Geoff Boyce | University College Dublin (original) (raw)

Papers by Geoff Boyce

Journal on Migration and Human Security, 2024

Immigration at the US-México border has drastically changed since the mid-2010s. Instead of adult... more Immigration at the US-México border has drastically changed since the mid-2010s. Instead of adult undocumented Mexican men, generally migrating for economic purposes, there are now large numbers of men, women, unaccompanied minors, and families from diverse countries seeking asylum in the United States, as they are allowed to do under US and international law. In response to these changes, the US federal government leveraged multiple strategies to impede access to the country's asylum system, including relying on Title 42 "expulsions." Title 42, a COVID-19-era health measure, prevented migrants from initiating an asylum claim. Instead, asylum-seekers were typically immediately expelled to the closest port of entry in México. The use of public health as a pretext to control the border placed these migrants at risk and led many to attempt repeat border crossings. Given this policy context, we ask: what, if any, is the association between Title 42 expulsions and migrant deaths in southern Arizona? We address this question by drawing on records of recovered undocumented border crosser (UBC) remains investigated by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) in Tucson, Arizona. We examined differences in the number and demographic characteristics of UBC remains recovered between what prior studies have characterized as the "Localized Funnel Effect" Era of border enforcement in southern Arizona (i.e. , October 1, 2013–March 19, 2020; N=851), and the “Title 42” Era (i.e., March 20, 2021–September 30, 2023; N = 709). We also assessed how, if at all, the geography of recovered UBC remains shifted between these eras.
We found that migrant deaths rose from an annual mean of 133 during the Localized Funnel Effect (LFE) Era to 198 in the Title 42 (T42) Era, representing a 48percent increase. Compared to the earlier era, remains recovered during the T42 Era clustered closer to the border and near the cities of Nogales and Agua Prieta, Sonora, having shifted from west to east in southern Arizona. Additionally, we found that Title 42 disproportionately affected Mexican and Guatemalan nationals both in terms of expulsions as well as deaths. We propose several policy recommendations based on our study’s findings intended to reduce
unnecessary suffering and increase human security:
• The US federal government should not impede or limit migrants’ access to the asylum system. Policymakers should instead create clear pathways and procedures that obviate the need for migrants to undertake dangerous journeys and overcome barriers to fair consideration of their claims.
• The US government must expand its ability to address these claims, as continued attempts to block asylum seekers will result in additional loss of life and increased violence. It should increase its capacity to screen asylum seekers at the US-México border. We propose an increase in USCIS Asylum Officers to carry out this duty. US Customs and Border Protection agents should not screen asylum seekers, nor should they assume the responsibility of serving as asylum officers, given the agency’s extensively documented record of persistently dehumanizing and mistreating migrants.
• The US federal government must take measures to eliminate the backlog of asylum cases in the immigration courts. These measures need to include reforms in the underlying immigration system and in the removal adjudication system, such as greater access to legal counsel and changes to the law that offer legal pathways to imperiled migrants who do not meet the narrow definition of asylum. Absent these reforms, the asylum case backlog will grow, and many asylum seekers with strong claims to remain will be removed after living for years in the United States.

Law & Policy, 2023

This paper draws on an expansive archive of internal government records obtained using the US Fre... more This paper draws on an expansive archive of internal government records obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act to examine federal, state and local police practice within the United States' 100-mile border zone. Analysis of this archive reveals a large number of “border” enforcement events that involve the arrest of US citizens, lawful permanent residents and others with deep roots in US communities. It further shows how, regardless of where US Border Patrol agents operate, those whom they target overwhelmingly tend to be persons of Latin American origin. Reflecting on these enforcement patterns, the paper argues for the troubling of categorical distinctions between “border” and “interior” enforcement that permeates scholarly, popular and journalistic accounts of the contemporary geography of mass deportation in the United States. As an alternative, the paper calls for greater attention to the “intensity” of immigration policing, as a way to account for multiple overlapping pathways of enforcement and to diagnose how the networked interconnectivity of agencies, personnel, resources and infrastructures involved in these activities amplifies the risks of racial profiling, arrest, and a host of related downstream consequences (family separation, financial hardship, diminished educational performance, and adverse health outcomes) for US citizens and noncitizens alike.

Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, 2023

Recent studies and reports suggest an increased mortality rate of undocumented border crossers (U... more Recent studies and reports suggest an increased mortality rate of undocumented border crossers (UBCs) in Arizona is the result of heat extremes and climatic change. Conversely, others have shown that deaths have occurred in cooler environments than in previous years. We hypothesized that human locomotion plays a greater role in heat-related mortality and that such events are not simply the result of exposure. To test our hypothesis, we used a postmortem geographic application of the human heat balance equation for 2,746 UBC deaths between 1990 and 2022 and performed regression and cluster analyses to assess the impacts of ambient temperature and exertion. Results demonstrate exertion having greater explaining power, suggesting that heat-related mortality among UBCs is not simply a function of extreme temperatures, but more so a result of the required physical exertion. Additionally, the power of these variables is not static but changes with place, time, and policy.

Antipode, 2023

This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces importan... more This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces important dimensions of earlier iterations of the colour line. The paper advances this argument by integrating findings from two distinct research projects: the first on the household financial losses that follow arrest by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ; and the second focusing on the everyday costs of policing and carceral supervision absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. Together, data from these sites illuminate how exposure to policing exhausts emotional and material resources from expansive family and community networks of care and support. To theorise the connection between financial dispossession and the dispossession of future opportunity, we draw on a heuristic reading of the "thin blue line" symbol. We conclude by suggesting a need for closer attention to how contemporary state interventions drive patterns of dispossession and vulnerability that accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms, and collectivities.

Acme: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2022

In the era of Covid-19, governments and commentators alike have argued that border controls are a... more In the era of Covid-19, governments and commentators alike have argued that border controls are a necessary tool in the fight against disease. Indeed, for much of 2020, the Trump administration in the United States adopted an almost singular focus on limiting transnational mobility as the lynchpin of its pandemic response. Ironically, this strengthening of border controls, combined with the uninterrupted operation of immigration detention and deportation, incubated the virus and amplified its circulation in the United States and abroad. Such outcomes raise many questions. How did the policing of national borders become embraced as such a pivotal tool in the fight against disease? What work does the border accomplish visa -vis pandemic control? And how do these public health outcomes shed new light on the nature of border controls? In this article, we argue that the principal contribution of border controls to the unfolding of contagion emerges from their role in the differentiation and policing of unequal legal and political status. We explore how this differentiation has demonstrably come to drive patterns of risk, harm and vulnerability during the era of Covid-19. As a contrast, we also discuss various grassroots and official interventions that have instead woven relationships of solidarity, care and cooperation across differences of nationality and legal status and their associated territorial expressions. Together, we read these efforts as cultivating a kind of "common immunity," one based on a recognition of mutual interdependence that is foundational to collective life, health and wellbeing.

The Geographical Journal, 2022

US public officials frequently argue that high temperatures are responsible for increasing mortal... more US public officials frequently argue that high temperatures are responsible for increasing mortality of undocumented border crossers (UBCs) in southern Arizona. In this article, we suggest that these kinds of assertions are not only empirically misleading, they also serve to naturalise UBC deaths in the region by helping to obscure their structural causes. Indeed, although heat exposure is a primary cause of death in the region, prior studies have also shown that migration patterns have shifted toward more remote and rugged terrain, characterised by higher elevations and greater shade cover. Using physiological modeling and a spatiotemporal forensic analysis, we assess whether the distribution of recovered human remains has shifted toward locations characterised by environments where the human body is more or less capable of regulating core temperature, and thus succumbing to heat stress. We find that the distribution of recovered UBC remains has consistently trended toward locations where the potential for heat stress is lower, rather than higher. This demonstrates that UBC mortality is not principally a function of ambient or regional temperature, but rather is a result of specific policy decisions that lead to cumulative stress and prolonged exposure due to factors like difficulty and distance of travel. To contextualise these findings, we discuss the evolution of the US Border Patrol's policy of Prevention Through Deterrence, and apply the concepts of structural and cultural violence to theorize its consistently deadly outcomes.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021

When a U.S. resident is arrested by immigration authorities, significant financial losses immedia... more When a U.S. resident is arrested by immigration authorities, significant financial losses immediately begin to accumulate to themselves and to their immediate family. Drawing on a survey of 125 households in Pima County, AZ, this paper examines the scope of these financial losses; the strategies that household members deploy to absorb and manage these losses; and their downstream repercussions for those activities and infrastructures associated with everyday and generational household social reproduction. Attention to these issues foregrounds the collective dimensions of harm-e.g., how the destabilizing effects of arrest, detention and/or deportation are never experienced by any individual in isolation, but rather multiply across those persons and relationships of dependency, care and support to whom these individuals remain connected over time. Given the disproportionate concentration of U.S. immigration policing on communities of Latin American origin, these outcomes carry important implications for the articulation of everyday conditions of labor, inequality and accumulation under racial capitalism. At the same time, people respond to the disruption of relationships of home and family through new practices, relationships and institutions of mutual aid, solidarity and struggle. What results is movement: novel patterns of collective life that transform the very communities whose members the state is attempting to violently separate. By exploring this latter dynamic, the paper contributes to emerging literatures on carceral and abolition geographies, connecting everyday conditions of social reproduction and the production and circulation of value to a broader dialectic of community resistance against state violence and material dispossession.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021

This essay introduces a special issue of ACME focused on the "carceral-police continuum." We use ... more This essay introduces a special issue of ACME focused on the "carceral-police continuum." We use this phrase to highlight three important concepts in policing and carceral geographies scholarship. The first is the imminence of coercive state power, and its uneven distribution. The second is the tangled and expansive web of relationships through which carceral logics and practices operate. The third are the ways attention to these conditions can contribute a conceptual framework to abolitionist praxis. After first offering some additional commentary on each of the problem areas identified above, we then describe how each of the papers collected here advances our understanding of these issues. We conclude by identifying several directions for continuing development, including a need for ongoing conceptual and methodological innovation that supports efforts toward collective forms of organizing, mitigation and redress directed at various forms of state violence, carceral power and their repercussions.

Geoforum, 2021

In public statements and archival documents U.S. officials have repeatedly made explicit their in... more 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.

Emotion, Space and Society, 2021

Confinement, hindrance, and time bring anxiety, fear, and stress, often accompanied by confusion ... more Confinement, hindrance, and time bring anxiety, fear, and stress, often accompanied by confusion and desperation. In the case of undocumented immigrants in the Sonoran Desert, such conditions are manipulated by way of surveillance and policing. These conditions, in combination with physical exertion, augment a physiological stress response that coalesces with existing traumas and fear. We undertake a critical mapping of relations among enforcement infrastructure, migration routes, and measurable features of the physical landscape to demonstrate that a corridor in the region functions as a labyrinth, an outcome of a combination of threats and stressors determined by the spaces migrants find themselves in after crossing the U.S./Mexico border. We argue a biopolitical understanding of current border policies indicates it reduces migrants to bare life rather than using threat, stressors, or trauma as instruments for manipulating behavior. We discuss how this labyrinth works in combination with other mechanisms, including criminalization, detention, abuse, separation, and deportation, to deliver consequences that may deter migration. Despite these efforts, migration routes remain plastic, indicating the continued potential to resist and evade the surveillance technologies and enforcement deployed in the borderlands. We assert that an inevitable result of the desert labyrinth is human mortality.

Journal on Migration and Human Security, 2020

Executive Summary Through a survey of 125 long-term resident households in Pima County, Arizona, ... more Executive Summary Through a survey of 125 long-term resident households in Pima County, Arizona, this study finds that an immigration arrest costs each household an average of more than $24,000. These costs accumulate through the value of assets seized and not recovered, out-of-pocket costs for hiring an attorney, immigration bond, and other expenses involved in supporting an immediate family member as they navigate the immigration court system. But they also include lost income due to disruptions to employment resulting from the arrest, and a physical inability to work while in detention, appearing in court, and immediately following deportation. In this article, we discuss how, when measured at the scale of the household, these financial costs fail to discriminate according to immigration or citizenship status, and accumulate to affect issues of poverty, education, housing security, health and development, and generational wealth inequality-all matters of sustained interest to state and local government. In the second half of the article, we draw on our research findings to evaluate various policies that states, counties, and municipalities can implement to mitigate these financial burdens while promoting the overall well-being of their constituents. Policies considered include: the "Immigrant Welcoming City" paradigm; the limitation of routine cooperation and custody transfer between local and federal law enforcement; expanding access to permissible forms of identification; universal representation for immigration defendants The cultivation of community bond funds; and the promotion of worker-owned cooperatives. Although these kinds of state or local initiatives cannot replace meaningful federal action on immigration reform, they can do much to provide relief and promote economic security for established immigrant and mixed-status families living in the United States, while contributing to overall community well-being and economic vitality.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021

Human geographers have long noted the colonial tropes and frontier imaginaries used to stimulate ... more Human geographers have long noted the colonial tropes and frontier imaginaries used to stimulate investment and normalize predatory property speculation within North American cities. Drawing on the insights of indigenous scholars and theorists of settler colonialism, in this article we argue a need to move beyond an analogical deployment of the “frontier” as a mere trope or imaginary and suggest that in settler colonial contexts, like the United States, the frontier and its structuring logic remain an ongoing feature of racial governance and capital accumulation over time. To develop this argument, we examine a genealogy of multiple and heterogeneous cycles of colonization, dispossession, and resistance in Tucson, Arizona. Attending to the racial and racist violence that shapes this history, we consider how the devaluation of nonwhite territorial and economic relations consistently structures urban real estate markets, driving the ongoing displacement and dispossession of communities of color. Viewing the frontier as a structuring logic of racial capitalism (rather than a symbolic motif or metaphorical condition) helps to explain why these racial patterns of dispossession can be observed as a hallmark outcome of processes of gentrification in settler countries like the United States. Meanwhile, through our case study we show how grassroots actors already are using the language of settler colonialism as a framework for naming and analyzing those outcomes just described, indicating a need for greater theoretical work that engages with these grassroots framings and narratives.

Geography Compass, 2020

This article argues for time and temporality as a critical dimension in the dialectical articulat... more This article argues for time and temporality as a critical dimension in the dialectical articulation of im/migration struggles. To make this case, the article draws on an emerging body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the temporal dimensions of im/migration and of im/migration policing. It then uses this framework to explore a host of anti-im/migrant initiatives currently unfolding in North America under the geopolitical leadership of Donald J. Trump. Contextualizing these initiatives within a longer genealogy of im/migration and im/migration policing across the continent, the article affirms scholarly characterizations of im/migrants' desires and aspirations as a "creative force" that "structurally exceed" border controls (The contested politics of mobility: Borderzones and irregularity); but it also argues a need for greater scholarly attention to how the violence associated with im/migration policing generates nonlinear im/migration dynamics and recursive pressures on nation-state borders and their police apparatus over the long durée. The article concludes by considering the theoretical, political, and empirical stakes of a conceptual shift in emphasis from space to time in the study of im/migration and im/migration policing, and then offers several concrete suggestions for further inquiry.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2019

Scott Warren is a political geographer and a volunteer with the Arizona humanitarian organization... more Scott Warren is a political geographer and a volunteer with the Arizona humanitarian organization No More Deaths. On January 17, 2018, Warren was arrested in Ajo, Arizona, along with Kristian Perez-Villanueva and José Sacaria-Goday, two Central American migrants to whom he was providing care. The United States has since charged Warren with two counts of felony harboring under 18 USC § 1324(a) and one count of conspiracy related to harboring. This paper seeks to place the Scott Warren case in context. First, it situates the charges against Warren within a longer genealogy of Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD), the overarching enforcement strategy pursued by the United States along its border with Mexico since 1994. Next, it discusses how the charges against Warren reflect a doubling-down on PTD and its underlying logic. This involves an aggressive neoliberal agenda being pursued by the Trump administration on multiple fronts, one designed to forcibly dismantle long-existing networks of community, care, and solidarity across difference in the transnational U.S.-Mexico border region.

Gender, Place & Culture, 2020

In the United States and beyond the challenges of global climate change are increasingly being go... more In the United States and beyond the challenges of global climate change are increasingly being governed via the militarization of nation-state borders rather than, or in addition to, the mitigation of carbon emissions and collective strategies for climate adaptation. In this article we apply the concept of “geopopulationism,” introduced by Bhatia et al. (this issue), to think through the zero-sum Manichaean logics of traditional geopolitical calculation and the ways these become applied to climate governance via the securitization of climate change-related migration. In order to disrupt this securitization of climate policy, we draw on the insights of feminist geopolitics and what Koopman calls “alter-geopolitics” to consider how contemporary grassroots movements like the Sanctuary movement and #BlackLivesMatter have made connections between political, economic and environmental vulnerabilities while developing relationships of solidarity and care that broaden, disseminate, distribute and regenerate security as an expansive and inclusive project. We conclude by considering ways that scholars can continue to ally ourselves with and contribute to these grassroots efforts.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2019

This paper applies the framework of settler colonialism to examine three generations of land stru... more This paper applies the framework of settler colonialism to examine three generations of land struggle involving the Tohono O'odham communities of Wo'oson and Cedagĭ Wahia in Sonora, Mexico. It traces how post-Revolutionary land and water reforms allowed for the consolidation of an extractive ranching economy that relied upon the dispossession of customary land and water sources accessed seasonally by Tohono O'odham ("desert peoples"). In the contemporary period, ranching has been supplemented by organized smuggling and the militariza-tion of the U.S.-Mexico border, generating new pressures and threats to the survival of Tohono O'odham in Sonora. Reflecting on these developments, we contribute to settler colonial theory by arguing that for arid lands peoples like the Tohono O'odham, the dispossession of territory is also a dispossession of mobility-in this case, those customary forms of mobility that for the Tohono O'odham have defined their relationships with one another for millenia within their desert homeland. We conclude by examining how the Tohono O'odham in Sonora are resisting this logic of dispossession and working to renew their autonomy and way of life for present and future generations.

Journal on Migration and Human Security, 2019

This article conducts geographic information system (GIS) modeling of unauthorized migration rout... more This article conducts geographic information system (GIS) modeling of unauthorized migration routes in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona and finds an increase in the ruggedness of terrain crossed by pedestrian travelers throughout time. The modeling of ruggedness incorporates multiple variables that include slope, vegetation, “jaggedness,” and ground temperature, and provides an alternative to Euclidian distance as a way of measuring and conceptualizing borderlands space. The data that informs our analysis is derived from comprehensive activity logs maintained by the humanitarian organization No More Deaths from 2012 to 2015, including 4,847 unique entries documenting the use of 27,439 gallons of clean drinking water at 512 distinct geotagged cache sites located along known pedestrian migration routes. The shift in migration routes toward more difficult terrain within this one high-traffic corridor reveals the ongoing impacts of the US Border Patrol’s strategy of “Prevention Through Deterrence.” In short, the pressures of enforcement on migration routes combine with everyday interference with humanitarian relief (No More Deaths and Coalición de Derechos Humanos 2018) to maximize the physiological harm experienced by unauthorized migrants. Among other outcomes, this explains both the persistence of mortality of unauthorized migrants and an increase in the rate of mortality over time (Martínez et al. 2014). The article concludes with several policy recommendations for US Customs and Border Protection that include making interference and vandalism of humanitarian aid a fireable offense; the formation of a border-wide agency tasked with search-and-rescue and emergency medical response, whose mission and operations are restrained by a clear firewall between itself and those of law enforcement; and ending Prevention Through Deterrence as a nationwide strategy.

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2021

Theories of migration deterrence have long posited that border enforcement infrastructure pushes ... more Theories of migration deterrence have long posited that border enforcement infrastructure pushes migration routes into more rugged and deadly terrain, driving an increase in migrant mortality. Applying geospatial analysis of landscape and human variables in one highly-trafficked corridor of the Arizona / Sonora border, we test whether the expansion of surveillance infrastructure has in fact shifted migrants’ routes toward areas that are more remote and difficult to traverse. We deploy a modeling methodology, typically used in archaeological and military science, to measure the energy expenditure of persons traversing the borderlands. Outcomes of this model are then compared to the changes in border infrastructure and records of fatality locations. Findings show that there is a significant correlation between the location of border surveillance technology, the routes taken by migrants, and the locations of recovered human remains in the southern Arizona desert. Placed in the context of ongoing efforts by the United States to geographically expand and concentrate border surveillance and enforcement infrastructure, we argue that this suggests a third “funnel effect” that has the outcome of maximizing the physiological toll imposed by the landscape on unauthorized migrants, long after migration routes have moved away from traditional urban crossing areas.

Acme: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019

In North America, and globally, the topics of immigration and immigration policy have become amon... more In North America, and globally, the topics of immigration and immigration policy have become among the most divisive fault lines of political struggle and debate. In this paper, we reflect upon the State of Arizona's embrace of the " Attrition Through Enforcement " (ATE) doctrine as exemplary of contemporary U.S. anti-immigrant policies that target the social reproduction of non-citizens. Reflecting on ATE and movements against it, we argue for the inadequacy of scholarly and activist approaches that would normatively deploy frameworks of “citizenship” or demands for “no borders” to articulate the stakes and composition of contemporary immigration struggles. Borrowing from political scientist Joel Olson and his concept of “democratic Manichaeism,” we argue instead the imperative to radically confront and unsettle the normative divisions between citizen and non-citizen that anti-immigrant actors and policies would police. Through two case studies in Tucson, Arizona, we examine the possibilities and challenges related to mobilizing such a Manichaean framework through the quotidian spaces of everyday life. We conclude by proposing “community composition” as both a political agenda and a methodological framework through which to attend to everyday geographies of belonging and exclusion while confronting the normative political categories that structure the nation-state and justify its violence.

Political Geography, 2018

Since 2001 the United States Border Patrol's Detroit Sector has grown from 38 agents to 411ethe f... more Since 2001 the United States Border Patrol's Detroit Sector has grown from 38 agents to 411ethe fastest rate of growth of any Border Patrol jurisdiction in the United States (CBP, 2016). Through ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews and the examination of a growing archive of internal US Border Patrol data obtained via the US Freedom of Information Act, this paper examines the everyday discourses of 'threat' and 'suspicion' that inform routine enforcement practices by Detroit Sector personnel as they police the US/Canada frontier. It finds that both 'threat' and 'suspicion' are narrated expressly according to geographic factors of origin, location and direction of travel, scrutinizing bodies and persons that, as an outcome, are said to appear " out of place. " At the same time, according to the Border Patrol's daily apprehension logs, enforcement activity disproportionately concentrates on Latinx residents across divisions of citizenship and immigration status, affecting peoples' everyday ability to circulate through urban and suburban space free from scrutiny, surveillance and the possibility of state violence. To theorize the site and stakes of these outcomes, the paper borrows Stuesse and Coleman's (2014) concept of " automobility " and develops this as an explicitly racial and racializing concept, one that affords an intersectional reading of state violence based on its distributional impacts on peoples' autonomy and control over their conditions of everyday social reproduction. This, then, suggests a need for greater dialogue between literature on immigration enforcement and those concerned expressly with geogra-phies of racial confinement, policing, dispossession and control.

Journal on Migration and Human Security, 2024

Law & Policy, 2023

Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, 2023

Antipode, 2023

Acme: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2022

The Geographical Journal, 2022

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021

Geoforum, 2021

Emotion, Space and Society, 2021

Journal on Migration and Human Security, 2020

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021

Geography Compass, 2020

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2019

Gender, Place & Culture, 2020

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2019

Journal on Migration and Human Security, 2019

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2021

Acme: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019

Political Geography, 2018

Handbook on Human Security, Borders and Migration, 2021

Boyce and Miller explore the expansive nature of post-9/11 US border policing, focusing on the US... more Boyce and Miller explore the expansive nature of post-9/11 US border policing, focusing on the US-Canada divide, and the increased racial-ethnic profiling of Latinos. This illustrates the Border Patrol's character as a national quasi-racial-ethnic police force, a development that raises a number of troubling questions that the authors identify and discuss.

Handbook on the Geographies of Power (Edward Elgar Publishing)

This chapter mobilizes a critique of the "Autonomy of Migration" (AoM) approach to the study of b... more This chapter mobilizes a critique of the "Autonomy of Migration" (AoM) approach to the study of borders and migration, offering a post-humanist theory of multiplicity as a theoretical alternative that can carry many of AoM's important insights while avoiding its conceptual, political, and methodological dead ends. Attending to the material dimensions of migration and security practice, the chapter argues that it is the volumetric multiplicity of space that provides the context and medium of ongoing innovation by both state and clandestine actors. Yet, as illustrated by the case of the U.S.-Mexican border in the Arizona desert, the dense multiplicity of borderland space nevertheless proves imminently threatening to human life. Rather than a romantic harbinger of "resistance" to border policing, then, these conditions demand attention to the politics of human vulnerability, and the unequal distribution of corporeal vulnerability as an instrument of both state violence and private capital accumulation.

Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis, edited by Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge; University of Georgia Press, 2012

published in Kristian Williams, Will Munger, and Lara Messersmith-Glavin (eds.) (2013) Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency. Oakland: AK Press, pages 245-257

Antipode, 2022

This essay is a contribution to an Antipode review symposium on Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: H... more This essay is a contribution to an Antipode review symposium on Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare, a text that traces the history of UAV technology and the failure, incoherence, contradiction and contingency that have always haunted its operation. More than anything, Chandler's novel reading of the history of drone technology disrupts any claim of novelty in the contemporary deployment of these aerial platforms in the war on terror, and suggests that rather than affording some unique military capability, the principle contribution of the drone to U.S.-backed counterinsurgency is a kind of epistemic violence, allowing for a continuous denial of the human error and decisionmaking responsible for the violence it unleashes.

The Border Militarization Reader, 2014

“What happens in Arizona is going to come and happen to you…. They plan to do more damage to our ... more “What happens in Arizona is going to come and happen to you…. They plan to do more damage to our communities.” These words of warning were spoken by Isabel Garcia, co-founder of Tucson, Arizona’s Derechos Humanos Coalition. Are they true? The largest workplace raids by the Border Patrol have both occurred far from the US-Mexico border; throughout the country, state and local law enforcement have taken up practices of racial profiling as part of a “crackdown on illegal immigration”; and every day, it seems, we hear new revelations about government spying on citizen and non-citizen alikeiii. The evidence seems to suggest that already border militarization and the criminalization of undocumented workers have opened pathways for increased surveillance and the erosion of civil rights across segments, throughout the entire country. Border states such as Arizona have provided testing and proving grounds for technologies and practices that extend into every facet of life in the USA, including “drug balloons” and blimps, virtual fences, drones, and all kinds of the latest “security” apparatus. It takes neither genius nor astute observation to see that both anti-immigrant hysteria and “the War on Terror” have been used to justify a steady stream of lost rights and lost privacy. Perhaps it is time for all of us who are US citizens and legal residents to realize that we have every reason to ally ourselves in solidarity with our undocumented sisters and brothers rather than those of the 1% and the political status quo who continue fanning the flames of racism and repression. The poet John Donne has told us that “No man is an island”. True enough–we are all connected, and we all share borders among us. To paraphrase and reinterpret the closing lines of his famous poem: Don’t ask for whom the Border Patrol patrols–it patrols for thee.

SocietyandSpace.org, 2020

Micol Seigel’s "Violence Work" makes an urgent contribution to our understanding of police work, ... more Micol Seigel’s "Violence Work" makes an urgent contribution to our understanding of police work, its historical and continuing relationship to counter-insurgency, and the generative fictions that serve to obfuscate this relationship and to normalize its violence. The text should be required reading for activists, scholars, and really anyone else seeking to understand the contemporary moment and to address the state’s outsized and often exclusive investment in violence as the operational framework for addressing any number of social problems.

NACLA: Report on the Americas, 2020

Under the guise of protecting public health, the White House has used the Covid-19 pandemic to in... more Under the guise of protecting public health, the White House has used the Covid-19 pandemic to intensify its border construction spree and to further limit immigration to the United States. Trump’s border-hardening response to the coronavirus is a manifestation of what feminist scholars Rajani Bhatia, Jade S. Sasser, Diana Ojeda, Anne Hendrixson, Sarojini Nadimpally, and Ellen E. Foley call “geopopulationism.” This concept describes an approach to governance that would address complex social, environmental, or health problems—a global pandemic is all three—by controlling peoples’ movements across borders. Against the administration’s obsession with the border and its naked xenophobic hostility toward foreign citizens and international cooperation, what we are learning through the present moment—in the United States and throughout the world—is that problems like coronavirus, which threaten all of us, can only be successfully tackled through meaningful cooperation that involves everybody. If nothing else, the Covid-19 pandemic and the fall-out from the pandemic both require that we break with the geopopulationist impulses that would reduce our world, our lives, and our communities to competitive isolation. For what the virus has radically laid bare, and what many of us are only beginning to come to terms with, is that our vulnerability to one another cannot be meaningfully held at bay or controlled by building border or prison walls; by locking away or deporting our neighbors, co-workers, members of our community, and foreigners alike. Instead, the solutions to the problems we face must be addressed through the quality of the relationships we weave between one another.

SocietyandSpace.org, 2017

This essay argues that US immigration policy in the contemporary era is increasingly enacting of ... more This essay argues that US immigration policy in the contemporary era is increasingly enacting of and enacted through a massive differentiation of the undocumented population in the United States, such that the pivotal differences that may define a person’s future vulnerability to state violence (prosecution, detention, and removal) may not rest specifically on an axis of whether a person has a lawful visa status (the difference between being “documented” and “undocumented,”) but rather on that person’s previous border-crossing experience and history of encounters with state authorities. And the stakes of this differentiation have to do specifically with the question of time–including whether an individual will have the opportunity to fight their case in court, and to remain in the United States while they pursue this fight.

DifferenTakes, 2013

Startlingly absent from most discussions of immigration reform, the Obama administration’s Operat... more Startlingly absent from most discussions of immigration reform, the Obama administration’s Operation Streamline is a mass prosecution initiative currently underway along the U.S.-Mexico border. In this issue of DifferenTakes, Arizona-based immigration rights researchers and activists Geoffrey Boyce and Sarah Launius expose how Operation Streamline is blurring the line between the U.S. criminal justice and civil immigration systems, violating basic rights, and criminalizing immigrants.

Public Political Ecologies Laboratory, 2014

http://ppel.arizona.edu/?p=587

Antipodefoundation.org, Dec 10, 2012

In Precarious Life, Judith Butler (2004) argues for a feminist transnational politics based on th... more In Precarious Life, Judith Butler (2004) argues for a feminist transnational politics based on the precarity of life – the corporeal vulnerability that we each share. In the US-Mexico borderlands, the violence associated with militarized border enforcement brings the precarity of life into sharp relief; several recent shootings by agents of the US Border Patrol are illustrative...

Bad Subjects, Jul 2011

Part of a special issue on Arizona and immigration, this essay offers background and context for ... more Part of a special issue on Arizona and immigration, this essay offers background and context for Arizona's SB 1070 and discusses social movement responses to the law prior to its injunction in summer 2010.

http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2011/81/boyce-launius.htm

Binational Migration Institute, 2019

When an individual is placed into immigration custody or removal proceedings in the United States... more When an individual is placed into immigration custody or removal proceedings in the United States, significant financial costs immediately begin to accumulate to themselves and to their household. These costs can be divided into direct costs (i.e., money and wealth that are directly lost or transferred as an outcome of the immigration-related arrest); and indirect costs (i.e., wealth and income that disappear due to the loss of employment and/or the loss of related economic opportunity). On average, our research finds that the average of direct costs borne by U.S. households when a loved one is detained and/or placed into removal proceedings total 9,228;whileindirectcostsamountedto9,228; while indirect costs amounted to 9,228;whileindirectcostsamountedto14,956. In aggregate, then, we find that an immigration-related arrest costs a U.S. household an average of more than $24,000 in lost wealth and income. As Congress and the Executive Branch continue to debate federal immigration policy, and as local jurisdictions wrestle with their own role and involvement in enforcing this policy, the data in this report provides insight into some of the most urgent challenges for mixed-status households in the United States. Our findings show that immigration police activity generates significant financial burdens on U.S. households, deepening inequalities of wealth and opportunity – all the while aggravating the emotional and psychological anguish that these activities produce. Notably, the impacts detailed in this report are not limited to non-citizens, or to those individuals specifically targeted by police agencies involved in U.S. immigration enforcement. Instead, these costs are absorbed by immediate and extended family members and social networks that include U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike, including many Lawful Permanent Residents. While the findings in this report are therefore relevant for understanding the impacts of current immigration policy, their implications extend beyond this policy domain to include issues of economic security, wealth inequality, and the long-term well-being of communities across the United States.

Transnational Institute and Immigrant Defense Project, 2021

‘Smart’ borders involve the expanded use of surveillance and monitoring technologies including ca... more ‘Smart’ borders involve the expanded use of surveillance and monitoring technologies including cameras, drones, biometrics, and motion sensors to make a border more effective in stopping unwanted migration and keeping track of migrants.

On January 20, 2021, his first day in office, US President Biden issued an executive order pausing the remaining construction of the southern border wall initiated during the Trump administration. Soon after, the White House sent a bill to Congress, the US Citizenship Act of 2021, calling for the deployment of “smart technology” to “manage and secure the southern border.” Under Biden’s blueprint, $1.2 billion would be allocated for border infrastructure including “modernization of land ports of entry, investments in modern border security technology and assets, and efforts to ensure the safe and humane treatment of migrants in CBP custody.”

Our new report shows that whether “smart” or not, all border policing shares a common goal: to control human beings and to deny entry to those deemed undesirable or undeserving. It highlight five harms caused by border policing:

-A boom in the border and surveillance industrial complex
-The growing policing of immigrants and their communities, the borderlands, and society on a global scale.
-Separation and undermining of families and communities.
-The maiming and killing of large numbers of border crossers.
-Exacerbation of socioeconomic inequality.

American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, 2021

In May 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center... more In May 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center and two researchers, Dr. Geoffrey Alan Boyce and Dr. Elizabeth Oglesby, submitted a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) request to CBP to obtain records related to Border Patrol’s interior enforcement operations in Michigan. CBP, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS),
the largest law enforcement agency in the United States and one of the
most secretive agencies in the federal government, refused to provide the information. It took years of litigation, culminating in numerous federal court orders, to compel CBP to produce the sought-after documents and data. CBP finished producing all documents in March 2020.
A sweeping analysis of those records, spanning the years 2012 to 2019, reveals that the agency produces few tangible results related to its officially mandated mission in Michigan: apprehending people attempting to cross into the United States from Canada without authorization. Instead, the data show that Border Patrol agents routinely spend their time and resources targeting people of Latin American origin who are long-term Michigan residents. Moreover, because of Border Patrol’s expansive view of what has been dubbed the “100-mile zone” (described in greater detail later), the agency claims it has the authority to conduct certain warrantless searches anywhere and everywhere in Michigan — every city and every county, every road and every highway. As a result, people of Latin American origin throughout the state are subjected to the constant fear that Border Patrol will single them out for harassment and arrest based on their appearance. Border Patrol agents are, in this way, terrorizing Michigan communities.

Binational Migration Institute, 2021

Miles de indocumentados que cruzaban la frontera han muerto al tratar de cruzar la frontera entre... more Miles de indocumentados que cruzaban la frontera han muerto al tratar de cruzar la frontera entre EE.UU. y México desde la década de 1990. Estudios anteriores han hallados que estas muertes son una consecuencia de los esfuerzos para aplicar la ley en la frontera, así como también de las condicione económicas, políticas y sociales en los países desde los cuales llegan los inmigrantes y en los Estados Unidos. Este estudio contribuye a este corpus literatura en expansión. Con base en los datos de la Oficina del Médico Forense del Condado Pima (PCOME, por sus siglas en inglés), proporcionamos información sobre la recuperación de restos humanos que se sabe o se cree que son de indocumentados que cruzaban la frontera en el sur de Arizona entre los años fiscales 1990 y 2020. Hallamos que durante este periodo se recuperaron los restos de al menos 3,356 indocumentadas que cruzaban la frontera, la mayoría de los cuales se encontraron a partir de 2005. Las detenciones por parte de la Patrulla Fronteriza de los EE. UU., que los estudiosos de la inmigración a menudo usan como equivalentes de tendencias de migración de indocumentados, han disminuido en el Sector Tucson de la agencia desde mediados de la década de 2000. Sin embargo, la tasa de restos humanos recuperados de indocumentados que cruzaban la frontera ha aumentado en gran parte, aunque las detenciones han disminuido, lo cual es una dinámica que sugiere que la migración de indocumentados en el sur de Arizona se ha vuelto cada vez más peligrosa. También hallamos que los restos de indocumentados que cruzaban la frontera se recuperaban cada vez más de áreas más remotas del sur de Arizona con el paso del tiempo, lo cual da mayor respaldo a esta afirmación. Los registros de la PCOME que examinamos a lo largo del periodo de nuestro estudio sugieren que los migrantes que han muerto en el sur de Arizona eran en su mayoría hombres (84%), y, entre los difuntos identificados, tenían de 20 a 49 años (82%) y provenían de México (80%). La mayoría murieron por exposición al medioambiente (38%) o una causa de muerte no determinada (48%), y fueron identificados satisfactoriamente luego de la muerte (64%). Sin embargo, como se destaca en todo este informe, hallamos importantes cambios en el desglose de estos factores a lo largo del tiempo, para lo que ofrecemos posibles explicaciones. Esperamos que los legisladores y el público consideren los datos que se presentan en este informe, pues el acceso a la evidencia empírica es crucial cuando se formulan políticas públicas y se tratan las causas raíz de inquietudes sociales críticas como la muerte de personas que cruzan la frontera a lo largo del límite entre EE. UU. y México.

Binational Migration Institute Report, 2021

Thousands of undocumented border crossers have died while attempting to cross the US-México borde... more Thousands of undocumented border crossers have died while attempting to cross the US-México border since the 1990s. Prior studies have found that these deaths are a consequence of increased border enforcement efforts as well as of economic, political, and social conditions in immigrant-sending countries and in the United States. The present study contributes to this expanding body of literature. Drawing on data from the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME), we provide information on the recovery of human remains either known or believed to be of undocumented border crossers in southern Arizona between FY 1990 and 2020. We find that during this period the remains of at least 3,356 undocumented border crossers were recovered in the region, with the majority being found since 2005. US Border Patrol apprehensions, which immigration scholars often use as proxy for undocumented migration trends, have decreased in that agency’s Tucson Sector since the mid-2000s. However, the rate of recovered remains of undocumented border crossers has largely increased even as apprehensions have declined, which is a dynamic that suggests undocumented migration in southern Arizona has become increasingly dangerous. We also find that the remains of undocumented border crossers were increasingly recovered from more remote areas of southern Arizona over time, which further supports this assertion. The PCOME records we examined over our study period suggest that migrants who have died in southern Arizona are largely male (84%), and, among identified decedents, 20-49 years of age (82%) and from México (80%). Most perished due to exposure (38%) or an undetermined cause of death (48%), and were successfully identified post-mortem (64%). Nevertheless, as highlighted throughout this report, we find important changes in the breakdown of these factors across time, for which we offer possible explanations. Our hope is that policymakers and the public will consider the data presented in this report, as access to empirical evidence is crucial when formulating public policy and when addressing the root causes of critical social concerns such as border-crosser deaths along the US-México border.

e Immigrant Defense Project’s Surveillance, Tech & Immigration Policing Project, and the Transnational Institute. , 2021

Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, 2023