Geographies of Confinement for Immigrant Youth: Checkpoints and Immobilities along the US/Mexico Border

• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Author: Milena A. Melo,Heide Castañeda
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12115
• Date: 01 January 2019

Geographies of Confinement for Immigrant

Youth: Checkpoints and Immobilities along the

US/Mexico Border

HEIDE CASTAN

˜EDA and MILENA A. MELO

The containment of immigrants along the US/Mexico border illuminates the complex spatial

implications associated with the securitization of migration enforcement. The production of

marginalized, carceral national spaces has particular consequences for the people who inhabit

them, as processes of spatial illegality shape their daily lives. Our analyses draw on five years

of ethnographic study in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Here, we focus on the experiences of

sixty-one undocumented youth, including recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,

to explore how the spatial violence created by checkpoints and everyday policing practices lead

to experiences of confinement and accelerate processes of social exclusion. Spillover effects

occur as all inhabitants must pass through inspection points and demonstrate proof of identity

and legal residency; this contributes to the reformulation of citizenship. To this, our article

adds insight into how social membership is experienced at the checkpoints so that “citizenship”

and “authorization” become conflated. Early childhood and youth experiences of freely cross-

ing spaces with school programs yet living with uncertain and precarious status contribute to

persistent fear, instability, and confusion under a multilayered immigration policy regime.

I. INTRODUCTION

As we entered the calm Starbucks near the end of a long day of interviewing in the sum-

mer heat, Erin waved us over to the corner where she and her mother were sitting. After

greeting them and ordering coffee, we split up the interviewing tasks in our typical

rhythm, with one of us speaking with Erin in English and the other with her mother at

the next table in Spanish. As we pulled out our interview guides, pressed play on our

audio recorders, and began with our questions, the espresso machine occasionally hissed

as customers entered and exited behind us.

Erin is a twenty-five-year-old Mexican immigrant with Deferred Action for Child-

hood Arrivals (DACA) status. She has aspirations of becoming a teacher and gets plenty

of experience through her current job as a substitute teacher at local high schools. A half

Funding for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation (#1535664) and the Wenner-Gren

Foundation for Anthropological Research. We would like to thank Nora Arriola, Carla Castillo, Ryan Logan,

Seiichi Villalona, and Aria Walsh-Felz for their assistance with various stages of the project. In addition to the

anonymous reviewers, we wish to thank Helen Marrow, Angela Stuesse, and Wendy Vogt for providing helpful

feedback.

Address correspondence to: Heide Castan˜eda, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida,

4202 E. Fowler Ave., SOC 107, Tampa, FL 33620, USA; Email: hcastaneda@usf.edu.

LAW & POLICY, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2019

©2018 The Authors

Law & Policy ©2018 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12115

ISSN 0265-8240

hour into the interview, she talked about how she deals with the constant presence of

Border Patrol in this region so close to the US/Mexico boundary. She compared the pre-

sent day with reactions from her family’s first arrival in the United States ten years ago.

“It was fear,” Erin said. “We would see a Border Patrol agent and like put our heads

down, try not to do anything that might get their attention to us. But after many years,

we see it as normal. We say, ‘Whatever happens is just going to happen.’ So we try not

to be afraid anymore.”

After a small pause, Erin continued. “Like my mom right now. She’s like, ‘Whatever.’”

At that moment, we turned and realized that she was talking about a Border Patrol agent

drinking coffee on the other side of the room. Neither of us had noticed, as the odds of

running into Border Patrol at a local restaurant or coffee shop in this area are high. Yet

our awareness of theirpresence was heightened today because ofthe topic being discussed.

A few minutes later, two other agents entered and waited for their order, standing just a

few yards from where we were interviewing the women. In the highly militarized zone of

the Rio Grande Valley,the presence of Border Patrol agents is simply a part of daily life.

Erin and her mother are part of the 1.7 million undocumented immigrants living in

Texas, many of whom are concentrated within the 100-mile wide buffer strip along the bor-

der that forms a secondary boundary to the interior of the United States (Pew Research

Center 2016). Their experiences illuminate how law is mapped onto particular geographies

to shape immigrants’ daily lives. Over the past decade, US Customs and Border Protection

(CBP) has doubled the number of agents both along the immediate border and in areas up

to 100 miles away from it as part of a layered approach known as the “defense in depth”

strategy (USCBP 2015; Government Accountability Office [GAO] 2017).

In addition to the risks associated with daily encounters such as the one at the coffee

shop that evening, a series of permanent checkpoints creates a sense of regional confine-

ment that affects the lives of all immigrants, regardless of whether they are recent

arrivals or have lived in the United States for decades. These checkpoints are located

between twenty-five and 100 miles from the border along all major highways that lead

into the interior of the United States and are staffed twenty-four hours a day, seven days

a week, forcing travelers to pass through them if they travel north. As a result, undocu-

mented persons living in this region define their lives by the distance they can travel

before reaching a spatial boundary. For residents of the heavily populated McAllen-

Edinburg-Mission metropolitan area, for instance, these boundaries extend roughly two

hours to the west through relatively unpopulated brushland, thirty minutes to the south

until stopped by the international border, an hour and a half to the east until stopped by

the Gulf of Mexico, and only forty-five minutes to the north, where highway checkpoints

prevent them from traveling to other parts of the state and the country. These permanent

checkpoints are supplemented by unpredictable temporary roadblocks placed in commu-

nities where immigrants live and work, operating as an additional level of inspection,

creating an environment of entrapment (Nu

´n˜ez and Heyman 2007), and resulting in

what some have referred to as a state of carcelment (Dorsey and Dı

´az-Barriga 2015).

Place matters. While some patterns of illegality are universal, others are rooted in

local geographies and practices (Gonzales and Ruiz 2014; Vaquera, Aranda, and Gonza-

les 2014). In this dynamic region—characterized not only by militarization but also by

historical patterns of migration and cross-border economic activity—spatial violence

(Winton 2015) results in extreme restrictions on mobility and confirms the everyday real-

ity of exclusion that immigrants face within a country not sanctioned as theirs, even

though they consider it home. To explore the sense of confinement that these immigrants

experience on a daily basis, this article examines how law is mapped onto people’s lives

through the competing logics of containment and mobility that are part of contemporary

©2018 The Authors

Law & Policy ©2018 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

Castan˜eda and Melo GEOGRAPHIES OF CONFINEMENT 81