Tactics of Empathy: The Intimate Geopolitics of Mexican Migrant Detention

ABSTRACT

By focusing on the externalisation of US bordering into Mexico, we consider the institutional setting that both limits and channels gestures of care and empathy in migrant detention. Working within a framework that highlights the connections between the global and the intimate, and by proposing to read these connections as they unfold into an intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork, we unpack the effects of Mexico’s recent shift towards humanitarian border politics on the interactions between detained migrants and border agents. Together with the material scarcity in which border officers operate, horrendous detention conditions and increased investments in detention facilities, this shift produces care-control dynamics that are specific to bordering in transit countries. We identify three ‘tactics of empathy’ deployed by Mexican border officers as they attempt to morally legitimise border control in this new environment, while concurrently avoiding legal liabilities and taming migrants under their custody. We argue that these tactics are less a manifestation of an ethics of care than a response to situations occurring in transit migrant detention where morality and instrumental rationality become entangled.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Stephanie Silverman, Luna Vives, and Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa for their thoughtful comments on the first draft of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Frontline borderworkers employed by the Mexican immigration enforcement agency, Instituto Nacional de Migracíon, are called agente federal de migración. However, following the border studies literature, we settled on the terms border agent and officer since they better encapsulate the various border control actions they perform. Furthermore, this term better echoes the ways in which US extraterritorial migration policing has reconfigured the Mexican territory into a borderzone.

2. However, it is noteworthy that Mexican society’s position regarding human mobility is openly ambivalent (Gall 2018) and in recent years, Mexican border enforcement agencies (Instituto Nacional de Migración and more recently the Guardia Nacional) have gained greater support.

3. The Mexican Transit Control Regime conceptualisation sheds light on the implementation of bordering processes and practices to intercept, deter, and expel migration in transit to the United States (Campos-Delgado 2018). Although Mexico began to strengthen its border control during the 1990s (Castillo 2000), this conceptualisation underscores the geopolitical arrangements established to govern migration in transit. It highlights how Mexico’s role as a transit country is capitalised on by both Mexican and US authorities, which, through legal and extra-legal aspects, have reduced migrants’ chances of reaching the United States (Rodríguez, Berumen, and Ramos 2011).

4. This is well illustrated by the donation in 2010 of IT equipment by the counternarcotics section of the US embassy in Mexico (e.g., computers, monitors, passport readers, and barcode readers) for a total value of USD $1,386,303.69. Internal documents state that the equipment would be used “in activities related to the identification of people who arrive in Mexico and those who are in the migration detention facilities” (INM-FoI 2014).

5. In the MTCR, there are three types of detention facilities: (1) Immigration Removal Centre, Estación Migratoria, (2) Provisional Immigration Removal Station Type A, Estancia Provisional Tipo A, and (3) Provisional Immigration Removal Station Type B, Estancia Provisional Tipo B. In this article we will refer to all three of them as detention centres.

6. A field agent, agente federal de Migración B, earns net monthly wages of $USD 516 while a field agent focused on migrant protection, agente de protección al migrante, earns $USD 600 (INM-FoI 2019b). To put this in context, a Mexican family (with four members) must rely on at least a monthly income of USD $580 to live above the poverty line (CONEVAL 2017). Moreover, in comparison with other law enforcement officers, border agents’ salaries are low. For instance,, the lowest earning of a federal police officer, oficial de la Policia Federal, is $USD 1,048. Amounts originally in Mexican pesos. Exchange rate 1 USD = 19.48 MXP (12/12/2019).

7. Following critical migration scholars, we use the term “border crossing facilitation industry”. This perspective questions the traditional connections between smuggling and trafficking and challenges the imagery of human smuggling as an industry that primarily preys on migrants. Without ruling out irregular migrants’ vulnerability, a focus on how and why migrants need and use the services of a facilitator for their irregular border crossing journeys is prioritised by these scholars (for more on this discussion see Achilli 2018; Sanchez 2016; van Liempt and Sersli 2013).

8. Swift deportations should not divert attention from how precarious and intense the detention is, whether it lasts less than the 60 working days limited by law or longer. In fact, research shows that prolonged detention, although illegal, is becoming a common practice in the regime (Campos-Delgado 2021; IDHIE SJ 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico; Queen’s University Belfast; Centre International de Criminologie Comparée.