Skip to main content

Waiting at the Border

Transcript

Abby Wheatley  00:00

But even within that there are sort of these various spaces of waiting, right because you've been walking, walking, walking, and then you're you're waiting crammed in, in a holding center with 40, 50, 100 people, right? With no social distancing or any kind of health measures, and then you're transported in a bus or a van back to the border and then you sort of have to wait on the bus as people disembark the bus, go slowly, you cross you physically cross back walking. Some people go through Mexican migration and other people are just literally walked right back across the border.

Eleanor Paynter  00:38

Welcome to Migrations: A World on the Move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's Migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, postdoctoral associate in migrations and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. This season, we're thinking about waiting, recognizing experiences of limbo, uncertainty, and delay as really core to understanding the dynamics of migration. As we'll hear throughout this season, waiting in border spaces is anything but passive.

For many of our guests, conversations about waiting are a chance to reflect in slightly different ways about their work on migration. We're so used to focusing on how people move, why they move, where they move, but border crossing is also shaped by periods of delay and anticipation. And in this season, we want to know: What about when people can't move? In this first episode, we turn to the U.S.-Mexico border, in conversation with three experts who have spent time with people stuck waiting to enter the U.S., with people living in detention, and with organizations that recover the dead. Our conversation returns repeatedly to Title 42, a policy that allows the government to keep people out during health emergencies. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have used Title 42 to expel asylum seekers and prevent them from entering the U.S. Waiting also shapes the borderlands well beyond the immediate experiences of possible crossing or apprehension. And our conversation moves from laws and policies that create prolonged situations of waiting to how people in transit navigate periods of limbo.

We also talk about how experiences of urgency and delay shape the borderlands themselves as people risk their lives to reach the U.S. I speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Molly O'Toole, who's Cornell's fall 2021 Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist Fellow, and with Dr. Abby Wheatley and Dr. Gabriella Soto, anthropologists based at Arizona State University, who both work along the U.S.-Mexico border. Our conversation draws on practices of journalism, ethnography, and forms of activism and humanitarian work in the borderlands.

I'm really excited to have the three of you here today, Molly O'Toole, Dr. Gabriella Soto, and Dr. Abby Wheatley. And I'll start by just saying, I think you're each doing really critical work to document and understand key migration issues. And I'm really glad to have you in conversation because you bring these different perspectives from journalism, ethnographic research, work with border communities. So I'm just really excited to get a chance to put all of this in conversation with you and think about waiting. And I'll start by asking you each to introduce yourself and say a little bit about how your work is situated in connection with the U.S.-Mexico border, or maybe larger migration issues. And I'll start with Gabriella.

Gabriella Soto  03:51

Well, I'm Gabriella Soto. I'm working at ASU, right now, with with Dr. Abby Wheatley, we're actually colleagues, and I'm thrilled to be having this conversation together. Because Abby and I are always talking about how our work interconnects because it's different and yet it intersects in ways that I find really compelling. Um, so I, I have two projects, and one is sort of the material culture approach using the framework of materiality. So how do, kind of archaeologically informs but like, how do people and things intersect? And it's a big question on the border, because you have infrastructure, you have the simple supplies that people bring with them, you know, the humanitarian infrastructure as well.

So there's all of these, when you have the terrain, of course. So there's all these kinds of different intersecting materiality that then also intersect with questions of, of heritage making and memory and decay, the perception of decay or danger. And then connected to that is also the materiality of bodies and the analysis of evidence for death investigation. And so you can see they're, they're intersecting. Obviously, the concept of materiality also includes the corporeal, but I always hesitate to be too like philosophical, when we're talking about human lives and deaths, but corpses are the materiality of, of human bodies is, is a, a rich point of study within the materiality community I'd say, because human bodies are both, you know, alive, they're not just objects. But after death, they are also objects that are subject to that, or, you know, inert right.

And so balancing that sort of dynamic of being alive and not alive also applies to other aspects of materiality as well. And I think, you know, in some ways, bodies are treated as objects, and in other ways, realizing that they have sort of this uncanny liminal subjectivity is also I think, maybe important for hoping that communities do more in acknowledging the deaths that occur on our border, but also the haunting aspects of the spaces where so many people die.

Eleanor Paynter  06:30

Thanks. You're already, you know, in what you say, you're highlighting questions that I associate with these, the temporal aspects of migration. So what you said about liminality, but also decay, thinking about danger as maybe involving a different sense of time. So the question of urgency versus, you know, sort of  longer or slower questions of how migration is experienced. And I'd love to come back to the question of the materiality of the border spaces. How about Molly?

Molly O'Toole  07:04

So I'm obviously a journalist at the LA Times, and I cover immigration and security, which have sort of two areas where there's a lot of overlap, but they've been sort of forced together for often political and the idea of security and the idea of immigration. That hasn't always led me to the U.S.-Mexico border, but often has. That space, I feel like is it obviously it's a physical space and a haunting physical space as you made reference to. But it's also, it takes up this sort of emotional psychological space in the American mind, in our discourse in our politics, um, so I found myself there a lot in reporting.

I was just thinking about the concept of waiting and the sort of theme that we're talking about. And I really do feel that especially in the last four or five years, that's essentially been my beat. It hasn't really been immigration or security, it's been waiting. It's been covering people who are waiting, who are stuck, who are in limbo, who are trapped, who, you know, at various points along the routes, but especially along the U.S.-Mexico border, you know, these border towns that have been rendered essentially sort of international waiting rooms, by U.S. policy as a direct result and intended consequence of U.S. policy. Um so, there's so much more to talk about, but I, I'll, probably, I'll probably leave it there. But if anything over, especially in in sort of the last the last two years, especially and specific policies that create, have created this sort of purgatory for migrants on the U.S., on the U.S.-Mexico border, or just over on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, which I think is really important to point out, because there's this sort of idea that as soon as people are on the other, quote unquote, other side talking from the U.S. perspective, it's it's almost as if they disappear. We don't see them anymore.

Eleanor Paynter  09:32

Thanks, and you, again, you're adding to the sort of list of associations, the idea of stuckness or being trapped. And I'm interested in the role that policy plays in creating experiences of waiting, forced waiting. Be interesting to come back and think about how we might resist that or talk back to that process. And also you mentioned that you're not focused only on the U.S.-Mexico border and I should have said that at the beginning about, you know, all three of you have work that applies, you know, much more broadly. And I know Molly, you and Abby also have both worked on the other side of the Atlantic, too, so I'll turn to Abby now.

Abby Wheatley  10:19

Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. My name is Abby Wheatley. I am an honors faculty fellow at Barrett, the honors college at Arizona State University where Gabriella and I are colleagues. But I also wanted to mention that Gabriella and I have known each other for about 12 years, and we actually met on the migrant trail, I think in 2013. And the migrant trail is a it's a walk, a solidarity walk from Sasabe, Sonora, Mexico back to Tucson, Arizona, that folks have been doing. I think we're about year 17, when a group of people from Tucson mostly decided to walk every year to visibilize, the deaths in the desert until the death stopped.

And we were just kind of commenting yesterday, you know, that we're, it's been many, many years and the deaths haven't stopped, unfortunately, and people are still walking. And people are still really committed to I think doing that walk every year to visibilize, you know, that tragedy, that ongoing tragedy, and that that's a space, I think that kind of brings in both memorializing folks who have died, but also the urgency is about people who are crossing now, right, and preventing those deaths that are very much preventable. So I'm a cultural anthropologist, and my work spans two regions, the U.S.-Mexico and E.U.-Africa borders. Specifically, I work on the Arizona-Sonora border and in Lampedusa, Italy, and I spent a lot more time on the U.S.-Mexico border, and only recently sort of extended my work to Lampedusa, thinking about, you know, the, these patterns across different spaces.

So it's less a comparative approach and more thinking about how vulnerable people in transit navigate extended and weaponized borderscapes in both places. And I view myself as, something I tell my students is I'm not a border scholar or border researcher, I'm interested in mobility, right, I'm really interested in how people navigate and actually managed to cross the border, and in spite of all of the restrictions, right, and enforcement measures, and really keen on not giving the border too much power, although we know that it is, you know, certainly impeding the mobility and movement of lots and lots of people. Yeah, and thanks for having me.

Gabriella Soto  12:52

Something Abby and I were talking about as well, sorry to jump in, um, was the fact that it's been 17 years, and all of the I mean, I say in a sweeping way, but I think it is true, and it's a superlative statement. Um, all of the organizations with whom we work are like, you know, we thought we would be here for just a few years, because obviously, like these deaths have been such a spike like we thought something would change. Um, and you know, it's an ongoing dialogue that people have and it, I think it promotes a sense too of like the border, even for the people who are not crossing. Like the fact that it's kind of this elevated state of emergency, this created state of emergency, um, you know, puts the people that are trying to counteract or respond to those policies in a state of limbo or state of like always catching up, because I think I think it's finally in the last few years that we're really, like the infrastructure of humanitarian aid across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Well, and maybe this isn't true either, there's really like deepened with this sense of like, we're here for the long haul now. As opposed to, you know, this is a temporary patchwork measure. But what also happens on the border is that policies change so rapidly. So, you know, they're always in a state of catch up, like when the Border Patrol started leaving families at, you know, Greyhound bus stations. Um, it was like, alright, we have to respond to that now, like, what are we going to do here? How do we, how do we change or like, you know, react to this policy? How do we react to the fact that there's more people on the border now? How do we react to the fact that people are, like, under this weird like Title 42 regulation like coming and going so much faster and in greater numbers? Um, so even though there's like the capacity of time for deep planning, the fact that things are always changing at the border as an inflection point, means that you know, everybody's still kind of like, you know, the time is short and extended at the same time.

Eleanor Paynter  15:05

I wonder if it's useful to sort of step back and think then about this context that you're describing as in flux at many different levels in different paces. But I'm also curious, maybe, first, I would ask, if you and Molly maybe would be willing to say a little bit about how you think about policy in the context of what you were just describing. So the fact that policy is rapidly changing, what does that really look like? So what kinds of things have changed specifically?

Molly O'Toole  15:36

Sure. I mean, I think it it, it adds to this idea of waiting, but purgatory of limbo of, of sort of being trapped in time being incredibly urgent and sort of endless emergency, endless crisis, you know, manufactured and not. But also just perpetual, endless, infinite. And so I think of the last few years. And it's whiplash, it's whiplash for migrants, it's whiplash for people who work with migrants, it's whiplash for, you know, legal service providers, humanitarian workers, shelter operators. It's whiplash for everyone, because it's just changing so quickly, all the time. And then, of course, they're the things that never change.

But the the change, in terms of the changing all the time, a few specific things that I would point to, I mean, you had essentially for the first time under the Trump administration. I mean, of course, you had what I think a lot of people sort of latched on to being family separation, and just I think there was a fundamental sort of understanding of the cruelty of that policy. Even though that policy had been in effect in one way or another, not just under the Trump administration, this sort of idea that children must be separated from family members, relatives, you know, close friends, guardians, for their own safety, and it was going to be the U.S. government that would decide what that relationship was, but with Remain in Mexico. And I won't use "Migrant Protection Protocols," despite that being the sort of, quote unquote, official name that the U.S. government uses, because it's such a contradiction in terms. You know, you had really for the first time, people being pushed back, asylum seekers being pushed back to Mexico in significant numbers, rather than being allowed to wait out there proceedings in the United States. And that, you know, 70,000 people and more than 70,000 people in a very short period of time, and sort of just being rolled out without any warning, not even to the people who are part of the US government who are supposed to be implementing this policy, just sort of like that.

So the Remain in Mexico policy is one of those that I think created a lot of uncertainty, instability at the border, and really put people into this really dangerous sort of waiting game. And then of course, with the pandemic, or under the pretense of the pandemic, you have Title 42, which you just made reference to referring to that sort of obscure public health law, World War Two era has never been used in this way before. But according to the Trump administration, and actually, in a way that's being continued to be argued by the Biden administration, that somehow the presence of the pandemic, despite the US often being the sort of epicenter, justified not even applying asylum law or going through the motions of applying asylum law, and turning people back to Mexico, regardless of where they were from, regardless of whatever their claims may have been, regardless of whether or not there was any public health issue. And that's without even a court hearing, or any sort of ostensible access in the future to making a claim in US, US immigration courts. So those are just a few specific policies that have just really fundamentally and very quickly and rapidly changed and created this idea of whiplash. And Title 42, it's now a million. I think it's about a million people or or people who have been subjected to this policy multiple times, but a million sort of quote unquote turn backs in, you know, a year and a half not even.

Eleanor Paynter  19:41

That's really helpful to hear fleshed out also because it draws attention to how I think you said under the pretense of the pandemic, for example, with Title 42 and then with these other policies under the pretense of security, or, you know, through framings that position migrants as only in terms of problems or as potential threats. What ends up happening is that those people who are coming, you know, to try to have a better life and seek protection end up being put in these extended situations of limbo, can we hear a little bit about then these spaces of waiting?

Abby Wheatley  20:25

So I mean, I want to talk about the literal waiting and, and maybe just tell a couple, you know,  vignettes or ethnographies of sort of people waiting at the border right now and what it looks like. And then I also want to, you know, make a disclaimer that I've only had the opportunity to go to Agua Prieta twice in the last, I've gone twice in the last two months, and spent about four or five days there. So really brief, not a lot of time. But this work builds on my dissertation research that I did, and I was on the border for, you know, over a year between 2012 and 2013. And then working also in Tucson and Oaxaca. Beyond that sort of thinking about sort of these movements, and how these sort of different spaces fit together. But some of the things that really stand out, I think, kind of looking at what's happening now, as opposed to what was happening in 2013 is 1) that people that the waiting looks quite different, because people are being removed from the U.S. really quickly. So you know, it's, it's looks something like you crossed, I don't know at midnight, one night, and you walked for 10 hours with a group of 15 people that say and were apprehended by border patrol, maybe you spent a few hours at a border patrol holding center, sometimes it's unclear where people were, or, you know, you just got picked up and put in a van. And then very quickly repatriated to the U.S.-Mexico border.

But even within that there are sort of these various spaces of waiting, right, because you've been walking, walking, walking, and then you're waiting at the holding center. Also just to say, you know, all of this is happening under the guise of public health, you're waiting, crammed in, in a holding center with 40, 50, 100 people, right? With no social distancing, or any kind of health measures, and then you're transported in a bus or a van back to the border. And then you sort of have to wait on the bus as people, you know, leave the bus, disembark the bus, go slowly, you cross, you physically cross back walking – the same way that other people sort of cross the border from the U.S. into Mexico. Some people go this part's unclear, but some people go through Mexican migration and other people are just literally walked right back across the border. And this includes Central Americans, which never, you know, never happened in 2013, because Central Americans with they are removed from the US or removed to their countries of origin, right, not to the U.S.-Mexico border. Because in fact, it sort of prolongs the state of limbo, right? Are you going home? Are you going forward? Are you – what happens if you're stuck there? And that's where a lot of the human rights concerns really come in. And then the the Guatemalans or sometimes or other Central Americans may be moved to a detention center in Mexico like an Hermosillo, or they may wait for a few hours in Mexican migration and also be repatriated – removed right across the border.

And then when we see folks because I've been working at the Migrant Resource Center in Agua Prieta. Sometimes people come in for 15 minutes. And the sense of urgency, I think, after all of that kind of waiting, is I need to go now and lots of people are going to cross again, immediately meet up with their guides or coyotes immediately and try to cross again. And I think other people might stay longer, they might stay the whole afternoon, kind of thinking about what to do. Some folks if they are in bad shape, or they want to go home and stay at a shelter, and they will do that. Right. But just to say that, in the past, you know, people are being removed quite so quickly from the U.S. like that, that the sense of urgency to get moving again, wasn't so great, either. Right. And I think there's this precarious balance between moving and waiting. So when people are waiting for too long, and they're sort of stuck, you know, that it kind of lends itself to different human rights issues and abuses, kidnapping, extortion, etc. But also when people are on the move too quickly. I think that they don't have the time to regenerate resources that they really need to make successful crossings. Right. So there's a really precarious balance there.

Molly O'Toole  24:44

I think Title 42 has directly I mean, it's directly played into that and what you're what you're seeing, I mean, the CBP kind of brags that it takes them 90 minutes on average to process someone now under Title 42. Because like you said, ostensibly the argument is supposed to be, "Well, the reason we have to do this is to keep people out of congregate settings where this could, but of course, throughout the entire process, they're in congregate settings, they're waiting together, there are no precautions that are taken and but the fact that people are being turned around so quickly. And I think what that also creates a separate waiting space that I just wanted to really quickly or separate sort of limbo or purgatory.

In part, the speed with which we saw this under Remain in Mexico, but in part, the speed with which they're being turned around, is, in some ways, making them even more vulnerable to kidnapping. Because like you said, they don't necessarily have the resources, they're not re-grouping, and the kidnappers don't have to wait very long, just sort of, you know, they're turned around so quickly, I don't mean to laugh, because it's not funny. But you know, they're turned around so quickly, that they just sort of wait, and they'll sort of just be handed directly back to them in the ways in which they are crossing, but also, the ways in which they're being returned, are setting them up to be even more vulnerable to groups that can prey on them immediately after they return. And I think that that the end, and they're also in a very different waiting space in which they're waiting while their families are being extorted, and the families in the United States, relatives in the United States that are being extorted.

Eleanor Paynter  26:28

We're talking a lot about people's vulnerability and how they're put by policy and by different actions in positions of being made to wait. And I wonder how Abby I'm thinking about your work on politics of survival and questions of agency and migration? How do you recognize different forms of agencies? How are people exercising agency in these situations, despite the fact that, you know, we do need to recognize their vulnerability and recognize the violence of these policies? But how can we sort of reckon both with that, and the fact that they are, you know, social political actors moving across borders?

Abby Wheatley  27:15

That's a really difficult question. I think that you know, one of the, you think before the podcast you had mentioned the weaponization of time, and Gabriella, Gabriella and I talked about that a little bit, you know, and I think sort of the weaponization of time, is that, you know, you delay resources to people in transit, right, like, rescues don't come quick enough or in the borderlands, what happens a lot is that, and Gabriella can add to this, but that, you know, if you make a 911 call, it gets routed to the Border Patrol, and they may or may not respond, if you're a person in transit. The separation of families that Molly mentioned. The weaponization of the landscape, that, you know, means that it takes longer to cross, you know, a certain, you know, part of the territory. And all these things really extend the crossings, both spatially and temporally. And so I think in that contact, in that context, where people have sort of agency is where they can develop sort of resources in transit, or develop networks and strategies.

And I think, yeah, heightened vulnerability doesn't mean that people aren't doing that. It means it's hard to do that. But it means that it's necessary to do that in order to survive. Right? And I think one of the things was talking about with my students recently is that, yeah, maybe the moment that you're actually physically walking in the Arizona Sonora desert with a group of 15 people, and you're like, very dependent on your guide for where you're going, you have little agency, right, because you might not be able to sort of even return to where you came from. And I think even in that space, people have said, I refuse to go on, or I'm going to turn back or I'm going to call for help, or we're not going to leave this person behind, right? People do assert their agency even in that space. But maybe it's more useful to think about the transit points before that, where people sort of regenerate their resources. So I think, in some ways, and I sort of mentioned this before, but a certain amount of waiting can facilitate the reconstruction or regeneration of community resources. And it's certainly why the shelters and comedores and other dining halls are important because they do create the space sometimes for people to regenerate those resources among, among themselves. Right? But maybe Gabriella can talk a little bit more about I think, Texas and sort of lack of response in Texas, or on the border.

Gabriella Soto  29:55

Sure. Gosh, there's so much to unpack what all of you have said, I mean, it's interesting to the, you know, you mentioned the borders, as just a narrow sliver of space in the context of migrant journey, that, like we're thinking about it to like, like, like, you know, in the context of the 1,000 mile plus journeys that people make, like, why does the border matter so much. And it's just like this inflection point where, like, anything can happen. And maybe it's true of all the spaces. But I think especially when you do end up crossing this quarter, and it's, I mean, like, the weird thing about space and time, here thinking more like materially, but also in terms of rescues, as I look in the scheme of things, it's very small space. And in other ways, it's also an immense space. So rescues in the, like, the politics of rescue come down, like, you know, do you have an exact coordinate, and, you know, Mexican cell phones or Central Americans cell phones don't interact as well with U.S. cell towers, like U.S., and the location is like, you know, there's a windmill and a pump, and a gate and they're all close together, and we're in this, like, 26,000 square mile probable search area – Are we going to find that? It's almost ridiculous.

Um, but at the same time, you know, time, you know, there's the time, this long time of a migrant journey, when it comes to rescues and recovery, the difference of an hour or two hours or three hours or less than a day comes to be, you know, the difference between life and death. So there's this, this long interval of crossing and journey, waiting, and then life or death comes down to like, an hour, minute or day, I think. Well, I I've been a part of a group – a small part of a research team that analyzes the the uniquely rigorous counts and death data accumulated in Pima County, Arizona. It doesn't it like the counts of migrant deaths don't really exist with the same breaker in other places along the border. So so there's been an immense scholarship connected to Pima County to try to understand like the rates and trends of deaths over time, to better understand like how they're affected by policy. But what we found in Pima County, and this seems to be true across the borderlands is that the rate of death has spiked immensely during this, this pandemic. And it seems to be that because there's so many harder barriers along the border, that people are choosing to, you know, instead of declaring asylum, or trying to go through that process, and maybe they've tried and weren't able to get anywhere. They've decided to just trade across, I think there's, there's more people crossing, and there's more people making, like dangerous attempts, and it's a way to, like it is a way to, like, circumvent these, these policies, but it's also just one, clearly much more dangerous situations. And I think, to Abby's point to we know, you know, based on this, this rigorous data from Pima that since 2006.

So, you know, we first started recognizing the spike in migrant deaths in Arizona, because more and more deaths were occurring from exposure, and there was a spike that went from, you know, ten deaths per year to like, hundreds, in the course of, you know, just one or two years. And we so, the deaths were all from exposure, and now since 2006, and especially since 2013, most of the deaths are found after so much time, they, they're so decayed, or they're skeletonized. And there's no way to to determine how they died anymore. So the the main cause of death, at least in Pima that we know about is undetermined, which also speaks to the fact that people are crossing in much more remote areas. And I found that in other places along the border, because, you know, for each person who recovered the causes of deaths are presumed to be so similar so why pay, you know, for an autopsy, why pay for a forensic anthropologist which is extra right? Or an additional step, even beyond autopsy and all of these things in this is worth mentioning that we, we think in our conversations clearly relate the incidence of deaths and danger to border control policies. But when someone dies, the jurisdiction of concern is local. It's, they're no longer a federal concern. They're a local concern. So local governments, our pain were handling, caring for, in material ways the the number of deaths.

Abby Wheatley  35:35

I was really struck by, you know, Molly earlier mentioned that the Border Patrol sort of bragging that they can repatriate folks in sort of 90 minutes, right? And that, at the other end of this, you know, people have gone missing and been missing for years, and we haven't recovered the remains. And now because of so much time passing, like their families don't have answers, right? And all this is happening in the same terrain. And I wanted to just back up a little bit and, and sort of give this a name, which is the, you know, prevention through deterrence policies implemented around 1994 that deliberately, you know, funnel migrants through the most remote and desolate quarters of the desert where they are expected to die. Right? And so this really facilitates the weaponization of the borderlands because to me, Gabriella, you're talking about the expansiveness of the desert. And I think that comparison really points out the desert is expansive, when people are isolated and funneled through the most remote corridors. And it isn't when the Border Patrol is repatriating folks quickly back through ports of entry. Right? So again, how does it become expansive, this is a deliberate strategy that, you know, is set up to risk the lives of people in transit in order to sort of deter future migration.

Eleanor Paynter  36:57

This also seems like a point of connection with several other border spaces and thinking about how, also in the Mediterranean, deaths are enabled by policies ignored by governments and migrant deaths are... They become a kind of, there's like a layered series of exclusions. So people who are excluded from entry, then are again, excluded in death, when they don't get identified, when their families can't be contacted, because no effort is made, or because the recovery happens over, you know, such a long period of time that identification is really challenging. And because I guess, I wonder if this is true, also at the U.S.-Mexico border, but because, you know, people aren't always carrying identification on them. Or sometimes they have, you know, different forms of identification, so becomes really complicated to think about what kinds of information are available, or what forms of care might be possible afterwards, care and contact, I guess.

Gabriella Soto  38:01

There's actually been a problem that some of my research in the past has documented, again, with the Binational Migration Institute as a member of a team, they should just above the sole conductor in this research. But it's been a problem that, that attorneys in the past were unilaterally using identification cards to create an identification of individuals, and that's how they were being buried. But especially in the border, even if people do carry identification cards, they might be the aliases. So, you know, the standards by which they were actually trained to investigate to give someone an identification are different. But you know, identification is also. a waiting game in so many respects to so often, especially with skeletonized or heavy decaying. DNA becomes the sole means of identification. But that can take a really long time. And it only can occur early.

Abby Wheatley  39:06

Yeah, I also wanted to mention that, you know, sometimes people are in detention or in a holding center, their their families are searching for them. And and it can still take a long time to sort of locate where they are. And another thing that's happening is that, you know, couples or families will be separated through the process of repatriation. So, really commonly happening now, but this has been happening for a long time is that, you know, if there's a couple that traveled together, that the man will be repatriated through Agua Prieta, and then his partner will be repeated through Nogales, for example, and they might not know like ..  I spoke with a gentleman, you know, last month who he didn't know until he was in Agua Prieta that his wife wasn't there. Right. So just thinking about, he thought maybe she was on a different bus or she was going to he would see her when he got there. Also people in transit, right? Have this are this other kind of form of waiting. Knowing that the risks are so high, right, and just imagine the sort of social and psychological toll of that waiting, even when you know the person is okay.

Eleanor Paynter  40:21

And we're thinking about waiting so much in the, in the specific context of that border space. But of course, the waiting doesn't get entirely resolved just because someone might actually successfully cross right. So what, how does waiting or how could we at least begin to think about waiting? Is it a useful question to think about? Or people who do cross instead of just thinking about it as sort of arrival as a kind of final moment? What, what kind of waiting or what other kind of limbo do people enter into when they are able to successfully cross?

Molly O'Toole  41:00

I think one way to to, to look at it... is it might be like an even more sort of insidious kind of waiting. I mean, this isn't some kind of competition, but that in terms of trauma, but, you know, I think people are sort of holding on right into everything until that moment where they cross. And then if anything after that, they're still in limbo, and maybe forever in limbo in the United States. And I'm thinking about that in a variety of ways. I mean, especially under the Trump administration, but this has been a trend. It was essentially impossible. I mean, hardly anyone was getting granted, parole or bond. And so if you have an immigration process, so let's say you do cross the border, and you are detained, or you actively turn yourself in, seek out Border Patrol when crossing in order to claim asylum.

People are often being held in immigration detention, in ICE detention, ICE custody, for incredibly long periods of time, in part because of the backlog being so significant, and having grown so much, in terms of immigration court cases. So if you have people waiting one or two years, and they're no longer being granted parole or bond, so that they can get out while they're waiting on their court proceedings. So you have people in detention for years at a time without any kind of resolution. And, and without going to any kind of resolution in the near future for their cases. So that creates an entire limbo. If someone is able to get out of detention, often their their court proceedings can last for years, even outside of a detention context. Um, and then potentially, they're sort of always waiting on some kind of status that will give them some kind of piece of paper or some kind of status that might give them some kind of stability in in their lives in the United States.

So I - the limbo doesn't stop. And I think that that could be sort of particularly cruel, that they've existed in the states of limbo, these intentional states of limbo have been stuck. You know, because the idea was to try and get them to give up before that point, the design of U.S. policies to try and get them to give up before that point, either through cruelty either through death, either through just the torture of waiting that they'll give up and go home. But that that the limbo continues, the purgatory continues after they've already been through all of that. I'm sorry, that was a long. But the there's so many, there's so many spaces of waiting, whether it's a physical space of waiting, a legal sense of waiting, I'm just sort of kind of always waiting on your life to start, I think, is for so many people.

Gabriella Soto  44:09

So how do you how do you ethically, you know, navigate these spaces in which you, you know, can give back or like contribute, as opposed to being maybe more extractive methodologically? I mean, just circumstantially, and so, not to put you on the spot Abby. But I actually think it's in the context of waiting, worth mentioning. They can get scholarly or like the, there's methodological implications to this as well.

Abby Wheatley  44:37

Well, I think, I mean, that's something I was reflecting on recently, because the last few times I've been to the border, people are moving much quicker out of the Migrant Resource Center. And in the past, usually, you know, I would mostly interview the people who were there for several days and we were able to sort of develop some type of relationship before sort of asking them about their story. And I think the way that migration has shifted, you know, under Title 42 Is that, you know, it sort of necessitates this, the short, shorter conversations, not even full interviews, right? Sort of like, and people are in those spaces always talking to each other, like, oh, how long did you walk and I walked 10 hours, we walked 12 hours, you know, so you're sort of in the middle, I think of these sort of reflections on what it means to cross the border or what it means to be a person to transit, what these experiences look like?

I think one thing I wanted to step back, and just maybe highlight is that despite, you know, the restrictions of the border, and the intense militarization and securitization, and the use of Remain in Mexico, and Title 42, all policies and approaches that have really enhanced and extended the risks and dangers of crossing, that people are still migrating, that people will continue to migrate, that people in transit are resilient, that they, you know, their communities matter to them, their families matter to them. And, you know, I think the, you know, you mentioned, Eleanor the politics of survival, but we did talk a lot about death. And we did talk a lot about the, you know, approaches of border enforcement that make it so difficult and dangerous to cross, I think it's important to also mention, that sort of people are resilient, determined, and that the all of those approaches and punishments do not deter migration, because the root causes and the reasons that people are migrating, right, their families, their communities, their lives are much greater even then, you know, incarceration, and the risk of death. And so migration is going to continue, despite, you know, building a taller wall, reinforcing it, building a double wall, putting barbed wire on the top. And I think that's, that's sort of the point to return to.

Molly O'Toole  47:08

Yeah, I think, if anything, in the most cynical sense, if you are, for any other policy, right, or let's say budget line, like, as as takeaway, all the humanity of it to the most sort of mundane feature of it in terms of, like, $1 amount, right? If you were to judge any policy or kind of budget item, as to whether it's effective or not, and if the whole point of this policy from the U.S. government standpoint since 1994, regardless of you know, Republican in office, Democrat in office, if the whole point was supposed to be well, the more cruel This is, the more difficult we make this, it will stop people. If we would actually take them at their own measurement of success, it has clearly failed.

For decades and decades and decades, which is not even to mention the sort of human cost in terms of trauma, or bodies or death. What is failed, I mean, people have continued to come, they will continue to come. It's ignoring reality. And, and I think that that's something that I always find really interesting, even with the sort of most cruel policies that could sort of be come up with the most draconian policies, we have seen increased numbers of migration, after those policies were put into place. And so that's one part of it. And then the other part, like you said, I mean, I think the resilience and the ingenuity and the sort of in the face of all of that what people are willing to do and willing to risk has always sort of astounded me and I think that's the sort of better takeaway from there's two sides of it, the cynical side of it. And then the other side of it, which being the people, people are astounding, humanity's kind of astounding in its capacity for what it can do.

Eleanor Paynter  49:28

Thanks for listening to Migrations: A World on The Move, a podcast produced by Global Cornell's Migrations Global Grand Challenge, a cross disciplinary multispecies initiative that studies how the movements of people, animals, microbes, resources, ideas, and more shape our world. You can learn more about the initiative at migrations.cornell.edu, where you'll also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us on Twitter @CornellMig. This podcast is hosted by Eleanor Paynter, Migrations postdoctoral associate with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and produced by Megan DeMint. Much of the podcast was produced at Cornell University on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ', the Cayuga Nation, and we recognize the nation's sovereignty and the indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is "Basically Really" by Steve Fawcett.