UCLA

Ample research across the social sciences have unraveled the varying dimensions of state violence embedded in immigration enforcement policies, whether in the interior of the United States, detention centers, or at the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Political scientists have focused on the top-down politics of enforcement practices and the impacts on immigrant political behavior, health, and inclusion. Yet, often overlooked is the reality that borders are meant to be crossed. There are 50 land ports of entry along the Mexico-U.S. border through which thousands of individuals travel from Mexico to the U.S. on a regular, sometimes daily basis. At these ports of entry, the U.S. government amplifies the power of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, who are given discretionary power to subjectively determine admissibility of border entrants. Additionally, some civil liberties do not fully apply at the border and racial profiling is a legalized enforcement practice. While scholars across the social sciences have examined the detrimental effects of infrequent, yet highly violent contact with immigration enforcement officers, what happens when such violence is a mundane part of everyday life in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands? What are the effects of normalized border violence on the livelihoods of individuals that depend on crossing the southern border? This dissertation explores the impacts of routine state violence at land ports of entry along the Mexico-U.S. border on the livelihoods of transborder commuters, who are residents of Mexican border cities but have legal documentation to regularly cross the border for work, education, commerce, and other activities. Transborder commuters are not immigrants in the traditional sense; they are a highly mobile population that includes U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and Mexican nationals with visas that depend on crossing the border for multiple reasons. Through three empirical papers, I analyze how routinized violence affects transborder commuters’ mental health, their ability to file complaints after enduring mistreatment from CBP, and practices of citizenship. Although each paper focuses on a specific outcome, the findings reveal how the normalcy of violence at the border leads to minimization of suffering, stigma, and disenfranchisement from rights accessibility. Thus, the dissertation reveals that when violence is normalized through a carceral institution, there is an impossibility of democracy. The findings of the dissertation make contributions to migration and policing literatures by showing that the detrimental effects of border enforcement that go beyond targeted populations, such as undocumented immigrants and their families. Specifically, the consequences of state violence are also experienced by people that have documentation to enter the U.S. through land ports, including U.S. citizens. Additionally, the findings demonstrate the multi-dimensional ways violence is experienced and normalized by individuals who have regular contact with the state at the border. At the core, the dissertation strives to unravel how mundane policing leads to the silencing of suffering experienced by individuals who regularly cross the Mexico-U.S. border.