Border Walls and Immigrant Deportation as Biopolitical Technologies in the US

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n33.02

Guillermo Alonso Meneses
Orcid ID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9441-0956
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, México
gui@colef.mx

Abstract:

This article looks back at several historic milestones in Mexico-United States migration throughout the last 100 years, particularly the cases of deportation and persecution of irregular migrants. Also, several episodes in building walls and fences on the border between the two countries since 1993, and the increasing rate of deportations since 2003; various processes that reached a climax with the border wall fostered by the United States current president, Donald Trump. Finally, a collection of testimonies from deported people gathered by free-access online database “Humanizando la deportación” [Humanizing deportation] allow us to argue that walls and deportations take on a biopolitical dimension. In this case, it is oriented to carry out a de facto policy of ethnic cleansing and sociocultural removal within the United States.

Keywords:migration, border, deportation, biopolitics, United States, Mexico.