Subordinating Space: Immigration Enforcement, Hierarchy, and the Politics of Scale in Mexico and Central America (original) (raw)

Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn significant attention to bordering practices, immigration enforcement, and international migration in the U.S. In Summer 2014, thousands of women and children from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. While many of these arriving migrants voluntarily turned themselves over to immigration authorities to claim asylum, the Obama administration was quick to declare "an urgent humanitarian situation" and "crisis on the border", requesting more than $3.7 billion to expand detention facilities, increase surveillance efforts, and hire additional Border Patrol agents (USBP) and immigration judges (Shear & Peters 2014; Rose 2019). This emphasis on deterrence, rather than aid or assistance, exposed not only the federal governments' inability to respond to the sudden increase in migration

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