
40To recall another antifascist intellectual, we can better understand child separation and detention and its resistance through a metaphor Lillian Hellman invokes to think about the past, pentimento. Sometimes old paint on canvas becomes transparent, allowing a glimpse of another sketch or image underneath. It is called pentimento because the artist “repented” and changed their mind. History can be pentimento, something beneath the surface but giving shading and form to things happening decades, even centuries later. The fight over the Trump administration’s child separation policy was haunted in this way. When journalists captured photos of children reaching for their parents to put a face to the Trump administration’s child separation policy, and Twitter users published abolitionists’ images of enslaved mothers’ babies being torn from their arms, it is not too much to say that an anti-fascist and abolitionist past was being activated — beyond living memory, yet vividly alive (Hellman 2000).
- 3 ––––––––––––––––––––– Genocide is defined by the UN General Assembly, Convention on the Prevention (...)
41Taking children has been a strategy for terrorizing people for centuries. There is a reason why “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is part of international law’s definition of genocide.3 It participates in the same kinds of sadistic political grammar as the torture and murder that separated Argentina’s children, and El Salvador’s, and Guatemala’s from their parents under the military junta, and sought to keep enslaved people from rebelling across the Americas or to keep indigenous peoples from retaliating against the Anglos who encroached on their land. Stripping people of their children attempts to deny them the opportunity to participate in the progression of generations into the future — to interrupt the passing down of languages, ways of being, forms of knowledge, foods, cultures. Like Black enslavement and wars against indigenous people, the efforts by the Trump administration to terrorize asylum seekers were white nationalist in ideology. It was an attempt to secure a white future for a nation, a community, a place.
42The note we wish to end on, then, is simply this. While it was not clear eight years ago how the neo-fascist Right was going to take up the particular histories of the fetishization of the white nuclear family that it inherited from an older conservative tradition, I think we can speak now with more confidence. Their claims about “gender ideology” and its danger to the family, the denial of health care and cultural representation to queer and trans folx, and abortion and contraception clearly constitute nodes of this authoritarian populism. So, too, do the ways that debt and neoliberalism rest on claims about “creditworthiness” and risk and the state’s responsibility to some people rather than others also rely on an idealized white family. It is all very eugenic, and deeply familiar. And finally, the question of child-taking and the child welfare system, whether aimed at trans kids or the children of asylum seekers, indigenous, or Black diasporic subjects remains central to reproductive governance under these new kinds of regimes.
43Laura Briggs is a Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Briggs' research focuses on reproductive politics and U.S. empire. She is the author of dozens of articles and numerous books, most recently Taking Children: A History of American Terror.
44Laura Briggs é professora de Estudos sobre Mulheres, Gênero e Sexualidade na Universidade de Massachusetts Amherst. A pesquisa de Briggs se concentra na política reprodutiva e no império dos EUA. Ela é autora de dezenas de artigos e vários livros, mais recentemente Taking Children: A History of American Terror.
ljbriggs@umass.edu
ORCID: 0000-0001-9753-4006
Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies
45College of Humanities
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts, United States
46Laura Briggs conducted the research that forms the basis of this article and is responsible for its execution and preparation.
Laura Briggs realizou a pesquisa que fundamenta este artigo, é a responsável pela execução e elaboração deste texto.
47Grande parte dos dados que suportam os resultados desta pesquisa e analisados neste artigo estão disponíveis em acesso público por meio dos links compartilhados nas referências bibliográficas a seguir. Os dados brutos que geraram resultados e que não estão com acesso disponibilizado no texto, podem ser solicitados à autora, após a publicação deste, mediante solicitação razoável.