The Spillover of the ‘Border Spectacle’ into Schools: Undocumented Youth, Media Frames, and the School-to-Deportation Pipeline

Abstract

This article examines how media outlets create a “border spectacle” (De Genova 2013) in schools, which contributes to the criminalization and deportability of undocumented immigrant students. Using content analysis, we studied n = 30 news articles that covered an incident in 2017 where two undocumented young men were accused of sexual assault and rape of a young woman in the school they all attended. This paper builds on the “school-to-deportation pipeline” by suggesting that, in addition to the zero-tolerance behavioral policies established by schools and teacher’s racist behaviors, the media coverage of alleged criminal acts also play a role in the expulsion and criminalization of undocumented students. The analysis of the news articles highlights four types of media frames employed to criminalize the young men involved in the case prior to these allegations being addressed by a court of law: (1) immigrant youth as sexual predators; (2) immigration as a correlation to a criminal act; (3) parents as the real victims of the case; and (4) sexual assault victims as collateral damage. Each of these media frames are built on xenophobic tropes that have historically facilitated the marginalization of Black and Latinx people, but in this case, it specifically targets undocumented young men. Collectively, the four media frames exemplify how media create a “border spectacle” in schools, manufacturing a moral hysteria to further marginalize and criminalize undocumented youth. We argue that, as a result of schools becoming border spectacles, undocumented young people’s fear of feeling targeted based on their “illegality” is intensified, and their sense of inclusion is hindered in an often thought to be safe and inclusive space for undocumented young people.

1. Introduction

In March 2017, a 14-year-old student from a town just outside of Washington, D.C., was allegedly raped by two classmates, during school hours, in a boys’ bathroom. The incident became a talking point for the xenophobic Trump administration when the accused perpetrators were identified as undocumented immigrants. “It’s horrendous and horrible and disgusting what this young woman in Rockville went through” stated then Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, about what occurred in Rockville High School that spring in 2017. He continued his statement supporting the Trump administration’s blatant attack on immigrants, “I think part of the reason that the President has made illegal immigration and crackdown such a big deal is because of tragedies like this”. Following the incident, the emphasis on the case was not just the alleged attack itself. Rather, the alleged attack also created an opportunity to generalize the behaviors and potential actions in that incident to all immigrant youth as Trump himself had done during his first presidential campaign. The overwhelming details of the case changed weekly, capturing the young men’s expulsion from school, their odyssey through the criminal justice system, the dismissal of charges, and the deportation proceedings of one of the youths involved. The negative consequences of this incident, however, not only impacted the immigrant youth involved, but extended into a full investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICE). This is not something of the past. In the years since the Rockville story broke out, there have been many instances of immigrant criminalization and amplified in news media outlets. For example, there were images of kids in cages, and terrifying news around Haitian migrants chased by Border Patrol officers on horses, and more recently, Donald Trump’s careless and baseless comments about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. These incidents further criminalize immigrants who often become targets of further harassment or more punitive policies that marginalize them in their host communities. In the case of Rockville in 2017, the way in which the story and follow-ups coverage were framed by the media led to significant consequences for the accused and their families. For instance, the father of one of the young men accused in the case from 2017 was deported, because ICE discovered that the father had lived in the country without proper status. These incidents are what we describe below as “border spectacles” [1] which, in turn, illegalize immigrants by associating them to a supposed criminal activity while simultaneously creating a social hysteria which fuels an “us-and-them” xenophobic rhetoric like that used by Donald Trump in both of his presidential campaigns.

It is important to note that this article does not necessarily follow the intricacies of the incident from 2017 itself. Nor does it justify the harm that was done to the victim. Instead, we aim to address two main questions: (1) how do media outlets contribute to the criminalization of immigrant youth and their pathway into the school-to-deportation pipeline? (2) How do media frames of incidents revolving around immigrants help curate the spillover effect of border spectacles? By addressing these questions, we demonstrate how incidents like the one in Rockville, Maryland, are utilized by media outlets as alarmist spectacles which are then used to perpetuate the criminalization of undocumented youth and justify the narrative that such children are dangerous and should be pushed out of school and into deportation proceedings. Of course, media frames alone do not criminalize people. We do not suggest that. Instead, we claim that, along with punitive education and other social policies, media frames do have harming impacts on undocumented people.

According to Nicholas De Genova [1] instances that create “border spectacles” often legitimize anti-immigrant discourses and the rationalization for continued border policing and the facilitation and production of immigrant’s “illegality”. The “border spectacle”, according to De Genova, “sets a scene of ostensible exclusion, in which the purported naturalness and putative necessity of exclusion may be demonstrated and verified, validated and legitimated, redundantly” [1] (p. 1181). Similarly to De Genova, we employ the idea of border spectacle to highlight immigrant youths’ intentional exclusion from schools as a result of their supposed “illegality”. A border spectacle that scandalized and illegalized the young people involved in the incident that occurred in a bathroom in Rockville High School in March of 2017 was created by media outlets and the Trump administration that justified the criminalization and exclusion of immigrant youth in the community. For De Genova [1,2], immigration enforcement and border policing generate a “border spectacle” of immigrant visibility and exclusion. However, in the case of Rockville High School, it is nether Border Patrol nor ICE who create the border spectacle, but rather the media and the community, and more specifically, alarmed parents who used the incident to call for the segregation of recently arrived immigrant children from the schools their children attended.

In contrast to De Genova, however, we conceptualize the border spectacle more fluidly, with the ability to be mobile beyond a physical border dividing two countries while still creating the intentional exclusion and criminalization of a specific population. However, in agreement with De Genova, we contend that border spectacles, as in the case of Rockville High School, have major real implications in people’s lives. It is not only a matter of highlighting a theoretical necessity to the policing of borders because of those who cross it and a government’s attempt to keep people from being transnationally mobile [3]. The implications of the spillover of the border spectacle we describe here are more tangible, at times resulting in the separation of families, as in the case of the young men whose father was deported as a collateral consequence of the incident examined.

Rockville High School, the location where the incident mentioned above took place, is located nearly 2000 miles away from the Mexico–US border. Despite the physical distance between the two locations, a similar exclusion and criminalization of undocumented immigrants took place after news media outlets and the Trump administration made a scene which warranted harsh treatment for those involved, especially the two accused young men. There is a clear similarity between school campuses becoming a border spectacle and the treatment of migrants at the Mexico–US border, which was further militarized and treated as a war-like space when Donald Trump was elected and demanded a border wall to be built to keep undesired migrants out of the country. We may recall the made-up fences and barbed wire used to create non-permanent boundaries that would presumably protect the US–territory from an invasive force. From 2016 when Donald Trump was on his first presidential campaign until now, the border has become a political spectacle or theater-like space from where anti-immigrant discourses and policies emerge.

In this article, we argue that when media outlets create a border spectacle in schools, similar to that of a militarized border, it justifies unauthorized young people’s exclusion and alienation from these purported safe spaces. That is, undocumented young people’s fear of feeling targeted based on their supposed “illegality” is intensified, and their sense of inclusion at schools is hindered. As such, when schools become a border spectacle, unauthorized students’ “illegality” becomes more salient than previously experienced in that setting.

This article contributes to the current understanding of the “school-to-deportation pipeline” literature. It suggests that, beyond educational policies that criminalize youth of color and forces them out-of-school, into prison or juvenile detention centers, and ultimately into deportation, the media framing of the border spectacle of schools implicitly takes a leading role in pushing undocumented youth on a pathway towards deportation. Media frames or framing are the ways in which news stories are specifically created to prime readers to have a particular reaction or a specific interpretation to the news highlighted. The media perspective in this article aims to underscore how different types of social entities participate in creating a “Latinx criminality”. Furthermore, the article also challenges the simplistic understanding that schools are spaces of inclusion where undocumented youth can claim a sense of belonging as highlighted by Latinx studies, immigrations, and education scholars [4,5,6,7].

Drawing from the analysis of n = 30 news articles that covered the incident at various moments in 2017, we highlight four important media frames that were employed to verify, validate, and legitimize the spectacle created around Rockville High School. These frames, we suggest, presented undocumented youth involved in the case (and by association, other immigrant youth) as a threat to their host community, despite the fact that the community is a “sanctuary-like” locality. The analysis of the news articles informed the four types of media frames employed to criminalize the young men involved prior to the allegations being addressed by a court of law: (1) immigrant youth as sexual predators; (2) immigration as a correlation to a criminal act; (3) parents as the real victims of the case; and (4) sexual assault victims as collateral damage. In addition to the creation of a spectacle, each of the analyzed media frames are built on xenophobic tropes that have historically facilitated the marginalization of Black and Latinx people. Nonetheless, in this case, they are specifically employed to target undocumented young men.

In what follows, we detail the methodological approach used for this project. We continue with a review of the literature to position the article and its contributions in the existing scholarship about the school-to-deportation pipeline and the portrayal of undocumented youth in news media. Next, we explain and analyze the different themes found in the newspaper articles. Lastly, we conclude the article with a discussion of the relevance of schools as border spectacles and the implications it may have on immigrant youth in educational spaces, which are often seen as safe haven where immigrant young people can become “new Americans” [8].

2. Materials and Methods

Lexis Nexis News database was utilized to search for news articles that focused on the incident. We used different variations of search words and phrases such as, “Rockville High School Maryland Sexual Assault”, “News Rockville High School rape case 2017”, “immigrant youth in Rockville high school sexual assault case”, and “Sexual assault allegation in Rockville High School”. The multiple search variations produced 15 mainstream news outlets including National Public Radio, Washington Post, New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Associated Press, Fox News, and UPI News current. Additionally, we analyzed an episode of “This American Life” that covered the case studied herein. We triangulated mainstream media news articles with smaller-scale community news outlets and Spanish-language media outlets. We examined 8 community news outlets specific to Montgomery County and the Washington DC Metro Area, near Rockville High School–including Montgomery County Media, Bethesda Magazine, and Washington TopNews. Lastly, we evaluated 7 Spanish language media sources from the Washington Area, such as Hispanic Times, El Tiempo Latino, and El Pregonero, all of which had different news articles detailing the incident addressed. Unlike the mainstream articles found through a database, we relied on Google News in search of local online newspapers and searched for individual articles regarding the 14 March 2017 incident. Using similar search codes used to find mainstream news articles, we found the local-area articles examined herein (See Appendix A for clarity). Additionally, the first author used Spanish search codes like those used in English to find some of the Spanish-language news articles used in this project. Interestingly, some of the Spanish-language articles were translations of some of the news articles found in more mainstream outlets. Translations were not used for the analysis, however, and we only relied on content that would add to the scope of the analysis. Similarly to the translations, there were 12 media articles that were not used for the analysis because they were Associated Press repeated format, template, and content in other news outlets. That is, while news articles were published by a different source, the content of the article remained the same. We did not use the repeated content for analysis because its contribution would be limited. Furthermore, we did not count any of these repeated articles as part of the overall total number of articles examined in this project. In other words, we only used 30 news articles because others we found were either translations or explicitly copied articles because they were part of associated networks. It is our understanding that, since the analysis of the date detailed herein, there have not been any other publications about the case highlighted.

We relied on news articles for two main reasons. First, while the first author was aware of the case as it took place in 2017, it was a delicate subject to try to base this article on qualitative interviews of those involved in the case without raising ethical concerns. Instead, we relied in sources that described the events that took place and some analysis of the case to try to understand the experience of the young people involved. Given that news media in general have different perspectives and understandings on an incident that took place, we decided that examining news narratives would give us insights into how immigrant youth are treated socially, even in a self-proclaimed “immigrant-friendly” locality.

The triangulation approach offered a broader understanding of how different media outlets interpreted and disseminated details about the case. We downloaded and read a total of 30 news articles to understand the case and openly coded and analyzed each individual article using the Dedoose research software and found themes that individually and collectively portrayed a border spectacle; however, instead of the event taking place at a national boundary, the spectacle was created in a school setting.

We relied on content analysis to compare and examine the news articles selected for this project. The comparative approach demonstrated that most of the articles employed criminalizing frames to depict the alleged criminal involvement of the two young men in this case despite the newspaper’s political leaning—regardless of whether it was more progressive or more conservative. Van Dijk [9] suggests that content analysis aims to “study the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, produced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” [9] (p. 352). Content analysis allows for a critical examination of the language used and the meaning certain news articles create. In addition, content analysis also helps assess socio-cultural and political trends and discourses that news articles can produce [9,10,11]. We analyzed the news outlets’ employment of language and the stigma toward undocumented young people, which in turn, became tools for the political justification for youth’s exclusion from educational settings and their enhanced deportability. We argue that news media outlets covering the Rockville High School case utilized different types of frames that heightened the public opinion’s negative view of undocumented young men in schools.

While we understand that social media platforms amplified many of these articles because people shared either entire articles or aspects of the articles in their individualized pages, we are also aware that accounting for those reactions and personal perspectives about the case would not deepen the depth of the argument we suggest here. Instead, we acknowledge that personal perspectives in social media outlets about the case would add a layer of analysis that might enrich the analysis. However, the personal perspective of people on social media about this specific case was not the intent of the initial analysis. Nonetheless, it is something we may consider in a future project.

3. Literature Review

3.1. Media Portrayal of Latinx Criminality

Latinx immigrants have been historically depicted in mainstream media and political discourses as criminals and undeserving of belonging in the United States [12,13]. Leo Chavez conceptualized the “Latino threat narrative” [14] as a way to understand the ways in which this group is often characterized as invading the United States, unwilling to assimilate to US-dominant culture, and often perceived as drains on social services. These xenophobic and nativist tropes are nothing new; they have been utilized by individuals and institutions in order to exclude racialized migrants [15,16]. While anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States has a long tradition rooted in racial discrimination, studies suggest that recent media representations of immigrants as criminals who cross borders illegally and create havoc in the country have intensified the criminalization of Latinx immigrants [17,18].

The fear of a “Latino threat” presented in media outlets often primes large sectors of the public to create a perception of migrants from Latin America as violent, creating a picture of Latinx migrants as predisposed to criminality [19]. Although anti-immigrant tropes have been used to portray Latinx immigrant adults negatively, children and youth have not been exempted from such treatment. Public perception of the delinquency and criminality of young people, especially in urban areas, often focuses on children of color including immigrant youth [20,21]. For example, scholars have suggested that recent media coverage and anti-immigrant discourse depict Latinx youth as untrustworthy, drug mules, and undeserving of inclusion [22,23]. While media outlets tend to depict immigrant children in a negative light, certain immigrant populations are discussed more positively, highlighting their deservingness as a result of their perception as vulnerable children in need of socio-political protections [24,25]. However, the media representation of immigrant youth is not the only means by which young people are depicted in a criminalized manner. Schools and newspapers that report on them are also a means, as we aim to demonstrate in this article.

3.2. Undocumented Youth Criminalization Beyond the Media

On 16 May 2018, Donald Trump made the following remarks as part of a roundtable opposing California’s “sanctuary laws”:

We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in—and we’re stopping a lot of them—but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before [26].

Days later, on 23 May, Trump defended his “animals” statement after many pro-immigrant leaders and advocates pushed the issue on the administration. Claiming his previous statement was not a generalization about all Latinx people, but about MS-13 gang members, Trump stated, “we have the worst immigration laws of any country, anywhere in the world. They exploited the loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors. They look so innocent. They’re not innocent” [27]. Donald Trump’s depiction of Latinx youth as a threat to US society is only the latest continuation of historical tropes that marginalize, racialize, and criminalize immigrants in the country. These types of tropes serve to rationalize legal methods for government institutions to target, surveil, and dispose of Latinx immigrants. The media reproduction of statements like those made by Donald Trump create social panic about a non-existent threat and primes people to view immigrant youth with suspicion [28]. Victor Rios [29] (p. 153) has argued that “labeled a gang member by police, a youth is unlikely to shake the stigma for years”. For Rios [29] the normalization of the trope that suggests that “immigrant youth are gang members” can become salient in undocumented youth’s lives and identities, especially in their educational settings.

Scholarship on the criminalization of Black and Brown youth in schools has examined the impact of zero-tolerance behavioral policies, racial biases, as well as discourses that stigmatize youth of color as deviant, often forcing youth’s entry into the criminal justice system [30,31,32,33,34,35]. Additionally, a small body of literature has paid close attention to unauthorized youth’s experiences of discrimination and criminalization within schools. Coshandra Dillard [36] conceptualized the deportation pipeline in a similar manner as the school-to-prison pipeline that relies on the “punitive discipline practices that push them [students] out of school, increasing the likelihood they’ll come in contact with the criminal justice system” [36] (p. 43) as well as the immigration system. Similarly, Hlass [31] suggests that the over-policing of schools and the racial biases towards Latinx youth creates a pathway for their criminalization. The author suggests school staff and law enforcement utilize gang allegations based on young people’s appearances and clothing style in order to render them dangerous and often leading to their criminalization and expulsion from schools and later deportation. Hlass [31] emphasized that since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, undocumented Latinx youth have been criminalized at higher rates than their documented and racialized classmates [31]. Additionally, Verma, Maloney, and Austin [37] argued that the main reason Latinx students enter the deportation pipeline is because of their racialization while in school. The authors suggest that the policing of young people’s behaviors based on racialized motives push young immigrants into the deportation pipeline. The school-to-deportation pipeline is a specific example of what Stumpff [38] has labeled “crimmigration”, where the hybridity of the criminal justice system and immigration policies work in tandem to interrupt migrants’ civil rights.

School policies as well as immigration and criminal laws serve to criminalize immigrant youth and push them towards deportation. However, an examination of other factors and actors that play a critical role in young people’s path towards deportation from school is necessary. In this article, we pay closer attention to the way that the media—through various media frames—contribute to youths’ exit from the educational pipeline and the creation of a border spectacle that justifies undocumented young people’s criminalization and deportability. This way, we move beyond solely analyzing the way that school personnel or punitive behavioral policies accelerate youth towards incarceration and deportation, although we understand the importance of these policies in undocumented youth’s process of criminalization. More specifically, we assert that youth’s deportability is not always in connection to ICE, per se. Their deportability also has much to do with the perception of the host community about undocumented youth because of the border spectacle that media outlets create. As a result of schools exacerbating the border spectacle, youths’ fear of feeling targeted based on their supposed “illegality” is intensified, and their sense of inclusion at schools is hindered even in inclusive or sanctuary-like locations.

4. Findings: Media Frames and the Making of a Border Spectacle in Schools

Media frames are ways by which people understand, analyze, and make sense of different events in a certain historical and political context [39]. Social frames, specifically, view events that are socially and politically driven, which are often unconsciously used for various reasons. Scholars have advanced Goffman’s “frame analysis” to incorporate multiple frames to aid in understanding our everyday lives, especially in relation to media [11,19,40]. Media frames examine “the words, images, phrases and presentation styles that a speaker uses when relaying information about an issue or event…[Media frames] reveals what the speaker sees as relevant to the topic at hand” [40] (p. 100).

Haynes, Merolla, and Ramakrishnan [19] examined the different types of media frames employed by news media outlets to focus on undocumented immigrants. The authors conceptualized “episodic”, “thematic”, and “issue” frames to make sense of how media contribute negative and positive opinions about migration and immigrants. We borrow these three aforementioned media frames from Haynes, Merolla, and Ramakrishnan to analyze the content of 30 news articles focusing on the Rockville High School case. In addition to the three frames offered by Haynes, Merolla, and Ramakrishnan [19], we also contribute by adding a “gendered frame” that specifically discusses the way in which the young woman in the case was depicted in news articles examined. A gendered frame focuses on how the accused victim’s gender is used to categorize other potential victims. The victim’s gender, we argue, is used as a pawn for the further criminalization of immigrant young men. In the Rockville incident, the victim’s identity as “female”, was used as collateral or secondary to the social concern of “bad” immigrant youth in the school system.

We argue that the frames employed by media outlets examined herein suggest that the school-to-deportation pipeline is not only accelerated by school personnel or educational behavioral policies that criminalize youth of color, including undocumented immigrant youth, but by the media itself. Media outlets play a critical role in the creation of a conduit that leads undocumented youth from schools toward deportation by heightening their supposed “illegality” and casting them as deviant actors that torment the community which they migrated into. Our objective is to shed light on the challenges experienced by undocumented young people in a locality that claims itself as accommodating and welcoming of immigrants.

4.1. Episodic Frame: Immigrant Youth as Sexual Predators Narrative

Haynes, Merolla, and Ramakrishnan. [19] (p. 19) suggests that episodic frames focus on specific examples or case studies of an issue. The Rockville incident demonstrates the media’s use of an episodic frame that capitalizes on an incident and uses it to stigmatize immigrants. While the case of Rockville High school is specific to its location and context, it is not the only case of undocumented people being depicted as sexual predators. Since the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, he has referred to immigrants, especially Mexican migrants, as “rapists”, which has become a popular trope utilized to criminalize unauthorized migrants in general.

Interestingly, the three types of news articles we analyzed (mainstream, community, and Spanish language) all used the same frame to depict the two young men involved in the case as sexual predators, or that they premeditated the assault in which they were allegedly accused. For instance, an ABC News article states, “she was walking in a hallway…when she was approached by two male students”. The article then states that one of the young men “asked the girl to walk with him and the other young men….[one of the young men] then asked for a hug, slapped the girl’s butt and requested that she have sex with him”. Using more explicit language about the sequence of events, the article states, “when the girl refused, Montano pushed her into a boy’s bathroom and then into an empty stall”.

A FOX DC 5 news article from 21 March 2017 similarly details part of the alleged incident in a way that depicts it as a heinous act, stating that “despite repeatedly telling the suspects to stop and her attempts to fight them off…the suspects took turns raping and sodomizing her, and forcing her to perform oral sex on them”. In a similar fashion, a Washington Post article detailed that, “Montano reportedly covered the victim’s mouth while Sanchez exited the stall to survey the scene. Sanchez then placed his jacket over the girl’s head and escorted her out of the bathroom”. Relatedly, the Washington Hispanic, a local Spanish language newspaper, used the same kind of language of “brutal attack on a little girl”.

The media outlets’ choice to report on these details of the early incident reports, prior to a thorough investigation or legal outcome, perpetuates decades-old depictions of men of color as violent toward women. These stereotypes have been fueled by media and entertainment dating back to the reconstruction era and used to create narratives about white women’s supposed need for protection from men of color [32]. While the news articles analyzed sensationalized young immigrant men as sexually violent, they failed to acknowledge that this was not a complete investigation nor that it had been thoroughly investigated since the case was in its infancy. Additionally, the news reports had different statements about the incident; however, the source of the statements was not included for readers to deduce the reliability of the reporting.

Three months after the case was initially reported on, the news media outlets began reporting that the legal charges first filed were changed based on camera footage, video, and text message exchanges between the youth. In an event that took place prior to the charges being changed, the defense attorney suggested that the accusation of their client had little merit and more investigation was necessary. It is worth asking, then, why were the defense attorney’s suggestions for a more comprehensive investigation, and the evidence they suggested not reported by news media when the story first broke? Even though these details entered the media reporting weeks after the incident took place, the impact of the border spectacle and reinforcement of racialized stereotypes had already been felt by the youth involved. The lack of initial investigation and the rush to criminalize Latinx young men is connected to their perception of criminality as a direct result of their immigration status. In fact, as we detail below, the young men’s immigration to the United States became a frame by which to perceive their supposed criminality.

4.2. Thematic Frame: Immigration as a Criminal Act

A “thematic frame” is a way in which media outlets present an issue in a “broader context, using generalities, and abstraction instead of more concrete, real-life example” [19] (p. 19). Many of the news articles we analyzed about the Rockville High school case focus on the process of immigration as a criminal act, which is not the case legally. Put differently, these news articles easily read as if immigration itself was, in fact, a criminal act. The criminal immigrant or “bad hombre” coming into the United States, as Donald Trump has suggested, is not a new trope, but one that has been continuously utilized to stigmatize and criminalize immigrants from Latin America for decades [13,14,15,16].

The articles analyzed conflate the actual incident and instead hint that the real crime began when the youths migrated to the United States. Through this frame, immigrant youths are perceived as criminals because of their immigration status. For example, most of the news articles underlined the young men’s detention at the border as a symbol of criminality. Gonzalez O’Brien [13] (p. 4) reminds us that media tends to focus on issues of immigration as “crime-control issues” that encourage the public to consume news about immigration as if it were a criminal act. Gonzalez O’Brien [13] exemplifies this process by prompting us to recall that most news coverage about immigration often illustrates images of migrants getting arrested or being handcuffed at raids, and thus, suggesting a criminal act has been committed by immigrants. By suggesting that the young migrants were detained at the border, the stories analyzed also depicted the youth migration and detention as a supposed criminal act in which the youth were involved. However, immigration laws in the United States are not addressed as criminal issues, but rather civil ones [41]. Yet, the depiction of migrant youth who are detained during their migration processes as a disposition to criminality became salient in the news coverage about the Rockville High School case. Like pictures of immigrants getting detained and handcuffed are used to depict immigrants as criminals, in the Rockville case, a police mugshot of one of the young men was used in many of the articles analyzed.

In addition, we found that the structure of the news story also highlighted the young men’s supposed criminality because of their migration. Mainstream, local, and Spanish language news articles all used a similar structure at the beginning of their coverage by detailing the sexual assault case, but quickly shifting to pay attention to the immigration status of the two young men involved. In many of the articles, the young men’s immigration journey was depicted as a mark of their criminality by suggesting that they were detained at the border or that their immigration cases “remained open”. In the news coverage, the young men’s border detention was examined in more than one paragraph. The details of the events taking place, however, were only contained in a single paragraph. The news coverage using this writing structure negatively depicts all youth who are detained for attempting to cross a border, escaping violence, economic hardship, and political instability, as a correlation with their involvement in illicit or criminal activities. This simplification and supposed criminal correlation with migration has been challenged by scholars who suggest that migration has no impact on a potential increase in crime rates in the United States [42,43]. Yet, the tropes created around the migration and criminality correlation are powerful and often weaponized to further marginalized migrant communities.

For example, a Baltimore Sun article noted that a “17-year-old came to the U.S. from El Salvador to live with relatives” and explained that “Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the 18-year-old was stopped by border patrol in Texas last year after arriving from Guatemala and that an immigration detainer has been placed on him”. Similarly, a Washington Hispanic article from 24 March 2017 stated that “both suspects have lived in the United States less than a year and both were detained at the border seven months ago” (My translation). Associated Press and Baltimore Sun articles also mention the multiple entities that were involved with both young men before being released to a guardian in Maryland. The Associated Press details could be read as if unintentionally blaming the multiple government entities that could have stopped the alleged assault that took place after their release from detention and reunification with the young men’s families in Maryland. Compared to the emphasis on a supposed criminal act in the migration process, the motivations and circumstances surrounding the youth border-crossing are rarely discussed or non-existent in the reports.

In these examples, we see the news articles turning to the “illegal” acts committed by the young people prior to what happened in the school in March of 2017 as important for understanding what took place at Rockville High School. The structure of the articles also obscures how the narrative about the sexual assault calls attention to unauthorized migration as the causal factor in the potential criminality of undocumented young people. The news articles examined presented the young men’s process of migration into this country as correlated with their involvement in the sexual assault case, a correlation that would be clearer to deny if the broader context around immigration was included in reporting. As other immigration scholars have suggested, Latinx “illegality” becomes weaponized to further criminalize and exclude them from the social fabric of a given community where migrants may settle in the United States [13,14,44].

4.3. Issue Frame: Parents as the Real Victims

Issue frames are news coverage that often alter public opinion as they tend to be presented as divisive issues. These types of frames may “connect to values or beliefs, as in frame amplification, or they may introduce new ways of looking at an issue” [19] (p. 21). For instance, media coverage may intend to discuss the issues of migration but instead focus the coverage on a different issue, such as the economic burden that migrants supposedly add on taxpayers. Different issues are used as a mechanism to portray immigrants in a positive or negative light depending on the political and social context. In the Rockville High School sexual assault case, as previously mentioned, news media coverage paid attention to the migration status instead of the sexual assault case that the two young men were involved in. In addition, and to focus on the case at hand, media coverage focused on parents in the community as if they were the victims of the incident, or at the very least, as if they were center figures in the case. Neither the young woman nor the young men were portrayed as the victims, but rather the parents were depicted as martyrs in the outcome of the events. The attacker in this depiction is the school system that allowed supposed criminals through their doors. News coverage that transforms the frame turns parents into victims, and detracts from the content of the case itself by creating entertainment by focusing on the emotional context of the parents’ experiences. By portraying parents as advocates for a better and more just school, media coverage paradoxically depicts undocumented youth negatively and centers parents’ requests for their removal from the school. This is especially interesting as parents’ suggestions and “calls for justice” were all in connection to a case in which legal outcomes were not yet decided nor fully investigated.

A Washington Post article notes that the “outraged parents” marched into Rockville High School to state that they were not getting what they demanded from the County School: namely the rejection and expulsion of all undocumented students. A Fox DC news article used similar language where “parents…upset, angry, and want someone at MCPS to explain exactly how this [incident] happened”. The Washington Hispanic similarly focused on the need for someone in the school system to explain what happened and to “demand that Montgomery [County] cease being a sanctuary city for immigrants and instead focus on protecting little girls in school” (my translation). A second Washington Hispanic article speaks of parents fighting school authorities “demanding different laws that allowed undocumented immigrants the right to not attend public school”.

Interestingly, the articles do not highlight the fact that Montgomery Public School seemed to be as accommodating and willing to give parents the opportunity to share their concerns in a recorded and live-streamed media footage. In a letter to the families of the entire county, the school superintendent took responsibility as a symbolic act to let the parents know he is concerned with the safety of the students in the schools. Yet, parents in the articles are portrayed as discontent because they were not successful in getting what they wanted: the expulsion of all the undocumented immigrant young men in the county schools. The bottom line for the parents as captured by the articles examined was to try to get the county to have segregated schools where recently arrived immigrants could attend which were separate from the schools that their children attended. In this light, the parents find their children more superior, more deserving of education than migrant students. The claims of the parents were not subtle. The media articles painted an image of parents who cared about their children by claiming a need for “safety” in schools, rather than highlighting or bringing focus to the parallel request of exclusion because of immigration issues. However, the underlying issue is the parents’ perception of immigrant young men as unsafe, as a threat to other youth and the school system.

An episode from the well-known media podcast, “This American Life”, also offered a captivating story about the case we discuss here. The episode “Fear and Loathing in Homer and Rockville” examined the hate-driven language utilized by parents to demonstrate their intent to protect their children from supposed criminals that recently settled into the school system after migrating from Central American countries. Racist and bigoted statements were recorded by parents towards the school officials for allowing “illegals” into the school. These comments and demands were made by parents despite the 1982 Plyler vs. Doe case that allows access to education for undocumented youth without the school officials asking students and families about their immigration status. The episode also points to an important aspect of the border spectacle as conceptualized by Nicholas De Genova [1,2], namely that border spectacles create a justification for the militarization and further enforcement of the borderland.

As a result of multiple threats, mainly from racists parents, as noted in the “This American Life” episode and in a news article from Bethesda Magazine, the school district found it necessary to have more security and protection in the school where the alleged sexual assault took place. However, studies have found that additional security or School Resource Officers (SRO) in schools often coincide with further criminalization of youth of color, especially young men of color [33,34,45,46]. In other words, the border spectacle justifies more security in a school that, in turn, increases the likelihood of immigrant youth being more susceptible to criminalization. For undocumented young people, criminalization increases their potential expulsion, not only from the school, but also from the United States, in what scholars conceptualize as the school-to-deportation pipeline [36,37].

4.4. Gendered Frame: Sexual Assault Victims as Collateral Damage

Gender in media, especially the sexualization of women in media, has a long history, which arguably has been magnified and sustained a misogynist and male-centered culture that aids the victimization of women [47,48]. According to Linda Martín Alcoff [48] depictions of sexual violence that occurs in different social institutions such as schools, churches, the military, or business, tend to protect the institutions instead of the victims, and often presents victimized women as “collateral damage to the larger necessity of protecting” mentioned institutions [48] (p. 9). We argue that media coverage in the Rockville High School case treated the young woman involved in this case as “collateral damage”, as Martín Alcoff suggests. The young men’s “illegality” and the school system’s need to preserve the parents and societal perception of a safe and inclusive space (especially for white students) was central to the portrayal of the case in news media outlets. The young woman’s experience, on the other hand, became something to manage, but not the most important aspect of the spectacle created.

Our intent here is to not normalize sexual violence. On the contrary, we challenge frames that victimize women by questioning the validity of reported sexual assault events or the women who report them. We argue that the experiences of the young woman, as portrayed by the news articles of the case examined, was manipulated and utilized by the state and media to further criminalize the young men instead of protecting her as an alleged victim of sexual assault. Her experience can be seen as collateral damage that the state or the school system had to deal with. But her body, her experience, and her story became tools for the state and media outlets to portray newly arrived and undocumented immigrant youth as a threat to the Rockville community.

The analysis of the news articles examined portray two ways in which the victim is used to criminalize the two young men. First, the young woman’s voice and her story is intentionally ignored. Her report or her experience of the events that took place are not mentioned. On the surface, it may seem like the articles give her a voice, but we suggest that media outlets, instead, speak on her behalf as a way to co-opt a potential victim’s experience and weaponize it against racialized young men. The articles examined do not share anything about the potential victim, except the fact that she was under eighteen years of age. While one may argue that this is to keep the victim anonymous, the undertones of the reporting signify that this ignorance is intentional. The victim’s experience is not relevant to the narrative that is being portrayed. The articles analyzed do not rely on her report of the incident, but rather used inflammatory reports by police or other sources without a full investigation. Through this reporting, the victim’s agency is taken from her in this process. In doing so, media outlets take a position of infantilizing the young woman while simultaneously adultifying the young men involved despite their age proximity. Many of the news articles analyzed, as mentioned above, use the language of “little girls” to generalize the experience of all the potential victims that could supposedly fall victim to the immigrant young men in their school. Note here how we refer to these children as men instead of “little boys”.

The second method in which the potential victim’s experience was maneuvered to criminalize the young men involved is by shifting the story angles of the incident when necessary to fit the changes in the case “when new evidence was discovered” as many articles mentioned. The intricacies of the case changed a lot over the months of 2017, but the story drastically changed when the initial charges were dropped in May of that year. “New evidence” suggested that it was possible that the sexual encounter was consensual.

A Bethesda Magazine article from 4 June 2017, nearly a month after the incident occurred, provides a timeline of the changes of events. According to the article, a month after the prosecution charged the two young men with rape in the first degree and two counts of first-degree sexual offense, the state dropped the charges because of “lack of corroboration and substantial inconsistencies from the facts”, based on what the Bethesda Magazine article suggests the State said. However, on 5 May, the same day the charges were dropped, the two young men were then charged with child pornography possession and distribution. The Baltimore Sun reported, “while dropping the rape charges, prosecutors brought child pornography charges against the two male teens. McCarthy said 18-year-old Henry Sanchez will be charged with possession of child pornography, which carries a potential sentence of up to five years”. The Frederick News Post similarly reported that “prosecutors dropped the rape charges but filed child porn counts. Police said the 17-year-old received nude images of the girl and shared them with the 18-year-old”.

Notably, 8 of the 30 news articles examined focused on the events after 5 May 2017. All of the articles, after 5 May 2017, changed the language that they previously used that focused on statements, such as, “brutal attack”, to instead highlight the child pornography angle. The change in charges illustrates the state’s desire to criminalize young men involved at whatever cost.

There was very little news coverage concerning the potential victim of sexual assault after May of 2017, or regarding her need for justice and healing from a potential traumatic experience. Instead, that potential traumatic experience was used to negatively depict young immigrant men and to generalize a racist trope about immigrant young men’s sexual behaviors as a threat to their host communities.

These examples clearly depict the potential victim in this incident as “collateral damage”. On the one hand, there is little evidence of voicing the victim’s experience from her perspective. Instead, the co-optation of her experience was used to further criminalize the two young men. This epitomizes the lack of concern and care about what the young woman really went through in March of 2017. More importantly, the news articles highlighted the supposed criminality of two young men who arrived in the neighboring Washington DC community months prior to the incident.

In a twist of events, the child pornography charges were dropped in October 2017, seven months after the initial charges, because “prosecutors studied the high school surveillance video, reviewed phone records, spoke to the girl and others, and concluded the original claims could not be corroborated”, according to a Washington Post article. In other words, when the evidence at hand could no longer be utilized against the young men—evidence that was brought to light by the defense attorneys and the young men involved—the charges were dropped against the two young men. However, their odyssey through the criminal justice and immigration system did not end with the news cycle.

5. Discussion and Conclusion: The Border Spectacle and the School-to-Deportation Pipeline

The politics surrounding the Mexico–US border are well documented and reported. However, multiple media frames employed by news media outlets in the Rockville High School case created their own spectacle that brought negative national visibility to that community near Washington, D.C., more than 2000 miles away from the actual Mexico–US border. The border spectacle did not need to take place near the actual border. Instead, local media created a hysteria that immigration is itself an invasion of criminals, which justifies further security. The events in Rockville were used for weeks by the Trump administration in 2017 to reproduce and uplift nativist, anti-immigrant discourses and policies. For example, during the time of the case’s development, the Trump administration promoted discourses around the necessity of building of a border wall or the institutionalization of groups like Victims of Immigration Crime Enforcement (VOICE).

The spectacle also brought exclusion and punishment to the young men in the examined incident. The young men were excluded from the community they intended to integrate into because of their involvement in the case. Even though all charges were eventually dropped, the personal and familial consequences were significant. Both young men involved in this incident were expelled from all county schools and both ‘pushed out’ of high school for their involvement in this case without a proper path towards high school completion. One of the young men’s fathers, as mentioned earlier, with whom he had recently been reunited after 12 years, was deported. ICE discovered his unauthorized status, according to a Bethesda Magazine article, and was placed in deportation proceedings. The young men have also been excluded from participating in any social program without calling attention to themselves because of the event that took place at Rockville High School. Therefore, exclusion for the young men meant more than removal from school. It meant an intentional disconnection from anything that would allow them any rights or block any access to inclusion and belonging. Thinking of Lisa Marie Cacho’s work, the young men transitioned from inclusion and belonging in school and a supposed immigrant-friendly locality to constantly living in a “space of social death”—where, as Cacho suggests, they are “ineligible for personhood” or rights [49] (p. 44). Instead, they were only seen as criminals and sexual predators in a community that claims to be extremely inclusive of migrants. Despite the charges being dropped, the allegations and their involvement in the incident will always hinder their ability to be perceived as deserving of inclusion in their host community. One of the two young men was deported, while the second, as far as news articles relate, was on deportation proceedings. Both young men tried to highlight their worthiness of belonging, but it was an unfortunate challenge that they could not overcome.

It is also important to underline that the criminalizing process of undocumented young people stems from their crossing of the border. After crossing the Mexico–US border, in an attempt to reunite with loved ones or seek a better life for themselves, undocumented young people’s criminalization takes place in multiple locations and not always near the border. That is, while we see that the news coverage of the border can often be qualified as a spectacle, many other incidents occur beyond the border areas. It is, in a way, as if undocumented immigrants carry the border with them and are criminalized because of that experience.

Furthermore, the spillover effect of the border spectacle that takes place is important to point out. The militarization and border security, we assert, metastasizes to other localities, including places claiming to be immigrant-friendly locations, like in the case of Rockville, Maryland. Scholars have called attention to this as the “thickening of the border” [50], but rarely has the “thickening” process spilled into schools in a way that contradicts schools as a possible safe-haven for undocumented young people.

Although schools have been historical sites of stratification that reproduce given the inequalities and social ills that affect a given community, especially for immigrant youth and youth of color [51,52,53,54] scholars have broadly suggested that schools and other educational spaces are spaces where undocumented youth feel included and create a sense of belonging though the educational, social, cultural, and civic engagement offered in those settings [4,5,8]. However, these often-portrayed safe spaces for undocumented youth can and have become less accommodating and more punitive toward immigrant youth, especially if the schools become border spectacle. We argue that, as a result of schools becoming a border spectacle, undocumented young people’s fear of feeling targeted based on their “illegality” is intensified—even more so than it already was in racialized urban schools—and their sense of inclusion at schools is hindered. Put differently, when schools become a border spectacle, as experienced by the two young men in Rockville High School, unauthorized students’ “illegality” becomes more salient in their daily experience in that educational setting. As a result, immigrant students become visible targets of attacks, exclusions, and scapegoating for the incidents that occur in the mentioned educational settings.

Nicholas De Genova [1,2] suggests that any place or space that can be inspected by immigration authorities can be considered a “border”, where scenes or spectacles can be created. The spectacle in the high school in Rockville, however, was not inspected by immigration authorities. In fact, Rockville is in an immigrant-welcoming and “sanctuary-like” locality. What we underline in this article is that, instead of immigration authorities taking youth from school or behavioral policies that accelerate youth of color’s participation in the criminal system, it is the community, the “outraged parents”, and the media that were deputized in a de facto manner in order to criminalize the young men and place them on a pathway towards deportation. The analysis of the news articles highlights four types of media frames employed to criminalize the young men involved in the case prior to these allegations being addressed by a court of law: (1) immigrant youth as sexual predators; (2) immigration as a correlation to a criminal act; (3) parents as the real victims of the case; and (4) sexual assault victims as collateral damage. Each of these media frames are built on xenophobic tropes that have historically facilitated the marginalization of Black and Latinx people; however, in this case, these specifically target undocumented young men. Collectively, the four media frames exemplify how media create a “border spectacle” in schools, manufacturing a moral hysteria to further marginalize and criminalize undocumented youth.

Chicana feminist scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa, so accurately described borders as mechanisms that “define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them” [55] (p. 25 Italics in original). The border spectacle described in Rockville defined safe and non-safe spaces based on how the adolescents’ interaction at school was depicted and reported in the media. Unfortunately, for the young men involved in the case, and the multitude of Latinx undocumented youth males in neighboring community schools, the schools have been deemed unsafe in part because of their criminalized immigration histories.

In a more pragmatic article or policy brief, we would like to add and expand on a possible policy suggestion to address several themes that we have theoretically addressed in this article. While we know the reality experienced by the youth in the Rockville case and many other localities, our main goal here was to contribute to the discussion on the school-to-deportation pipeline as it is a topic where scholars suggest that only structural issues like existing zero-tolerance policies in school, teacher bias, and the racist treatments of students contribute to the acceleration of immigrant youth into the deportation pipeline. Instead, we suggest here that news media outlets also play a role in the criminalization of immigrant youth in educational spaces by the framing of new stories that take place before they are properly investigated.