Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation

By Deborah Boehm

Returned follows transnational Mexicans as they experience the alienation and unpredictability of deportation, tracing the particular ways that U.S. immigration policies and state removals affect families. Deportation—an emergent global order of social injustice—reaches far beyond the individual deportee, as family members with diverse U.S. immigration statuses, including U.S. citizens, also return after deportation or migrate for the first time. The book includes accounts of displacement, struggle, suffering, and profound loss but also of resilience, flexibility, and imaginings of what may come. Returned tells the story of the chaos, and design, of deportation and its aftermath.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9780520962217

Deborah Boehm

Deborah A. Boehm is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies/Gender, Race and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of Intimate Migrations: Gender, Family, and Illegality among Transnational Mexicans.

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Returned

CALIFORNIA SERIES IN PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

The California Series in Public Anthropology emphasizes the anthropologist’s role as an engaged intellectual. It continues anthropology’s commitment to being an ethnographic witness, to describing, in human terms, how life is lived beyond the borders of many readers’ experiences. But it also adds a commitment, through ethnography, to reframing the terms of public debate—transforming received, accepted understandings of social issues with new insights, new framings.

Series Editor: Robert Borofsky (Hawaii Pacific University)

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University of California Press Editor: Naomi Schneider

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4. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, by Paul Farmer (with a foreword by Amartya Sen)

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15. When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa, by Didier Fassin

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31. Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb, by Rachel Heiman

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37. Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World, by Adam Seligman, Rahel Wasserfall, and David Montgomery

38. Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South, by Angela Stuesse

39. Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation, by Deborah A. Boehm

Returned

Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation

Deborah A. Boehm

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Boehm, Deborah A., author.

Title: Returned : going and coming in an age of deportation / Deborah A. Boehm.

Other titles: California series in public anthropology; 39.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | Series: California series in public anthropology; 39 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016003688 | ISBN 9780520287068 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520287082 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520962217 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Deportation. | Transnationalism. | Mexico—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. | Immigrants—United States—Social conditions. | Immigrant families—United States. | Illegal aliens—United States.

Classification: LCC K3277 .B64 2016 | DDC 305.868/72073—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003688

Manufactured in the United States of America

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Por los que regresan

Contents

Prologue: Chaos

1. Destinations

2. Alienation

3. Violation

4. Fragmentation

5. Disorientation

6. Reinventions

Epilogue: Lost

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PROLOGUE

Chaos

Artemio described his deportation as a night filled with uncertainty and fear. Several weeks earlier, after having been stopped for a minor traffic violation and driving without a license outside of Dallas, Texas, Artemio, a Mexican national and migrant to the United States, was arrested.¹ He spent two weeks in a county jail, followed by time in a U.S. immigration detention facility where he was told that as an illegal alien he was being removed from the country. Then one night while Artemio was sleeping, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents threw open the door, took him from the cell where he was being detained, and transported him with a group of about fifty other migrants to the border town of Laredo. The busload of Mexican citizens, their wrists and ankles shackled, arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border close to 3:00 A.M. After filing off the bus, the migrants’ shackles were removed by ICE officials, and they were pointed in the direction of the bridge that joins the two countries. Artemio, with his fellow citizens, walked into Mexico, expelled from the nation where he had lived and worked for several years.

Among Artemio’s most vivid memories of his return are the darkness and the chaos. He described loud voices, disorder, confusion. Earlier, while in detention, other migrants had advised the newcomers to move in a group after their release, warning of the many dangers in border communities. With ICE agents standing behind on the U.S. side of the border, Artemio and the others were met by a large group of people waiting for them, calling out and offering information and services: cab drivers; people suggesting hotels or selling bus tickets; coyotes, or guides, willing to facilitate crossings back into the United States—even that very night. Artemio confided that the experience was terrifying.

•  •  •

When Artemio was deported, he became one of more than three million others to be formally removed from the United States by the government in the past decade. The chaos of that night reflects a broader turmoil that shapes transnational movement today. This book chronicles and tries to make sense of the chaos of the current moment. The early twenty-first century has been characterized by unprecedented numbers of deportations of migrants, in the United States and around the globe. In the name of state sovereignty and national security, nation-states are increasingly carrying out deportations—or what the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) terms removals—of foreign nationals. Restrictive immigration legislation and border enforcement are expanding, and debate about immigration and deportation is at the center of public and policy agendas. This age of deportation is marked by both order and disorder. Through calculated efforts, the U.S. state deports hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants each year. By expelling those it labels alien, the state ostensibly aims to create stability. Yet this system of supposed order also depends on and results in—and may even intentionally create—disorder for millions of formal and informal residents of the nation.

I pay particular attention to the alienation and chaos of deportation in family life, tracing the contradictory ways that state policies unfold within families and communities. Deportation and other resulting forms of return are disorienting, extending and intensifying the separation caused by migration:² families are divided and reconfigured, parents and children live in different nations, partners do their best to maintain relationships that span international borders. The effects of deportation reach far beyond the individual deportee, as family members with diverse U.S. immigration statuses, including U.S. citizenship and residency, return after deportation or migrate for the first time. Families in Mexico are also affected; for example, when Artemio was deported, vulnerability came to define his daily life but also that of his wife and young children, those who depended on his earnings from work in the United States. The state’s removal of some is experienced within families by all, as the dis/order of the state reaches into kin networks and strains and reconfigures family relations.

A parallel and intertwined line of inquiry situates this chaos in structural context. There is an order to the mass deportations that the United States has carried out in recent years. A focus on the disorienting effects of deportation reveals the calculated strategies of the state in its many forms. This order both contrasts and informs the chaos of deportation. By detailing the experiential and embodied realities of individuals and families, I also uncover the cumulative effect of state action, a product of the diverse actors, including governing bodies, policy makers, and representatives of government agencies, who design, formulate, implement, and reimagine U.S. immigration and deportation laws. Ethnographic research shows the ways that exchanges between state agents and migrants—whether legal and judicial or informal and undocumented—shape this structured chaos. As the stories of those who have been deported make clear, millions of people have not been expelled from the United States by chance.

This book provides a new framework for understanding return and deportation: state actions intended to bring order to the nation and its borders result in its inverse, creating chaos for those who are deported and their loved ones but also for the state itself. Through removals, the state erases presence, undermines well-being, disrupts migration flows, unravels families across borders, upsets life trajectories, and undoes diverse forms of national membership. Today millions of de facto citizens—those who have come and settled during decades of formal and informal recruitment of migrant labor—live in the United States without rights. Furthermore, U.S. citizens, the family members of those who are deported, are also swept up in the devastation of deportation. By removing de facto citizens and, through family ties, U.S. citizens, the state erodes the very notion of citizenship it aims to protect, creating and perpetuating chaos within and beyond the nation.

This book, then, aims to record chaos and structure in its many forms and to theorize the structured chaos of return. It follows movement between two specific nations and in a particular historical moment, but it is also a broader study of return and deportation, processes that are increasingly being carried out by nation-states in many parts of the world. Although I focus on events and exchanges on the ground, the book captures changes that are much larger than any one individual’s experiences or a particular nation’s system of membership. In the end, this is a study of an emergent global order of social injustice and its local and transnational effects. As Artemio was removed from the nation, he was emblematic of the disorder, confusion, unpredictability, and violence that characterize the record numbers of deportations being carried out each day in multiple local settings.

As places of departure and destination blur, migrants, deportees, and other transnational subjects describe going and coming in ways that challenge traditionally linear understandings of migration. By considering the experiences of those who have been deported and their loved ones, I explore this global shift in human experience. In the following chapters, there are accounts of precarity—struggle, suffering, and loss—but also of resilience, flexibility, and imaginings of what may come. This is a world inverted, where certain acts are quickly and often arbitrarily labeled crimes, while crimes against personhood and humanity go unwitnessed and unacknowledged. As deportations are enacted around the globe, it is imperative to understand the character, reach, and effects of return in its many forms. This book tells the story of the chaos, and design, of deportation and its aftermath.

CHAPTER 1

Destinations

Your government is throwing everyone out!

—Raúl

"You’ve heard, haven’t you, about los deportados [the deportees]? There are many who have returned. It seems you are sending us all back! Mariela was tidying the house as we spoke. She walked into the courtyard, threw some food to the dogs there, and came back inside. Her joking tone quickly passed: Quién sabe que van a hacer . . . ¿Quién sabe? [Who knows what they are going to do . . . Who knows?]." When I first went to rural Mexico to conduct fieldwork in 2001, everyone in the community was talking about migration north—a family member who was there, plans for one’s own migration, life on the other side. Years later, the conversation had shifted notably. Now as people welcomed me into their homes and chatted with me at community gatherings, they had a common topic on their minds: return to Mexico and the experiences of deportees who had arrived in recent months. As Mariela said, the future of those who had been deported and their loved ones was indeed uncertain.¹

Beginning with my first conversations with migrants—during research about the ways that migration affects family life—transnational Mexicans have repeatedly expressed a desire to go and come, to move freely between the two countries.² This has been more or less a possibility at different points in history, as demonstrated by generations of Mexican migration to and from the United States, but movement has always been in some way defined, controlled, facilitated, and/or prevented by the state. As a result, the mobility and immobility of people between Mexico and the United States over time has directly served the state. Even when movement has been relatively open, the terms have been set by the U.S. government.

What does it mean to return in the context of deportation? How can we understand departures and destinations in this disorienting milieu? Deportation touches many lives and includes multiple forms of return: being returned, returning, returning for the first time. The return of deportation can be removal, forced migration, return migration, exile, displacement, or homecoming. Although states enact deportations as supposed returns, the very notion of return is problematic.³ Is return a revocation? A regression? A reinvention? As I demonstrate, deportation by the state reverses, or undoes, several processes. Removals, and the multiple forms of return that follow, upset the geographic direction of transnational migrations, confuse temporal narratives, strip communities of a sense of security and well-being, deunify families, separate couples, disorient young people, and problematize—and in the end, erode—citizenship and de facto membership in the nation. The difficulty of assessing removal’s multiple effects rests in large part on the disappearance of its subjects from the geographic and social scene, its official emphasis on unidirectionality, and the overwhelming right and power of the state and its apparatuses. Yet removal’s dis/order and dismantling can be traced through returns, as people go to and come from nations north and south.

RETURNED

The many forms of transnational movement I describe throughout this book begin with deportation, expulsion, or removal. This is return by force—the act of being returned—carried out at the borders of the nation and from places within the country’s interior. Since the 1990s, deportations of foreign nationals from the United States have been on the rise.⁴ Mexican nationals make up the largest number of individuals identified by DHS as deportable aliens, foreign citizens who may be deported.⁵ The statistics tell a story of increasing removals, with record highs, for example, of 478,000 foreign nationals detained in 2012⁶ and more than 438,000 people removed in 2013.⁷ Removals—forced returns carried out by the state—are ever more common, in the United States and elsewhere.

As a result, the number of deportees and other returnees living in Mexico grows as people arrive each day. The many statistics on deportation reflect the experiences that I witnessed during research. In 2001, when I first went to a Mexican farming community with approximately three hundred inhabitants, I heard people talk about only a few cases of deportation in the area, but I knew no one personally who had been deported. In 2008, six people had been returned. In 2010, nearly twenty community members had been deported from the United States, and in 2011, as a year of fieldwork came to a close, more people continued to arrive after long stretches in el norte. The numbers of family members who have returned with or followed deported loved ones, as well as those who have come back because of the increased risk of deportation in the United States, are much higher than those the government categorizes as officially removed, changing the character of communities throughout Mexico.

As the number of removals grows, so do the legal consequences. DHS distinguishes between removal and return: removal is what is commonly understood as deportation, a legal process with administrative or criminal consequences placed on subsequent reentry owing to the fact of removal;⁸ return is not based on an order of removal.⁹ According to DHS, the majority of voluntary returns are those of Mexican nationals who are apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents and then sent back to Mexico.¹⁰ Notably, these supposedly voluntary returns have declined, while removals, or formal deportations, have reached a record high.¹¹ In other words, returns as they are officially defined are decreasing, while deportations or removals—with their accompanying legal ramifications—are ever more common.

Current deportations of Mexican nationals must be considered within a long historical frame¹² of migration between Mexico and the United States. Previous returns to Mexico have frequently been forced, for example, the repatriation of Mexican (and U.S.) nationals after World War I (1920–23), during the Great Depression (1930s), and through Operation Wetback beginning in 1954.¹³ In addition, many other forms of return have been understood as voluntary, such as seasonal migration, although, as is evident through the returns of removal, this forced/voluntary dichotomy inadequately captures the many complexities of transnational movement over time.

For Mexican nationals, and for those with ancestral ties to Mexico, the U.S. government’s systemic removal of people living within its borders is both reminiscent of and a departure from mass deportations of previous eras. Although return and involuntary removal are familiar processes for Mexicans, since the mid-1990s return migration to Mexico has taken on a shifting character. According to oral histories I conducted, migration and return were relatively open from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. In fact, many migrants received amnesty under the Special Agricultural Worker provisions (SAW I and II) of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. However, the U.S. Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996)—which systematically criminalized undocumented migration—and the government’s response to the events of September 11, 2001, have set the stage for the current increased control of undocumented migration through deportation.¹⁴

LOS QUE REGRESAN

When Mariela described the many people being sent back, she listed first those who were returned by the U.S. government. But as she talked more about the uncertainty in people’s lives, she also described the networks of family members affected by removal and the many other forms of return that accompany deportation. She spoke of the young children of one deportee and concerns surrounding their father’s ability to provide for them now that he had been expelled from the United States. She told me about a man whose teenage daughter had just arrived in their small town, against her wishes, more than a year after her father’s deportation. Mariela captured the uncertainty for those who are returned but also for those who return, who come to Mexico for the first time, or, because of age, gender, or other aspects of subjectivity, who may never migrate to the United States but depend on the migration of others. Deportation alters many lives, even those of individuals who have never gone north.

In 2008, the state government of Zacatecas began a program called Por los que regresan/For Those Who Return. The program provided grants to aid migrants returning from the United States. The funds were directed to small development projects that would benefit return migrants and their local communities; for example, grants could be used