“Gang bangers,” “superpredators,” dangerous “illegal aliens.” While the Trump administration has intensified tough-on-crime rhetoric, there is nothing new about equating youth with criminality. Children in the United States continue to be subjected to police abuse in their schools and neighborhoods, or torn away from their parents by the state.

Trump’s efforts to equate immigrants with violent gangs has enhanced the hysteria around gangs. But police across the country have long sought to define the behavior of youth as “gang involved.” They have entered hundreds of thousands of children into gang databases, subjected tens of thousands to injunctions, and swept up thousands in broad conspiracy cases. By defining young people as gang members, police and prosecutors are signaling that these children are beyond help and must be subjected to the most extreme forms of punishment.

This negative characterization of poor and largely nonwhite youth is in sync with the broader push to replace social services with criminalization. As more and more deprived neighborhoods are denied access to decent jobs and schools, their young people are criminalized as “the worst of the worst” to ensure that the problems in these communities are understood as individual and group moral failures, rather than the result of rapacious market forces and a hollowed-out state.