Border Inspections and Rights' Violations: A Way of Life

Nation-states constantly police the citizenship and cultural identities of border dwellers, thereby questioning their right to move freely, even within the boundaries of their own countries.

At the USA-Mexico border, the affluent middle-class or working poor Mexican people that cross the international boundary must pass through US customs inspection stations with Mexican passports in addition to a tourist visa, worker visa, temporary visa, or a laser visa (a local border crossing card). The US Customs houses represent government spaces dedicated to the inspection of primarily people of color, where individuals are catalogued and identified into separate waiting lines at customs' offices. “Inspection stations...inspect, monitor, and surveil what goes in and out in the name of class, gender, race, and nation” (Lugo 2008, p. 115). Those most targeted for inspections are Mexican descent people, arguably the predomi­nant group affected by the “colorlines” politics of this region. Additionally, the state has fomented a culture in which incarceration of suspected criminals, Indig­enous peoples, Chicano/Chicana and Latino/Latina communities, and immigrants is commonplace, routine, and accepted.

Cooperation between municipal police forces normally attuned to domestic issues and national agencies oriented toward “threats at the border” has created a disciplinary field that has erased boundaries between “global terrorism,” street­level crime, and undocumented immigration. These practices create convoluted classification systems and scales of meaning with severe sociocultural and political implications for all border crossers: they are categorized as aliens, terrorists, or criminals. The multitiered system of surveillance, criminalization, arrest, and incarceration creates and sustains systems and rhetoric(s) that undergird the phys­ical barriers, policies, and surveillance technologies associated with the militariza­tion of the border.

Border violence is experienced through this process of inspection where docu­ments are demanded irrespective of people's background or status. At times, local authorities abuse their authority, which represents systemic manifestations of border violence. As a consequence, corruption and abuse of power are downplayed and kept from public view. Border inspection stations exemplify some of the most systematically violent and psychologically terrifying spaces within border zones that epitomize the nation-state's practices of demarcating the borderline itself. Alejandro Lugo states, “border inspections are more pervasive among the failed border crossings of the working classes, who too often experience border exclu­sions” (Lugo 2008, p. 117).

Border inspection stations reveal how larger border regions can be contradictory. On the one hand, they are marked by hyper-nationalized space, as the margins of any nation-state come to represent who is let in or who is forced out.

The exodus of children and youth fleeing violence from Central America underscores the need to reconceptualize traditional ideas of rights, citizenship, access, and belonging. These children and adolescents are “forced migrants,” hoping that the USA will respect their human rights to be free from violence and economic catastrophe, regardless of their origin and destination. The same argu­ments for human rights are true for children in their home countries.

In these border zones, human rights violations occur on a regular basis. The transfronterizos (border crossers) that physically reside in the USA-Mexico border region find themselves meeting the same infringements of human rights as the transmigrants that move through these spaces. Although not always physically violent, the ritualistic confrontation, the questioning of one's identity and legality, and the stripping away of one's rights and dignity can arguably be more detrimental than the physical brutality that sometimes accompanies crossing borders (Bejarano 2010). At times, fleeing violence means not only enduring physical violence but also the psychological and emotional trauma that causes permanent injuries for border crossers or refugees. Instead of “containing” violence, state policies of border control and enforcement actually exacerbate preexisting tensions on the ground. Stricter policies implemented at border crossings cause financial difficul­ties for poor families crossing. Physical structures such as the border wall, and deployment of greater numbers of Border Patrol agents, for instance, cause indi­viduals traveling north to become “trapped” in Mexican cities south of the boundary that are already struggling with overpopulation and crumbling infrastructure. Tightened policies at border checkpoints and international borders, as well as a declining access to citizenship, have caused millions of undocumented individuals to move “into the shadows,” where their vulnerability becomes a prominent feature of their already precarious lives.

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