Drugs and Deportation on the Border: Post-Deportation Geographies of Enforcement and Conflict
This dissertation explores the ways that immigration and border enforcement regimes have shifted deportees' relationships to violence in border cities. By taking a feminist geopolitical perspective, I use first hand accounts of deportation to interrogate the complex connections between space and violence. What are U.S. authorities causing along the border through their escalated enforcement practices? How do organized crime, drug trafficking and migration intersect in border spaces? How do people react to being dropped off in unfamiliar and often dangerous border towns? The three articles that comprise this dissertation follow these questions. The first explores the newly anointed consequence delivery system (CDS), an enforcement program designed to deliver ever-increasing punishments to immigration offenders. The second article traces migrants' experiences with drug trafficking while crossing the border, showing how spatial overlap and other enforcement mechanisms have pushed these two activities into largely shared terrain. The third article addresses migrant kidnapping and the different purposes that it serves for transnational criminal organizations. Through ethnographic work, combined with in-depth surveys, this dissertation provides new analysis about the intersections of drug violence and migration along the border. For the conclusion I discuss the need to expand the nascent literature on deportation studies, and focus squarely on the post-deportation impacts–namely, what does deportation cause? How does it harm people and families in the days, weeks, months and years following removal? This is at the core of studies on deportation, since little is really known about what it means to be deported, and what this system of mass removal is doing to hundreds of thousands of individuals each year.
Drugs, Mexico, Migration, Political geography, Violence, Geography, Border
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations