Executive Summary Anti-immigrant rhetoric and constricting avenues for asylum in the United States, amid continuing high rates of poverty, environmental crisis, and violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, have led many migrants from these countries to remain in Mexico. Yet despite opportunities for humanitarian relief in Mexico, since the early 2000s the Mexican government, under growing pressure from the United States, has pursued enforcement-first initiatives to stem northward migration from Central America. In July 2014, Mexico introduced the Southern Border Program (SBP) with support from the United States. The SBP dramatically expanded Mexico’s immigration enforcement efforts, especially in its southern border states, leading to rising deportations. Far from reducing migration or migrant smuggling, these policies have trapped migrants for longer in Mexico, made them increasingly susceptible to crimes by a wide range of state and nonstate actors, and exacerbated risk along the entire migrant trail. In recognition of rising crimes against migrants and heeding calls from civil society to protect migrant rights, Mexico’s 2011 revision to its Migration Law expanded legal avenues for granting humanitarian protection to migrants who are victims of crimes in Mexico, including the provision of a one-year humanitarian visa so that migrants can collaborate with the prosecutor’s office in the investigation of crimes committed against them. The new humanitarian visa laws were a significant achievement and represent a victory by civil society keen on protecting migrants as they travel through Mexico. The wider atmosphere of impunity, however, alongside the Mexican government’s prioritization of detaining and deporting migrants, facilitates abuses, obscures transparent accounting of crimes, and limits access to justice. In practice, the laws are not achieving their intended outcomes. They also fail to recognize how Mexico’s securitized migration policies subject migrants to risk throughout their journeys, including at border checkpoints between Guatemala and Honduras, along critical transit corridors in Guatemala, and on the Guatemalan side of Mexico’s southern border. In this article, we examine a novel set of data from migrant shelters — 16 qualitative interviews with migrants and nine with staff and advocates in the Mexico–Guatemala border region, as well as 118 complaints of abuses committed along migrants’ journeys — informally filed by migrants at a shelter on the Guatemalan side of the border, and an additional eight complaints filed at a shelter on the Mexican side of the border. We document and analyze the nature, location, and perpetrators of these alleged abuses, using a framework of “compassionate repression” (Fassin 2012) to examine the obstacles that migrants encounter in denouncing abuses and seeking protection. We contend that while humanitarian visas can provide necessary protection for abuses committed in Mexico, they are limited by their temporary nature, by being nested within a migration system that prioritizes migrant removal, and because they recognize only crimes that occur in Mexico. The paradox between humanitarian concerns and repressive migration governance in a context of high impunity shapes institutional and practical obstacles to reporting crimes, receiving visas, and accessing justice. In this context, a variety of actors recognize that they can exploit and profit from migrants’ lack of mobility, legal vulnerability, and uncertain access to protection, leading to a commodification of access to humanitarian protection along the route.

No abstract

As insecurity in Central America persists and avenues for asylum in the U.S. constrict, migrants are exploring options in Mexico—to seek humanitarian relief or to bide time as they consider whether to continue north, settle, or return. Based on interviews with migrants and shelter staff at the Mexico‐Guatemala border in the summer of 2017, this article applies contingency logics (Bledsoe 2002) to analyze how proximate social ties, accumulated experiences, and harsh ordeals inform how migrants make decisions, change their minds, and re‐envision destinations amid uncertainty. Complicating tensions between mobility/immobility and settlement/transit, we demonstrate how decisions to settle, seek protection, or wait in Mexico may be socially understood as fostering migrants’ larger goals to continue their journeys and pursue their migratory aspirations. However, given Mexico's expanding deportation apparatus and the unpredictability of options in Mexico, such forms of waiting also risk consigning migrants to indeterminate waiting, vulnerability, and entrapment.

Historically in the United States, periods of large-scale immigration have been accompanied by perceptions of threat and stereotypes of the feared criminality of immigrants. A century ago major commissions investigated the connection of immigration to crime; each found lower levels of criminal involvement among the foreign-born. The present period echoes that past. Over the past quarter century, alarms have been raised about large-scale immigration, and especially about undocumented immigrants from Latin America. But over the same period, violent crime and property crime rates have been cut in half; the decline in crime has been more pronounced in cities with larger shares of immigrants; and foreign-born young men are much less likely to be incarcerated than natives. The evidence demonstrating lower levels of criminal involvement among immigrants is supported by a growing number of contemporary studies. At the same time the period has been marked by the criminalization of immigration itself, and by the confluence of immigration and criminal law and enforcement apparatuses. A series of critical events succeeded by moral panics influenced the passage of hyper-restrictive laws and a massive injection of institutional resources that has built the "crimmigration" enforcement apparatus into the "formidable machinery" underpinning mass deportation today. He was awarded the CSU Board of Trustees Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, an accolade given to one student from each CSU campus annually. He is a member of Project Rebound, a university support program by and for formerly incarcerated students, and plans to attend law school upon graduation.

The United States deported 24,870 women in 2013, mostly to Latin America. We examine life history interviews with Mexican and Central American women who were apprehended, detained, and experienced different outcomes. We find that norms of the "crimmigration era" override humanitarian concerns, such that the state treats migrants as criminals first and as persons with claims for relief second. Removal and relief decisions appear less dependent on eligibility than geography, access to legal aid, and public support. Women's experiences parallel men's but are often worsened by their gendered statuses. Far from passively accepting the violence of crimmigration, women resist through discourse and activism.