Distance and interruption: The violence of deportation among families enduring childhood cancer in the United States

In recent years, the xenophobic rhetoric that has long shaped debates about immigration in the United States has reached a fever pitch, which has only helped enable structurally violent policies of mass deportation. This paper demonstrates the harmful impact of such policies on child cancer patients and their family members by drawing on collaborative, multimodal methods that bring online news coverage into conversation with ethnographic fieldwork at a safety-net children's hospital in California. Our analysis shows how these policies target undocumented and mixed-status families, making them structurally vulnerable to parent-child separation and familial removal, which can lead to life-threatening treatment delays and other traumas. By continuing to produce critical analyses of state violence and by bringing this work into conversation with pro-immigrant activism, medical anthropologists can help contribute to the abolition of institutions that enact anti-immigrant violence.