Migration in the margins: border bureaucracy and barriers to migrants’ rights during Programa Frontera Sur

Abstract U.S. support for border enforcement in Mexico has been ongoing for decades, but in 2014, after the arrival of unprecedented numbers of Central American minors and families to the U.S., even greater pressure was placed on Mexico to seal its border with Guatemala. This paper explores the resulting tensions between Mexican border enforcement policies outlined under Programa Frontera Sur, intended to tighten security and surveillance in the south of the country, and Mexico’s 2011 Migration Law, intended to facilitate the protection of migrants’ rights. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how the borders of the Mexican state are maintained through the (il)legibility of administrative rules and procedures in the context of conflicting immigration agendas. Specifically, this paper explores the precarious paths to legal protection via regularización de estancia por razones humanitarias, a temporary legal status granted to victims of grave crimes. It traces applicants’ circuitous trajectories through bureaucratic processes and evolving enforcement landscapes, noting the costs and contingencies involved in making claims ‘legitimate’ and legible in the eyes of the state. This paper also brings attention to the positioning of migrant shelters at the margins of state inclusion, where formal and informal mobilities often intersect. As a feminist geopolitical study of state bordering practices, this research is useful in understanding lived impacts and responses to more recent strategies of administrative border enforcement, including the MPP and Title 42 programs.