UC San Diego

In late October of 2018, the Department of Homeland Security’s sudden termination of its program, where ICE would “transport the traveling asylum seekers directly to the departure points for their prearranged mode of transportation […] facilitating an orderly release process.” (Rosenburg 2018). DHS officials initially cited partnerships with local governments and NGOs to facilitate this transition; however, a total lack of communication left these organizations scrambling to shelter migrant families while ‘filling the gap’ created by this rescission of the state. In doing so, they knowingly fomented an optics of discord at the border by releasing asylum-seeking families onto the streets while rejecting blame or responsibility by justifying their actions within the language of humanitarian concern (Fassin 2011).

Taking the subsequent emergence of an asylum-seeker’s health screening program as its point of departure, this thesis situates medical humanitarians’ experiences of response and caregiving within a political ethos (Jenkins 2015) of xenophobia manifested in the federal dismantling of the government’s asylum system. This paper mediates cultural phenomenology, literature on citizenship and the state, and ethnographies of transit migration to reformulate a geographically and experientially salient theory of moral wayfaring (Heinemann 2015) within this clinic’s context. Through interviews with the clinicians who helped found this novel health screening program, moral wayfaring facilitates critical examination of medical humanitarians’ challenges addressing the struggles, trauma, and wellbeing of their clients. As such, I investigate the relationship between governance and care at the processual (and exceedingly liminal) threshold between migrant detention and asylum-seeker’s resettlement.