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.

Introduction

The vulnerability of Central American migrants to Mexican state authorities is well known and well documented. Mexican border agents’¹ have consistently been portrayed as incompetent, exploitative, and easily corruptible² (Carte 2014; Gall 2018; Villafuerte and Del C. García 2007). Yet, following a range of policy changes effected in 2011, border officers are required not only to control, but also to care for detained migrants. This gives rise to a series of challenges and dilemmas that provide valuable insight into the dynamics of borderwork and humanitarianism in transit countries. Humanitarianism is a moral and political logic of governing that assumes an ontological inequality between human beings, wielding care-control as a form of intervention that ‘differentiates in a hierarchical manner the values of human lives’ (Fassin 2007, 519). Contemporary research on the topic, primarily adopting a Mediterranean and US focus, has inquired into how bordering strategies do not pit care and security against one another, but are inevitably linked in a ‘politics-of-life’ (Fassin 2007) where recognition of human dignity and political subjecthood is substituted with a mere will to save migrant lives. As such, bordering increasingly unfolds in a dialectical rapport between security and humanitarian logics where, in the words of Fassin (2018, 426), ‘compassion and repression are quasi ineluctably linked’. Against this backdrop, this article poses an empirical question: What happens to ‘humanitarian borderwork’ in transit countries? How does a care-control framework transform border practices, particularly migrant apprehension, detention and deportation, in these countries?

Much of what we know about transit border policing in Mexico derives from the narratives of migrants intercepted and detained along the way (CNDH 2019; Vogt 2017). Conversely, we are interested in exploring bordering from the perspective of border officers involved in migration control in transit states. To do this, we draw on Wilson’s (2012) invitation to study intimacy as a category in the global analysis of power as well as on the ‘intimate economies of detention’ framework (Conlon and Hiemstra 2017), which sheds light on the complex and tangled networks of relations and practices implicated in the operations of migration detention. Building on this approach, this article examines what we call the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork, paying particular attention to the everyday care-control arrangements involved in the enforcement of migration control, and the ways in which externalised bordering is effected through the cloistered affective interactions between border officers in transit countries and the migrants they detain. Our analysis thus contributes to scholarly research on the geopolitics of border externalisation, while also shedding light on how geopolitics unfolds through enclosed interactions in migration detention. It speaks to how geopolitical forces play out not only on the bodies of migrants but also, in the midst of a political economy of scarcity, on the exhausted bodies of the borderworkers tasked with their detention and expulsion. We are concerned with the types of forces that shape ‘everyday intimacies’ in transit country detention (Conlon and Hiemstra, 2014; Mountz and Hyndman 2006, 447) and therefore locate ourselves within the burgeoning scholarship that examines care-control dynamics (Papada 2021; Sahraoui 2020; Williams 2015) as inherent to the ‘humanitarian borderscape’ (Pallister-Wilkins 2018).

In order to unveil the workings of the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork and the ways in which it supports externalised bordering, we expand the lexicon used to study care-control in border enforcement. We identify three ‘tactics of empathy’ deployed by Mexican border officers to morally legitimise border control, avoid legal liabilities, as well as control and tame migrants. Tactics of empathy are stratagems that curb the moral capacities of bordering actors. They are part of the wider processes that securitise people’s mobility, making possible what Gill (2016) has identified as the coexistence of moral distance and physical proximity in migrant carceral spaces. If Walters (2011) speaks of the ethical positioning of humanitarian actors as a tactic of empathy – where ‘witnessing’ is one such tactic – we wish to open up the possibilities offered by this notion. As we argue below, tactics of empathy shed light on the rationalisation of compassion in transit control bordering and migrant detention, against a general backdrop of meagre resources. Tactics of empathy render care a calculated act. They arise from the precarious situation in which border officers are placed as a result of border externalisation, the rise of humanitarian legal imperatives in Mexico, and the lack of resources that characterise their work.

Such tactics rely in the first instance on humanitarian narratives that displace the responsibility for migrant vulnerability away from Mexican bordering activities, insisting instead on agents’ putative rescuing role. We call this tactic (1) blame avoidance and blame-shifting through salvationist rhetoric. Tactics of empathy are also deployed in a carceral-like setting characterised by overcrowding, poor hygiene and boredom for those detained, which favours (2) the institutional cooptation of day-to-day care by borderworkers, as well as the regulatory individualisation of responsibility for migrant care and control in such conditions. Finally, tactics of empathy are turned on their head through (3) the enforced commiseration that is sometimes demanded of migrants who are asked to witness their jailers’ dire labour conditions. Together, these three tactics are an expression of the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork; they are less a manifestation of an ethics of care than a response to situations where morality and instrumental rationality become entangled in the everyday situations that arise from Mexican-US migrant carceralities.

We begin our analysis with methodological considerations. We then review several facets of externalised bordering that have come to bear on the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork in Mexico. This includes the reverberations of US border control efforts throughout Mexican migration policing institutions and detention infrastructure, but also on the country’s national politics. We underscore how, following this reshaping of migration control, a care-control bordering framework was adopted in this transit country. We then delve into the political economy of scarcity that affects border practices and migrant detention in Mexico. We argue that the exploitative working conditions of Mexican border officers influence their capacity for and reliance on empathy as they deploy care-control tactics to apprehend and detain migrants. By highlighting the political genealogy of the recent turn to humanitarianism in Mexico, we note how it has come to foster special kinds of care-control interactions in transit bordering practices. We argue that the mixture of geopolitical, institutional, legal, and politico-economic factors that shape migration control in transit states influence in unique ways border agents’ reliance on a humanitarian grammar, as they attempt to legitimise their actions.

Methodology

Our methodological strategy is inspired by Côté-Boucher (2020), who suggests investigating border control practices as borderwork – a specialised type of labour where security, regulation, administration, policing, risk management and, as we argue in this article, care, interact daily. Scholarship on border control from the perspective of state agents is growing (Eule 2018; Skaarup 2021; van der Woude 2021). Yet, due to restrictions over access, there is a paucity of research in transit states and the Global South.

Building upon previous research on Mexican migration control from the perspective of migrants, civil society, and state agents (Campos-Delgado 2018), we first draw on semi-structured interviews conducted by the first author with ten Mexican border agents in 2016 and 2019 in various cities throughout Mexico. The participants work, or worked, at different hierarchical levels, whether as frontline officers or as mid-level staff for Mexico’s National Migration Institute (Instituto Nacional de Migración, hereafter INM). In the case of former migrant officers, they were included in the research if they had been employed after 2011, that is, as explained in detail later, after the adoption of legal changes that veered bordering towards humanitarianism. Access was obtained through informal conversations and gatekeepers. Although a snowball sampling strategy was first envisaged, when requesting recommendations/contacts for potential participants, the research participants voiced their reluctance and their fears of being fired or reprimanded by the institution if their participation was revealed. Interviews focused on their participation in migration enforcement actions with priority being given to participants’ views and understandings of their everyday actions in migration detention. The analysis presented here addresses perceptions and experiences shared by participants, regardless of geographic posting or hierarchical position within the INM. Pseudonyms are used throughout the article to safeguard participants’ anonymity; similarly, cities of residence and job titles are not mentioned. Interview excerpts in this article are translated from Spanish.

Border agents’ narratives shed light on their participation in migrant apprehension, detention, and expulsion, and provide insight into their working conditions, interactions with migrants, as well as the ethical and moral dilemmas they face and the legitimation strategies they rely on in those moments. Migration control in Mexico, as it is worldwide, is a highly politicised issue and its critiques frequently focus on agents’ misconduct and propensity for corruption with less emphasis on structural or regulatory problems (Insyde 2013). Our participants are not oblivious to this, nor to how their testimonies have the potential to hamper the legitimacy of migration control in the region, a regime to which, after all, they contribute. Accordingly, we can sense their ambivalence when they rely on humanitarian tropes to legitimise migration control, reflect on their precarious working conditions, irregularities and more generally, the systemic incompetence in the management of migrant populations.

These interviews are supplemented by archival information obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests to the INM. These requests constitute a powerful tool to challenge government secrecy and ‘offer insights into the understanding of the production of security, state power, and knowledge’ (Belcher and Martin 2019, 34). FoI requests are a method of enquiry and a data gathering tool that challenge the lack of public information about bureaucratic structures and processes (Luscombe and Walby 2017). Referred to hereafter as INM-FoI, the type of information provided by the INM relates to the administrative and operational dimensions of Mexican migration control – such as workforce, salary scales, and operational handbooks. Along with public reports monitoring human rights in detention centres (CNDH 2019; CCINM 2017; IDHIE SJ 2022), this information lies at the heart of our analysis on the material infrastructure, bureaucratisation, and the political economy of scarcity sustaining the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian bordering in Mexico.

Externalised Bordering in Mexico: Setting up Care-Control

Carlos, a border officer, wonders aloud why and on whose behalf he is doing his job: ‘Taking off my uniform, I think, who am I working for? Who do we stop so many migrants for? If they don’t even want to stay here … they want to go north.’ In a transit border control regime, the conviction that one protects state sovereignty is severed for border officers, and with it, one of the primary legitimations for engaging in borderwork. In this sense, their experience of borderwork is embedded in the geopolitical realities pertaining to the externalisation of border control.

Does this ambivalence yield a higher level of empathy towards migrants? After all, Mexico is a country of Spanish-speaking emigrants. Yet we learn from Cortez (2020) that we cannot assume empathy in border control to arise from identity-based or from ethical and ideological ascriptions; nor can we do so from national imaginaries. Mexico’s self-representation as a ‘nation of emigrants’ (Fitzgerald 2009) should not be misinterpreted as conducive to compassion towards migrants. In fact, considering the appalling conditions experienced by irregular migrants in Mexico (which are reviewed below), the moral principle of ‘treat(ing) others the way you want to be treated’ does not appear to apply. In contrast, the geopolitical entanglements of the externalisation of US border control define the logics according to which bordering is legitimised and enforced in Mexico and, ultimately, shape the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork in this country.

The Extended Detention Infrastructure of an ‘Arterial Border’

Initiated in June 2001 through the US-led bilateral Plan of Action for Cooperation on Border Safety, the Mexican Transit Control Regime³ (MTCR) exemplifies ‘the elasticisation of the US southern border’ (Hiemstra 2019), an externalisation that reterritorialises US bordering and disseminates it not only across Mexico but also the Americas (Álvarez Velasco 2020). During the first decade of its implementation, the MTCR has contributed to framing transit migration as a security issue, calling for increased expulsions and for the expansion of the Mexican migrant detention infrastructure. Under the influence of this bilateral cooperation, in 2005, the INM – the Mexican border enforcement agency created in 1993 – was transformed into a national security agency with close ties to the US State security apparatus.⁴ Its ‘stop and return’ mandate shows it has worked at full speed. In 19 years, the INM recorded 2,613,915 apprehensions and 2,398,419 expulsions of irregular migrants – meaning that over 90% of migrant apprehensions resulted in expulsion (Unidad de Política Migratoria 2019). To further buttress enforcement, an extended infrastructure articulated through contractual agreements, financial transactions, increased bureaucratic involvement and politico-economic dynamics was established, which, similarly to the US (Hiemstra and Conlon 2017, 3), enables and normalises its expansion, while simultaneously concealing it.

As Burridge et al. (2017) caution, externalised borders are not located ‘everywhere’ and should not be conceptualised as ubiquitous. Yet, it is worth noting that the Mexican migration detention infrastructure has spread nationwide with a concentration in southern border states. 30 of the 32 Mexican states host a migration detention facility, for a total of 51 facilities⁵ (INM-FoI 2019a). As a result, the INM had to recruit more staff. From 2000 to 2016, the number of border agents posted throughout the country rose from 89 to 2,167. The states employing more than 100 agents are Chiapas, Mexico City, Quintana Roo, Baja California, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and Sonora. Therefore, agents are located mainly in the capital and in the northern and southern border states, as well as in main maritime ports of entry (INM-FoI 2017). Nevertheless, if the enforcement of the MTCR is concentrated in the southern border area, it has also extended to migration hubs throughout the entire Mexican territory, creating what Vogt (2017, 12) conceptualises as an ‘arterial border’, ‘a complex social arena where migration flows are policed, exploited and contested’.

The ‘arterial border’ is key to understanding the extent of the dangers that migrants face when travelling to and through Mexico. Prior to Covid-19, around 500,000 irregular migrants crossed Mexico’s southern border each year (Médecins Sans Frontières 2017). These perilous journeys are characterised by assault, extortion, rape, and kidnapping at the hands of state officials, as well as petty criminals and organised crime groups (París Pombo 2017). The US-Mexico ‘border death regime’ (Cuttitta, Häberlein, and Pallister-Wilkins 2020) extends to the southern part of migrants’ journeys. According to information provided by the National Commission of Human Rights, from 2010 to 2015, 4,589 human rights violations complaints were filed by or on behalf of migrants – 48% of those were located in the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Tabasco, and ‘only’ 17% were filed in the northern states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas (CNDH-FoI 2017). Consequently, a focus on high-risk areas in the vicinity of the Mexico-US border (Boyce, Chambers, and Launius 2019; Williams 2015) might obfuscate some of the consequences of border externalisation. Yet, as aptly suggested by Sinatti and Vos (2020, 72), the main question ‘is not where border deaths happen physically, but rather how bordering is further exercised through their representation and by whom’. We will see below that the reality of human rights violations in their country is downplayed by Mexican border officers who prefer to avoid blame by wielding a salvationist rhetoric, which discursively displaces migrant insecurity north of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande.

The Tension between Enforcement and Humanitarianism

Current scholarship on the transforming spatialities of migrant detention (see for instance, Burridge et al. 2017, 242) tends to conceptualise the deterritorialised reorganisation of border policing and migrant carceralities from the viewpoint of destination countries. However, the geopolitical dynamics set in motion by such re-territorialisation of borders also affect the very politics of transit countries involved in migration control. The involvement of transit countries not only influences their border control politics, policies, and practices; as has been the case in Mexico, border externalisation also looms large in political debates on the multiple challenges facing the country – such as corruption and violent drug cartels – and seizes precious public resources that could otherwise be spent on education and health. Like Frowd (2020), we find an increasing interconnection between transit and destination state politics, particularly as regards the reverberations of externalised border control through national debates. This becomes apparent when one examines Mexico’s recent humanitarian shift in its approach to migration control.

Before the enactment of the 2011 Migration Law, the 1974 General Law of Population (GLP) contained rules governing migration to, from, and through Mexico. Anticipating contemporary trends, the GLP made irregular migration a criminal act punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The law made migrants vulnerable to state corruption. ‘Although rarely enforced’, write González-Murphy and Koslowski (2011, 2), ‘these articles served as tools in the hands of corrupt immigration officials who could extort money from illegal migrants with threats of long prison terms’. Official criminalisation and corruption were also utilised by rapacious criminal groups who benefited from exploiting migrants and pushed them further underground. A blatant example of this is the high-profile case of the mass murder of 72 migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas by ‘Los Zetas’ in 2010; the criminal gang massacred the migrants after they refused to pay ransom and/or work for them. After years of national and international condemnation of the increasing brutality experienced by migrants in transit, this tragedy acted as a trigger for Mexican civil society to demand justice and advocate for a new Migration Law with a focus on human rights. Immigration regulations in the GLP were repealed and the Migration Law was enacted. In contrast with current theories showing a trend towards the criminalisation of migration (Inda 2011), Mexican legal history allegedly indicates a move away from it.

Nonetheless, the 2011 Migration Law did not reduce migrant vulnerability during transit through Mexico; instead, it redeployed it to justify draconian border controls. Migration officials – including interviewed border agents – resorted to the language of humanitarianism to usher political programmes and initiatives that emphasised the ‘rescue mandate’ of the INM. Officials refocused the Migration Institute’s mandate by using the framework of assisted voluntary return (retorno asistido), rather than deportation. This framing has very tangible consequences for migrants. Under Mexican law, deportation comes with a re-entry ban, whereas ‘voluntary’ repatriation does not, thus decriminalising re-entry onto the Mexican territory. At the same time, however, as it is aligned with the ‘rescue’ rhetoric, the voluntary return framework legitimises fast-track expulsions and the continued reproduction of the MTCR.

By coupling enforcement with humanitarianism, legal decriminalisation did not put an end to border deterrence and punishment practices. On the contrary, it reinforced them. This is demonstrated by the rampant use of the ‘safe and orderly migration’ mantra in repressive border control actions, such as the Mexican Programa Frontera Sur in 2014. Relying on a humanitarian crisis rhetoric, the programme started after the increase in arrivals of unaccompanied minors at the US southern border. In a move recalling what Antonio De Lauri (2019) designates as ‘the reciprocal relationship between humanitarian search-and-rescue operations and state-sovereign performances’, the crisis rhetoric labelled migrant vulnerability as an ‘emergency’ rather than diagnosing it as a structural result of border regimes. This humanitarian rhetoric has since been used as a justification to implement even more restrictive migration control policies. In short, the policy changes started after the San Fernando massacre, and the international public shaming it triggered, mark the beginning of an era in Mexican migration control where the securitisation of migration is morally and ethically legitimised by the unprotected nature of irregular migration.

Border Humanitarianism and a Political Economy of Scarcity

A new era of humanitarianism in Mexican border control was inaugurated through a stronger migration control apparatus that relies heavily on street-level border officers. Yet, this did not translate into better treatment for migrants. The intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork in Mexico are inevitably shaped by a political economy of scarcity. Limited budgetary resources, staffing shortages and harsh working conditions contribute to producing abysmal conditions of detention. In such circumstances, border officers are expected to embrace ‘humanitarianism’ in their interactions with migrant detainees with little resources to do so. This state of affairs provides the context to make sense of the tactics of empathy deployed by Mexican border officers.

Abysmal Conditions in Prison-like Facilities

Mexican migrant detention centres are governed by new care-control norms and regulations enacted since 2012. However, a criminalising approach to migration control coupled with discrepancies between these regulations on paper and their lack of application in practice (Campos-Delgado 2021) generate appalling prison-like conditions. The total holding capacity of Mexico’s detention centres of 4,443 detainees (INM-FoI 2019a) contrasts sharply with the annual number of migration enforcement actions. For instance, considering the figures for the last five years (2014–2019), Mexican authorities apprehend on average 153,371 migrants per year, that is, 12,780 per month. Although the regime favours celerity so that migrants can be quickly processed and deported – 74% of those in detention are held for a maximum of five days (CNDH 2019, 93) – this does not compensate for the fact that migrants must endure grim conditions while in detention.

In migration detention facilities, hygiene is poor and basic supplies are often lacking. The frequent absence of running water makes it impossible to ensure the correct functioning of critical sanitation services (CNDH 2019, 152, 188). As a result, a common observation amongst research participants concerns the ‘odours’ of detention since detainees cannot wash (Campos-Delgado 2021). Interviewees also describe over-crowding, with people being denied proper bedding and being forced to sleep on the floor with dirty and pockmarked sheets. Unsurprisingly, lice epidemics and skin-related problems are frequent (CCINM 2017, 60). Detention centres do not provide clean clothing, nor the possibility of washing dirty items (CCINM 2017, 93). Local subcontractors serve three meals a day, but detainees frequently complain about food quality and quantity. Due to lack of a designated dining room in some facilities such as Tenosique’s and Tijuana’s (CNDH (Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos) 2019, 136) or Puebla’s and Tlaxcala’s (IDHIE SJ 2022), detainees eat on the patio floor – if indeed, there is a patio – or inside their cells. The outdated infrastructure also poses safety and security risks for the detained population in the event of an emergency (CCINM 2017, 110).

Although detention is administrative and not criminal, the INM subjects migrants to surveillance and punishment. Some newly built facilities feature mid-ceiling elevated corridors from which agents monitor and watch over detained migrants. Public reports reveal a problematic recourse to solitary confinement for migrants deemed non-compliant with detention centres’ rules (CNDH 2019, 133). These prison-like practices are not unique to Mexico. They characterise migration detention spaces around the world, including in the US, Italy, and Greece (Cheliotis 2013; Esposito et al. 2019; Martin 2012). As a result, and as argued elsewhere (Campos-Delgado 2021), they should be examined not as a structural deficiency of the MTCR, but as crucial to understanding how control, deterrence, and punishment are interweaved in the government of migration. However, given the humanitarian programme to which they must adhere, border agents are also asked to care for migrants amid such dire conditions.

Externalised Borderwork as Contract Work

While, as underscored by Andersson (2018), employment is an aspect of the ‘bioeconomy of containment’ and of a growing migration industry, profit-making in border externalisation is also rendered possible by the transfer of responsibility for borderwork to transit countries and by the related extraction of labour carried out by these countries’ non-unionised, underpaid, and vulnerable workers. Mexican migration officers are ‘precarious workers’ (Campbell and Price 2016). They are paid low wages,⁶ have little control over hours and working conditions, and suffer from marked employment insecurity. For instance, during 2020, 51% of INM’s field agents (agentes de protección al migrante and agentes federales de migración) were hired on three-month contracts, that is, under so-called plazas interinas (INM-FoI 2021). Furthermore, it is noteworthy that, as our interviewees stressed, this labour insecurity is not exclusive to first-line officials, but extends to mid-level managers as well. This not only provides valuable background information that problematises the taken-for-granted corruption of Mexican border officers; but italso sheds light on the pressures experienced by borderworkers to control and care for migrants.

Although their working conditions are regulated under the Federal Law of Workers in Service of the State, interviewees often describe their workdays as exceeding the mandatory eight hours. Additional hours are not remunerated. Shifts of 12 hours of work followed by a 12-hour rest period, or of 24 hours followed by 48 hours rest, are rarely respected. Agents may be required to participate, during their rest time, in lengthy enforcement activities, such as operations to detect and apprehend migrants, transport detained migrants to other facilities, or join deportation procedures. Due to the shortage of human resources and regardless of the official appointment, all agents, even office workers, participate in policing actions.

These conditions hinder officers from providing care to migrants in their custody and are likely to overwhelm their empathic abilities. Sara, an officer, admits losing patience after 12-hour shifts:

It is what happens after so many hours of work, that you start to get angry, it may be that you like your work, but you say: “ENOUGH!” It is as if you reached a limit. I like to attend to foreigners, but after 12 hours, how can they expect us not to talk to them loudly and say: “ENOUGH! PLEASE, STAY STILL!” […] I have seen colleagues explode. Many ask them: “How do you talk to them like that?”, and [they reply]: “Take care of them for 14 hours and let’s see if you can keep calm” The fact is that the officer has not slept, has not eaten. He probably could not use the toilet calmly. Of course, he is stressed! And what can you do if there is no one to send help? He must take care of all and that’s it. There is no way to tell him: “If you want, I’ll do your job.” No. Nobody is going to do it. Hardly anyone is going to say: “If you want, go take a nap and I’ll help you.”

Border officers’ interactions with migrants are thus influenced by the overcrowding and poor conditions in detention facilities, but also by their own labour instability and limited professional recognition. This institutional setting both limits and channels gestures of care and empathy in Mexican migrant detention. As noted by Turgoose et al. (2017), policing actors are less likely to burn out when they rely on empathy. Studies involving border and migration officers have also revealed that emotional labour is a dominant aspect of borderwork, as officers attempt to reconcile themselves with their job’s moral ambiguity (Rivera 2015; Vega 2018). Yet our research shows that, in addition to these coping and self-redeeming strategies, Mexican border agents use empathy pragmatically in order to minimise the most burdensome aspects of their work. By doing so, they effectively instrumentalise empathy.

Tactics of Empathy: the Intimate Geopolitics of Care-Control

Studies on humanitarian bordering have questioned whether we can rely on frontline borderworkers to convey empathy to migrants, as well as explored the ways in which border institutions depend on or limit such displays of emotions, and the impact that this may have on the full political recognition of migrants and their rights by border bureaucracies (Gill 2016; Mountz 2010). In this section, we intervene in this scholarship by investigating how, in a context of scarcity, the MTCR becomes embedded in the practices and obligations of overworked officers, revealing the complex and convoluted daily realities of the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork and the limits of envisioning empathy in borderwork through a pure ethics of care lens.

The three tactics examined below are expressions of the fine-grained instrumental and moral interplay shaping migrant-officer relationships in a context where minimalist care has been pronounced vital to border control. We thus mobilise here a particular understanding of the ‘global intimate’ (Wilson 2012), as we are interested in how care and empathy can be relied upon as tools to control, monitor, and discipline migrants under custody, as well as in how these tools are sharpened by the geopolitical, financial, and organisational realities of transit migration control.

Tactic 1: Saving Migrants from Gringos and Coyotes: Blame Avoidance and Blame-Shifting through Salvationist Rhetoric

Despite the violence experienced by migrants on their journeys to and through Mexico, research participants are convinced that their work ‘saves’ migrants from a certain death … in the United States. Such salvationist rhetoric insists on the necessity of bordering as a response to the risks and dangers migrants face en route. Carlos admits: ‘Yes, you are sensitive, but you have to do your job because you have to apprehend him, and [if you don’t do that] maybe that person can die in the desert.’ Eugenia mentions experiencing a similar dilemma when she apprehends migrants: ‘Yes, it is very difficult. They start crying there, “please let us go” or children [say] “my parents live there” [in the US]. Yes, it is complicated, but in the end you make them understand that it is our job and that they do not know that there are too many risks on the way, and that, yes, we are protecting them’. Similarly, Sara recounts how her co-workers guide her through the moral dilemma of apprehension: ‘they tell me: “you have to think about what could have happened if we hadn’t apprehended them, if the truck had crashed, or if the smuggler had sold the women”’; in the end Sara buys into the salvationist rhetoric, ‘and they are right, we are saving them from harm or potential dangers’.

Mexican border agents’ salvationist rhetoric also demonises human smugglers as traffickers, relying on a simplification of their role in the industry of border crossing facilitation.⁷ Talking about migrants’ lack of awareness of travel distances in Mexico, Jacinto reflects on what he sees as migrants’ scarce initiative in gathering intel prior to undertaking their journey: ‘I always tell them that they don’t know the geography [of Mexico] and that they come without prior knowledge, they don’t investigate. [Once their journey begins] they don’t know where they went, nothing, they do what their guide [smuggler] says: Go up, go down, walk. I always tell them that they pay so much and they don’t demand, they never ask, they don’t know which route to take, nothing’. Interviewees convey images of commodified women, hazardous transportation conditions, and ruthless criminal organisations. Like Jacinto, they deploy the reductionist angle of a patronising empathy that portrays migrants as passive agents at the mercy of a violent border crossing facilitation industry.

Evoking Gringos or Coyotes, border officers carry out blame-shifting and blame avoidance. The displacement of blame, which is a crucial aspect of humanitarian borderwork, helps shape their self-representation as rescuers. If legitimation rhetoric has been shown to characterise US migration control and detention (Vega 2018), unpacking the self-justification strategies of Mexican border officials gives us valuable hints about the production of salvationist rhetoric that is specifically anchored in the reality of transit country bordering. Of course, some tropes remain constant. In such rhetoric, migrants always die elsewhere – i.e. at the hardened borders of rich states – and as a result of the actions of others – i.e. smugglers. In this sense, the depiction of border deaths as happening beyond the national territory and as a result of malevolent smugglers is a powerful trope, which allows Eugenia, Carlos, and their colleagues to underplay, or even deny the part they play in making migrants vulnerable, and reframe their actions as assistance and care.

What about responsibility, one may ask? By relying on a salvationist rhetoric, do border officers become the embodiment of the MTCR, or are they better understood as simple employees who are, effectively, puppets of this regime? The answer to this question is not simple. On the one hand, the context in which salvationist rhetoric is deployed matters. We may recall Carlos’ ambivalence when he ‘takes off his uniform’ and his feeling that he is in fact doing borderwork for the United States. Whereas in destination countries, rescue talk is articulated with suspicion and is attached to efforts to protect the sovereignty of these states, in Carlos, Eugenia, and Sara’s narrative, there is no connection between ‘migrant safety’ and ‘greater border security’ (Williams 2016, 27). Mexican borderworkers do not justify migrant detention by insisting that the state protects its own citizens from irregular migration. Instead, the humanitarian tropes they evoke paint Mexican border control agents as rescuers, saving migrants from the harms brought about by US border control and by smugglers, thus effectively exonerating Mexican authorities from their responsibility in generating the conditions for migrant vulnerability.

Building on Bauman and Herzfeld, Gill (2016) argues that (border) bureaucracies mediate acts through means such as norms, paperwork, and institutional mechanisms that separate decision from action, establishing moral distancing between bureaucrats and those seen as socially undesirable, and denying a sense of responsibility towards them. In the Mexican case, however, the salvationist rhetoric made possible by humanitarian borderwork does speak to a sense of responsibility, however thwarted. Ultimately, rescue talk helps border agents evade moral questions about their connivance in migrant rights violations by virtue of being employed by this regime, while re-asserting a patronising preoccupation for migrants, portrayed as defenceless and devoid of agency. However, whether or not we conceive of Mexican border officers as ultimately responsible for the MTCR, may not be the crux of the matter. What is most important is that the MTCR makes them responsible for the care-control of migrants.

Tactic 2: institutional Cooptation of Care and Individualisation of Responsibility for Migration Control

Waiting is a ‘crucial feature of migrant (im)mobility’; it is ‘socially produced, imbued with geopolitics, and also actively encountered, incorporated and resisted amidst everyday spaces that migrants experience’ (Conlon 2011, 353, 355). We saw that, on average, migrants do not wait long while in detention in Mexico as they are processed quickly and deportations happen swiftly.⁸ Yet while they wait, migrants must be cared for, a task entrusted to border officers. As illustrated in two situations narrated by research participants and reviewed in this section, care practices in migrant detention are not only shrouded in a political economy of scarcity, but also instrumentalised by a regulatory framework that codifies the care and disciplining of migrants as officers’ individual obligation. The marriage of the individualisation of responsibility with a lack of resources paves the way for the institutional cooptation of officers’ care-control acts which, in turn, allows the INM to dodge accountability for conditions of detention and for the human rights violations that occur in carceral settings.

Official regulations hold officers responsible for ensuring detainees’ well-being. Article 9 of the INM’s Detention Centres Rules sets out this role: ‘It is the responsibility of public servants attached to the Migration Station, the custody, security, and surveillance of foreigners in Migration Stations and Temporary Stays Centres as well as preserving order, discipline, and harmonious coexistence. At all moments, they must safeguard the human rights of the detainees’. Overcrowding and boredom as migrants wait to be deported or released threaten this ‘harmonious coexistence’. As a result of their limited resources, but also of the protection of the privileges of market providers who are issued contracts by the INM, officers must negotiate between rule abidance and maintenance of order. For instance, as per article 49 of the same rules, they are prohibited from bringing inside anything that may alleviate detainees’ boredom, that can be provided by external contractors –such as snacks. Yet officers may decide to breach the rules to reduce migrants’ anxiety and boredom, as well as limit the possibility of discontent.

The following scene aptly illustrates this dilemma. A group of migrants had been detained for ten days in a facility and officers were looking for activities to keep them occupied. Fortunately, a Mexico vs. Honduras football game was scheduled to be broadcast on television. After checking with their immediate superiors, the officers on duty decided to bring in a TV and put the game on for detainees to watch. Then, officers used their own money to go shopping for chips and popcorn, bringing in pizzas and soft drinks for the detainees. Sometimes, officers say they also pitch in to buy cakes for migrants’ birthdays. Agents explain that even if this goes against regulations, they feel compelled to use their wages to provide some form of entertainment for detainees in situations where the precariousness of the facilities and lack of official provision of leisure activities for detainees jeopardises ‘preserving order, discipline and harmonious coexistence’.

Quandaries abound here. Officers are expected to preserve discipline in overcrowded detention centres, but are given little resources to do so. Because of the INM’s contractual obligations with private providers, officers are formally forbidden from bringing into the detention centre the tools, food, and games that might facilitate this endeavour. Faced with bored and potentially restless migrants, officers must tap into their creativity and provide distraction. Authorities turn a blind eye to such breaches of regulations because this kind of rule-breaking is essential to maintaining order and soften potential resistance on the part of migrants. If unrest arises, officers can then be blamed for failing to abide by regulations. National authorities can also pass onto officers both the monetary cost of such micro-order maintenance, and responsibility in the event of unrest, protests or escape attempts. As Anabel explains, this individualisation of responsibility is an intrinsic and normalised aspect of the day-to- day management of migrant detention: ‘Obviously, we know that when we have people detained in the migration station, if there is some kind of incident, if there is some kind of riot, or whatever, it is the responsibility of whoever is on duty’. Exploiting the emotional labour of border officers through their inclination towards care and their fear to lose their employment, the intimate geopolitics of humanitarian bordering allows the MTCR to shroud institutional accountability while legitimising its detention practices.

Such institutional cooptation of officers’ care acts is further illustrated in the following scenario. Even though the INM furnishes some bare essentials to migrants, such as hygiene products, other necessities are often paid for by agents out of their own pockets – this, despite their paltry wages. For instance, officers spoke up about buying sandals for detained migrant children who go barefoot. It would be a mistake to interpret this provision as pure compassion on the part of officers. In fact, there are significant incentives for border officers to provide such necessities. Sara asks: ‘So, how much money is she giving away and from her heart? In the end she also does it because it is her job; there is no way that she will say: “No! Children! There are no sandals here!” and let them go barefoot so that soon after the Human Rights National Commission [CNDH] arrives, and they file a complaint? She says: “Better I buy it for them”’. By providing for such needs, officers argue that they avoid potential blame stemming from human rights visits by the CNDH, which is known to file complaints in such cases.

There is no exclusion of moral concerns (Gill 2016, 40) by border officers in such instances, nor is there an ethics of care where institutions attend to migrants needs and acknowledge them as subjects with political claims of their own. Searching for a potential for compassion by border officers in such cases might also miss the mark, given the institutional setting, the regulations, the involvement of rights-monitoring agencies which shape migrant detention practices – and of course, the fact that migrant children are placed in custody in the first place. In contrast, care interventions in these migrant carceral spaces not only follow a logic of ‘improvement’ of detention conditions (Morris 2017); they also make this improvement the focus of intimate, soothing interventions geared towards taming migrant resistance to detention and deportation. Instances of empathy, such as the one described by Sara, are a product of an individualised accountability context where Mexican border officers are ‘made to care’ through a web of responsibilisation mechanisms that respond to disciplinary carceral logics and humanitarian border politics, geared towards alleviating just about enough of the precariousness of migrant detention to avoid public blame.

Tactic 3: (En)forced Commiseration

Mario speaks to how he wishes to be understood by the migrants under his custody: ‘We want them to understand us, that this is our job, and to understand that we can help them. All agents are trained to tell them that life doesn’t end, because sometimes they think their life ends here.’ Mario’s remarks yield a surprising finding. In providing emotional comfort to migrants, agents sometimes ask migrants to empathise with their situation. Officers are painfully aware of their damaged reputation in Mexico. For Anabel, their activities are tarnished by social discredit. She illustrates her point by narrating a situation that arose during a deportation operation by air in which she participated: ‘Once we were on a plane, a lady asked if the children [who were travelling with us] were going to be returned [to their home countries]. I answered yes, and [she started shouting] “Malditos, desalmados (Damned, ruthless)”’.

Bordering in a transit country brings out in novel ways the ‘moral and political contentiousness of their work’ for border officials (Vega 2018, 2547) who contend with recurrent dislike in their interactions with a public often sympathetic to the plight of migrants. Such contentiousness also arises when attempting to establish a bond with those they detain. In some cases, we found that it might not be that border guards sympathise with migrants, but migrants who are asked to feel empathy for their jailers’ low pay and working conditions, as well as comprehend their efforts to alleviate their poverty and that of their families.

In the following quote, Sara re-enacts a conversation she had with a group of Salvadorian migrants who questioned her decision to do such an ‘ugly job’. Sara details her reaction: ‘I once had to tell some ladies who asked me how I do this ugly job. I told them I do it for something very simple, that I also have daughters, that I came here and that the only job was this, and I had no choice but to take it because I have daughters to support. And although I don’t like detaining them, it is the only job available in my country, in no way will I not eat or not feed my daughters.’ Sara continues her explanation to these women using an imagined scenario: ‘For example, you arrive in the US, and they give you a job arresting Salvadorians. Wouldn’t you do it to make a living? (…) I tell them to think about it, none of us are bad, none of us like to do what we do, but it is the only thing there is, it is the only job, and they understand. Many times, it’s like playing with them or with their minds so they know that I don’t want to do this, but I have to do it.’

In this case, it is the instrumentalisation of empathy in Sara’s fantasy story that attracts our attention. As she confirmed later in her interview, Sara does not have children. Admittedly, her concocted tale of woes is not far-fetched, given what we know about the political economy of borderwork in Mexico. Yet, it is worth questioning if there is not a whitewashing intent underlying the fabricated life that Sara evokes in her interactions with detainees. Her narrative inserts itself in the deeply unequal relations between detained migrants and agents. As was the case with the Canadian officers studied by Côté-Boucher (2020), Sara underplays and trivialises in this exchange the importance of transit bordering configurations of power in which she is favourably placed. She underscores a presumed similarity in the materialities of everyday life, distancing herself from her role in enacting border externalisation through some of the most violent means put at the disposal of the state, namely detention and expulsion.

Further, Sara’s narrative does not only reinforce a sort of inevitability in the situation that led to this meeting of migrant and jailer. It also suggests commensurability between the set of circumstances that compelled these migrant women to leave El Salvador, and those that required Sara to accept a job as a border agent. It is not a coincidence that in this example an officer interacts with a migrant by relying on a gendered story that mobilises the responsibilities that come with maternity. Sara turned this exchange into an occasion to work on her interlocutors’ gendered affect, deploying concern and understanding as tools to pacify detainees and reduce challenges to her authority.

Enforced commiseration with officers’ imagined woes personalises border control, making putative similarities of condition a basis for generating compliance and shaping detainees into tamed subjects. As discussed by Cortez (2020) in the case of Latinx US Border Patrol officers, the promises of better treatment of migrants born out of their cultural proximity with border officers appear short-lived in Sara’s narrative – and perhaps even the assumption itself is essentialising. Mexican border officers also present situated attachments and varied ethnic identification with migrants. Despite this, officers may rely on concocted connections to ensure the governability of detained migrants. This tactic of empathy appears to be particularly effective, in that it taps into socio-cultural connections and putatively shared strained economic circumstances.

In short, empathy in Mexican migrant detention works as a resource to subdue morally demanding encounters into governable situations. Far from emphasising care acts that would recognise and resist the difficult conditions in which migrants are detained, the three tactics of empathy reviewed in this section suspend the ethical possibilities embedded in face-to-face interactions with migrants and thus transform such interactions into opportunities to tame detainees’ everyday resistance, as well as limit their rights and political demands.

Conclusion

As Walters (2011) - reminded us over a decade ago, borders take on many faces and trajectories. With border externalisation, destination countries have made border crossing more difficult and more dangerous. At the same time, the past decade has seen the emergence of a field populated by state and non-state actors dedicated to ‘rescuing’ migrants endangered by the very existence of borders. The humanitarian border, while anchored in a multi-layered securitising and penalising angle, wields care-control as a form of intervention and, thus, humanitarian gestures and discourses in bordering are steeped in moral distancing. This antagonistic and morally convoluted form of bordering is embodied by borderworkers. Given their extended security powers and surveillance tools, as well as the fact that the legal protections afforded to those they deal with are murky, border bureaucrats may end up being even more indifferent to the needs and suffering of others, and are empowered to exert even crueller forms of social control (Gill 2016; Mountz 2010).

In this article, we intervened in the conversation about the geopolitics of border externalisation and the ‘humanitarian borderscape’ (Pallister-Wilkins 2018) by exploring how care-control dynamics play out in Mexican transit bordering and migrant detention. Following the re-territorialisation of bordering in North America through the MTCR, we inquired into the emergence of new bordering forms, institutions, and practices. The intimate geopolitics of Mexican migrant detention are entangled with the effects of border externalisation policies on Mexico’s national politics, a humanitarian legitimising rhetoric, and a political economy of scarcity which is materialised in abysmal conditions on detention centres and dire working conditions for borderworkers.

Probing the contradictions and intimate character of care-control logics, we considered the caring-distancing relationships established by Mexican borderworkers with detained migrants and how modalities of rationed care and empathy are mobilised as tactics in daily detention situations. By examining these tactics of empathy, our research contributes to unravelling particular modes of ‘global intimacy’ (Wilson 2012, 32) produced by border regimes. We showed that humanitarianism in transit bordering produces tensions between proximity in daily interactions and the restrictions imposed by institutional distancing that are not entirely explained by a Bauman-inspired reading of bureaucratic indifference to suffering. In contrast, in a manner akin to Gill (2016, 8) in his study of detention in the UK, we found that transit bordering ‘is able to present a ‘softer side’ that actively encourages and enrols emotions such as care and empathy’ among border officers. A ‘softer side’ that is, nonetheless, integral to an intimate geopolitics of humanitarian borderwork that ‘rescues’ migrants and concurrently, culminates in their expulsion.

However, without ignoring the hierarchical and paternalistic grammar implicit in it, it is crucial to underline that the rationalisation and instrumentalisation of empathy allows borderworkers to navigate a precarious labour system and a system of accountability that holds them individually responsible. This revealed the MTRC’s accountability loopholes, which places institutional responsibility for the systemic incompetence in managing migrant populations on its exploited and precarious border officers. Hence, the standard for border humanitarianism embedded in border agents’ tactics does not respond to an actual compassionate stance, nor to a desire to promote political recognition of migrants as rights-bearing political subjects. Rather, it is a stance embedded in a security regime that is stretched to its limits.

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).

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.

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).