“The United States, It’s Supposed to Be Where Dreams Come True”: Rhizomatic Familias, Nested Policy Contexts, and the Attendant Shaping of Undocumented and Mixed Status Students’ Lived Experiences in North Carolina

This qualitative research study explores the nature of the nested contexts (historical, political, socio-cultural) within which migrant youth experience restrictive immigration policies in North Carolina, while also examining how these youth perceive and experience the enactment of these policies through an interpretive policy framework combined with a critical policy analysis lens. Spotlighting these experiences highlights not only the structural obstacles and challenges these youth and their families face both within educational settings and in their daily life, but, importantly, underscores their capacity for agency and function as policy actors with theability to recreate policy meaning and effect transformative change. The findings of this study suggest a need for structural policy reform and a series of systemic reforms within K-12 educational settings in North Carolina to provide schools with institutional mechanisms of support to meet migrant students’ needs. The study also develops a new conceptual framework, rhizomatic familias, on the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome to call attention to mixed status families’ uniform experiences of illegality.