Expelled: The Politics of Exclusion and Spaces of Exception at the US-Mexico Border

Keywords: immigration, asylum, borders, spaces of exception, im/mobility
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 46

Abstract

Beginning with the Obama and intensifying under the Trump Administration, the U.S. has adopted policies aimed at blocking migrants’ ability to seek asylum in the United States. Initial enthusiasm for the Biden administration’s new approach has stalled among immigrant advocates as government policies have changed, processes have slowed, and the will to meet the arrival of tens of thousands of asylum seekers with a humanitarian response has diminished. The United States has increasingly used administrative and legal measures to expel asylum seekers and keep them outside of its territory while targeting those who arrive with detention and rapid return to transit countries or regions of origin. The policy shift from detention and deportation to expulsion in the US asylum system in combination with Mexico’s resistance to provide refuge to migrants has created what Giorgio Agamben refers to as “spaces of exception” in the form of make-shift asylum seeker camps along the US-Mexico border. This paper uses ethnographic research conducted in 2020-21 to examine spatial practices of mobility and immobility producing spaces of waiting in Matamoros, Mexico as a way to understand the workings of legal regimes of exclusion, the spaces they produce, and how victims of this violence use im/mobility as acts of resiliency and contestation.