Governed bodies, discarded bodies: Notes for an analysis of contemporary migrations during Covid-19
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957231165704 |
| Author | Yerko Castro Neira |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957231165704
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(2) 235 –251
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957231165704
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Governed bodies, discarded
bodies: Notes for an analysis
of contemporary migrations
during Covid-19
Yerko Castro Neira
Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico
Abstract
This article presents the results of an ethnographic research conducted in the northern border
of Mexico from 2019 to 2021, specifically in the city of Tijuana. The objective of this article is to
analyse the role of bodies in border and migration management with special emphasis on the time
of the Covid-19 pandemic. To do so, I focus on three situations. First is the case of migrants whose
bodies are exploited in the precarious work opportunities they find along Mexico’s northern
border. Second, I look at migrants who experience detention and confinement in Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) detention centres in the United States. And third, I analyse the situation
of missing migrants whose bodies are sought by family members and numerous collectives in
Mexico. Through the analysis of these situations, the article demonstrates that by using ‘bodies’ as
a productive category for analysing migration and the containment of migratory movements, we
can understand both the resulting negative effects on migrants’ subjectivity and bodies and how
migrants respond to and challenge the global migration system.
Keywords
biopolitics, bodies, Covid-19, discipline, migration, necropolitics
Received: 13th July 2022; Revised version received: 22nd February 2023; Accepted: 24th February 2023
Introduction
The global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus deepened and expanded anti-
immigrant policies across many countries and borders, thus multiplying their negative
effects on migrants and asylum seekers.
When Covid-19 began to spread in Mexico in March 2020, migrants locked up in
immigration detention centres openly expressed their fear of contagion due to overcrowd-
ing, while complaining about poor treatment and lack of information from INM staff
Corresponding author:
Yerko Castro Neira, Universidad Iberoamericana, Prolongación Paseo de la Reforma 880, Santa Fe, Mexico
City 01219, Mexico.
Email: yerko.castro@ibero.mx
1165704POL0010.1177/02633957231165704PoliticsCastro Neira
research-article2023
Special Issue: COVID Capitalism
236 Politics 44(2)
[Spanish acronym for the National Institute of Migration]. This provoked numerous pro-
tests and riots in detention centres in different Mexican cities (Melgoza, 2020).
Guatemalan migrant Rolando Barrientos died of asphyxiation at the age of 42 in one
of these riots at the migrant detention centre in Tenosique, Tabasco, in southern Mexico.
He had travelled with his wife and son to escape gang violence. He had a refugee applica-
tion pending with COMAR [Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees], but despite this,
the INM held him in detention.1
Contradictory accounts of his death surfaced. Migrants charged that officials sup-
pressed the protest and blocked the exit when four migrants started a fire. In response,
some migrants broke down doors and managed to escape. Rolando Barrientos had health
problems due to diabetes, which is why he left the detention centre so long after protests
erupted; the smoke from the ensuing fire asphyxiated him. Months later, the CNDH
[National Human Rights Commission] confirmed this version of events in its
Recommendation 69/2020, accusing seven INM officials of ‘violation of the right to
life’.2
The Mexican government’s version of what happened was radically different. The
Attorney General’s Office charged four Honduran citizens with ‘aggravated homicide by
arson’, sentencing them to 13 years in prison.3
While this was occurring in Mexico at the beginning of the pandemic, the US govern-
ment reinstituted an old provision of the Public Health Act defined in Title 42, which
granted authority to prevent entry and expel persons who constituted a risk of infectious
disease transmission (HRW, 2021). Although touted as a health regulation, in practice it
was used as one of several immigration control policies, thus facilitating expulsions on
hundreds of flights and empowering immigration authorities to disregard due process in
asylum cases (Del Monte Madrigal, 2022).
Title 42 meant that the United States stopped accepting all asylum applications as of
March 2020. The border was closed to all crossings other than those defined as essential
and indispensable; simultaneously, deportation procedures were fast-tracked, both in the
United States and Mexico. The Covid pandemic provided national authorities legitimacy
and the perfect justification for tightening immigration control policies through declara-
tions of various states of emergency. As a result, control and surveillance of migrants
were further militarised, provoking numerous additional effects.
These actions by various governments to intensify migration control contrast with the
absence of state measures to protect migrants from the Covid pandemic. Migrant defence
organisations in Tijuana reported that it was they who led the humanitarian response dur-
ing the pandemic, while the state failed to take any significant responsibility (Alma
Migrante, Espacio Migrante, and OMADES, 2021).
As Dolores Paris stated, government measures were aimed at forcefully continuing the
permanent illegalisation of migrants, even those who had received legal documents such
as the Visitor Card for Humanitarian Reasons (Tarjeta de Visitante por Razones
Humanitarias, TVRH). Migrants were denied the renewal of these documents with no
consideration given to repercussions stemming from the pandemic.4
Consequently, all government measures during the pandemic targeted migrant bodies
as objects of their policies, whether to expel or incarcerate them, or deny them any pos-
sible legal status.
In this context, the pandemic forced migrants to wait in the midst of uncertainty and
disorder. In this article, I hope to demonstrate that behind this apparent chaos lies a social,
racial, and class order that exacerbates migrants’ vulnerability. In this exploratory article,
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