Laura Briggs

Professor Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. Briggs' most recent book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020), examines the 400-year-old history of the United States use of taking children from marginalized communities— from the taking of Black and Native children during America's founding to the Donald Trump's policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border-as a violent tool for political ends