Immigration Policing as Holey War: Rings of Connection, Deadly Gaps, and State Loopholes in the Struggle for Asylum

Abstract

This article uses the concept of holes rather than borders to articulate the space that US immigration policing engenders. In contradistinction to borders—lines or zones that can be mapped, walled, or policed to delimit sovereign bodies—holes are strategic exceptions to mappable sovereignties. Rather than fixed, mappable boundaries, holes are mutable and in flux, thriving on the shifting potential to appear or disappear and to make people disappear as legal subjects. If US immigration policing operates, to a large extent, through holes distributed across borders and long-distance spaces, then any mapping of this power that centers national borders or bounded nation-states alone is insufficient. I show how the policing of Venezuelan migration centers the distribution of holes from South and Central America to spaces within the US that are far from “the border.” Against a discursive focus on “the border” and the border wall in US rhetoric on immigration, I argue that the actual practices of impeding flows of immigration or channeling them through spaces of death have increasingly operated through holey space. If holy space has been defined in studies of religion as a sacred space set apart from mundane rules, then the hol(e)y spaces of immigration are set apart from fixed conceptions of “the rule of law.” A focus on holes shows how the legal order of immigration depends more on exceptions, personalized or arbitrary power, and the instability of interim extra-legal executive orders than a dichotomy of legal/illegal. Despite their necropolitical power, holes do not create an entirely striated, hierarchical space. Holes are also rings of connection and passageways, highlighting the creativity and agency of asylum seekers in forging dignity under extremely difficult conditions.