This paper details the socio-legal factors that shape the relationship between the child, the family, and the state, and the ways unaccompanied migrant children's lives have come to be defined and contested. The legal identity of migrant children is socially situated within a history that intertwines social movements of helping professionals, legal jurisdictions characterized by increasingly intolerant approaches to juveniles, and shifts in the treatment of unauthorized migrant youth under immigration law over time. In a globalized world, this triangular relationship between children, families, and the state becomes increasingly complex and dynamic. Social policies and legal norms often lag far behind the diverse and fluid domestic arrangements of transnational family ties. The article begins by tracing how the creation of the juvenile court and the emergence of the tutelary complex have radically shifted the notion of migrant children as legal subjects in the United States. Through the legal case of Polovchak v. Meese and the advent of the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status, the author argues that the law and institutional practices ensnare youth between competing allegiances to the state and to the family. It is critical to understand the gravity of these forces on the ways youth navigate the complex and uneven terrain of everyday life.