Stuck in Transit: Humanitarian Infrastructures and Unaccompanied Minors Migrating through Mexico

Background and Purpose:

In the spring of 2014, a surge of unaccompanied minors began arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Shortly, afterwards, following pressure from the United States, the Mexican government announced an expansion of immigration enforcement operations. This has created new tensions for a loose network of shelters that provide basic humanitarian assistance to Central Americans migrating undocumented through Mexico. This paper examines how shelter workers assist unaccompanied minors as they navigate state-based humanitarian frameworks and human smuggling networks amid the simultaneous violence of expanding immigration enforcement throughout Mexico.

Various studies examine humanitarian efforts and deportation policies on children and families within the global north. However, as immigration enforcement is increasingly ‘externalized’ to countries at the margins of the global north, how humanitarianism and undocumented migration intersect within spaces of transit such as Mexico remains largely unexamined. Accordingly, this study asks: 1) How do migrant shelters work both within and against state immigration policies? 2) Both subject to deportation and eligible for humanitarian assistance, what tensions do migrants experience while migrating through Mexico? 3) What are the broader implications of these tensions for international social work practice?

Methods

Findings are drawn from 14 months of ethnographic research (8 hours a day, 4-6 days a week) in and around 3 migrant shelters throughout southern and central Mexico between June 2014 and May 2016.  As a shelter volunteer, I have conducted intake interviews, accompanied migrants through the application process for refugee visas and humanitarian visas, participated in team meetings and trainings with shelter workers, and assisted with day-to-day shelter operations. In addition to semi-structured interviews with migrants, shelter workers, and transit community residents, I also followed 5 migrants long-term beyond shelters, both in-person and remotely, as they continued north, returned south, and/or settled within Mexico.

Findings

Paralleling the railway infrastructure that many migrants use to transit through Mexico, I conceptualize migrant shelters as a social infrastructure that accompanies 'unaccompanied' minors in their negotiation of licit humanitarian channels and illicit smuggling networks. In many cases this is a matter of strategic waiting in which shelters become temporary safe spaces where migrant minors can take up applications for refugee status in Mexico while waiting for relatives to cobble together payment for someone who can guide them to the U.S.-Mexico border. This dynamic raises difficult ethical questions for shelter workers as they seek to protect underage migrants from human smuggling networks while also respecting the decisions of families that have been scattered by violence, poverty, and deportation to hire smugglers.

Conclusions and Implications

Fleeing the violence of home and wary of migrating alone, unaccompanied minors increasingly find themselves ‘stuck in transit’ throughout Mexico.  Within this context, migrant shelters take on a mediating role as unaccompanied minors and their families negotiate both state-based humanitarian relief and clandestine migration networks. While research and policy responses have primarily focused on addressing refugee settlement and the root causes of migration, it is increasingly important to also consider the tensions of care work in spaces of transit such as Mexico.