In the context of heightened worldwide migration, emotion-based discourses portraying migrants as fearsome and dangerous continue to regulate nation-state boundaries. This paper reports on a critical visual research study in which migrant youth living in New York City were given digital cameras and asked to take pictures of places they thought were important in their school, neighborhood, and family. The study's research methodology was designed to explore the role of emotion in how migrant youth enacted citizenship and used photography to construct visual counternarratives. In order to challenge emotion-based discourse that excluded migrants, the youth in this study mobilized feelings of care and cultivated transnational affective ties to assert their right to belong in public spaces. Implications for participatory qualitative research methods and school-based civic education practices are explored.