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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Graduate College

Grantor dc:publisher

The University of Arizona.

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Slack, Jeremy M.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Oglesby, Elizabeth

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Oglesby, Elizabeth
• Banister, Jeffrey
• Marston, Sallie
• Whiteford, Scott

• Drugs
• Mexico
• Migration
• Political geography
• Violence
• Geography
• Border

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10150/556876

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.arizona.edu:10150/556876