UC San Diego

Prevention Through Deterrence is a Customs and Border Patrol immigration policy that focuses on weaponizing the natural landscapes of the southern border in order to prevent migration by “funneling” migrants into “hostile terrain” meant to injure and kill (U.S. Customs and Border Patrol 1994). The stated goal of this policy is not only to prevent migration through deaths in hostile terrain like deserts and bodies of water, but to prevent migration through fear of the hostile terrain that must be traversed, and the inevitable risk. While Prevention Through Deterrence is an immigration enforcement policy that is literally about weaponizing the physical landscape, this philosophical approach to preventing immigration plays out in many contexts in U.S. immigration and asylum processes, including in bureaucratic and administrative contexts. I examine additional ways in which migrants’ entry to the United States and migrants' rights to live are prevented by the U.S. immigration regime through forms of systematic deterrence that weaponize fear and death, as well as temporality and opacity. Specifically, the Employment Authorization Document asylum time clock is a site to consider the bureaucratic extension of the philosophy and practice of Prevention Through Deterrence. I argue the Employment Authorization Document time clock is an intentional deterrence to residency and to life, playing out in conceptual and in corporeal ways in the lives and bodies of asylum seekers. What do these bodies and the violence they endure tell us about the culture of the U.S. immigration regime? In critically analyzing the culture of this regime I examine that which is structurally fundamental to the functioning of such a system, including xenophobia, racism, fear, and violence.