Humanitarianism as a Moral Alibi at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Center for Migration Studies Essays, 2020

Enforcement along the US-Mexico border has intensified significantly since the early 1990s. Social scientists have documented several consequences of border militarization, including increased border-crosser deaths, the killing of more than 110 people by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents over the past decade, and expanded ethno-racial profiling in southwestern communities by immigration authorities. Less attention has been paid to the pervasive and routine mistreatment migrants experience on a daily basis in CBP custody. This paper traces major developments in border enforcement to three notable initiatives: the pre ention-through-deterrence strateg , the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Consequence Delivery System, initiated in 2011. Despite the massive buildup in enforcement, CBP has operated with little transparency and accountability to the detriment of migrants. The paper provides an overview of the findings of nongovernmental organizations and social scientists regarding migrant mistreatment while in CBP custody. It then highlights important shifts in migration patterns over the past decade, as well as changes in border enforcement efforts during the Trump administration. It discusses how these transformations affect migrants e er da encounters ith CBP officials. The paper concludes by providing specific recommendations for improving CBP conduct. Its core theme is the need to emphasize and inculcate lessons of appropriate police behavior, civil rights, and civil liberties in training and recruiting agents and in setting responsibilities of supervisors and administrators. It offers recommendations regarding important but underrecognized issues, including ending the use of CBP agents/officers as Asylum Officers, as well as better-known issues such as militarization and the border wall.

2013

Geoforum, 2021

In public statements and archival documents U.S. officials have repeatedly made explicit their intention that the deployment of tactical infrastructure along the Mexico/United States border will contribute to the "funneling" of unauthorized migration toward increasingly remote and difficult routes of travel. By amplifying the suffering, risk and uncertainty to which migrants are exposed, it is intended that others in the future will be deterred from considering a similar journey. In this paper, we use the phrase "corral apparatus" to name how heterogeneous elements like walls, checkpoints and surveillance towers combine to form a common architecture of deterrence. We then undertake geospatial modeling of the relationship between this apparatus and the spatiotemporal distribution of human mortality across two major unauthorized migration corridors in southern Arizona. Our analysis identifies a meaningful relationship between the location of these infrastructures and patterns of mortality observed over time. Yet it bears emphasis that the United States government's ultimate objective is not to kill people, but to manipulate their behavior. To reflect on this point, we explore the relationship between deterrence theory and counterinsurgency as a particular framework of governance, one that emphasizes the targeting of coercive action against a population in order to immobilize an adversary. We discuss how an elaboration on this framework provides clear analytic purchase for understanding connections between those infrastructures of deterrence deployed in remote desert areas and a number of more recent carceral practices and enforcement initiatives undertaken by the United States along its border with Mexico.

2007

Annals of The Association of American Geographers, 2003

Throughout the world, increasingly securitized and militarized border enforcement efforts have made transnational migration an increasingly deadly endeavor for unauthorized migrants. The deadly consequences of unauthorized migration has compelled the emergence of what William Walters refers to as the humanitarian borderdthe concentration of humanitarian aid and services along the edges of the global North. This paper expands on Walters work through an in-depth analysis of the emergence and transformation of the humanitarian border in southern Arizona, USA. Through an examination of transformations in how migrant care is provisioned, overseen, and regulated in southern Arizona, this paper traces a shift from humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care whereby care is increasingly linked with enforcement efforts. In doing so, this analysis illustrates how care functions as a technology of border enforcement, increasing the reach of the state to govern more bodies and more spaces.

International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 2019

In the last 30 years, the USA has constructed a complex architecture throughout Latin America aimed at stopping migrants in transit before they reach US borders. This article identifies several components critical to this transnational policing. One component is the development of security 'partnerships' with transit countries, through which the USA provides funding, equipment, and training for migrant interdiction. Another component is a vast international expansion of Department of Homeland Security networks aimed at detecting and intercepting the illicit mobility of people and things. A third component entails the significant stretching of US military presence throughout Latin America and the Caribbean through a variety of means. This paper argues that as the USA extends its border policing activities through time and space, it conceals its direct role in migration policing activities that violate human rights and fuel illicit activities, distracts from policy failures, and evades international obligations.

2005

Creating a “Crisis”: The Mexican-American Border; Violations of International Law and the Rights of Refugees seeking asylum in the United States and Mexico, 2019

Porous Borders, Invisible Boundaries? Ethnographic Perspectives on the Vicissitudes of Contemporary Migration, 2018

The Western Historical Quarterly, 2006

Operation Wetback of 1954 is typically understood as a U.S. immigration law enforcement campaign that resulted in the deportation of over one mil lion persons, mostly Mexican nationals. This article, however, uses research conducted in the United States and Mexico to trace the decade-long buildup and binational history of Operation Wetback. JLn May of 1954, U. S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell issued an announcement. In the coming months, the U. S. Border Patrol would implement what he called Operation Wetback. As he explained it, Operation Wetback would be an intensive and innovative law enforcement campaign designed to confront the rapidly increasing number of illegal border crossings by Mexican nationals. As promised, during the summer of 1954, eight hundred Border Patrol of ficers swept through the southwestern United States performing a series of raids, road blocks, and mass deportations. By the end of the year, Brownell was able to announce that the summer campaign had been a success by contributing to the apprehension and deportation of over one million persons, mostly Mexican nationals, during 1954. Five decades later, Brownell's public chronicling of Operation Wetback 1954 con tinues to draw the basic framework for understanding the campaign as an intensive U. S. law enforcement campaign targeting undocumented Mexican nationals during the summer of 1954.1 Yet, BrownelPs account of Operation Wetback was a decade late Kelly Lytle Hern?ndez, assistant professor of history, UCLA, thanks the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation,

The U.S.-Mexico border is a site of extensive militarization in both countries, although the direct intervention of the military and military-like police agencies is greater in Mexico than in the United States. The widespread, sloppy use of militarization concerning this region requires initial careful definitional comments. Then, militarization on the Mexican side of the border is examined, in particular the extreme intervention of the military since the 2006 Calderón presidency. The human rights consequences of this intervention are reviewed, as well as the involvement of the United States in Plan Mérida. U.S. militarization of the border is also considered, especially intensive surveillance and intelligence analysis in the framework of national security. The article closes by asking whether militarization serves social control, and if so, how coherent and cohesive it is. The key argument is that militarization is not an omniscient, omnipotent control strategy, but rather a repetitive and somewhat clumsy template used by U.S. political elites (and relatedly, Mexican elites) to address dynamic and disruptive challenges in Latin America and related regions of the United States.