The US–Mexico border and the fatigue of being 'the spectacle'
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Author | Gabriella Sanchez |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13040 |
COMMENTARY
The US–Mexico border and the fatigue of being
'the spectacle'
Gabriella Sanchez
University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, Massachusetts, USA
Correspondence
Gabriella Sanchez, School of Criminology and Justice Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA.
Email: gabriella_sanchez@uml.edu
DOI: 10.1111/imig.13040
Received: 13 June 2022 Accepted: 17 June 2022
When I first began writing this commentary, the US–Mexico border was about to explode—or so the White House
said. From the time it announced that Title 42 restrictions would be lifted as of 23 May 2022, the Biden Administra-
tion used every available opportunity to warn the public that the reopening of the border to asylum seeker would
invariably lead to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants to the US–Mexico divide (Echavarri, 2022). It also
cautioned that the end of the policy which had for the last 2 years brought asylum seeker to a halt on the Southwest-
ern border, would create never before seen demands on both law enforcement agencies and humanitarian response
(Owen & Barr, 2022).
Three days before the restrictions were lifted, a federal judge blocked Biden's decision. As this article goes into
print, the US–Mexico border remains closed to asylum seekers with lethal consequences, as shown by the June 27th
incident in San Antonio, Texas, where over fifty people lost their lives during a smuggling attempt (Edison & Svitek,
2022).
Title 42—a piece of public health legislation dating back to the 1940s—was reintroduced by the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC) in 2020 as part of then president Trump's measures to control irregular
migration (Gramlich, 2022). It granted US immigration authorities the power to deny admission to people applying
for asylum at US–Mexico border ports of entry, and to immediately return those found trying to enter the country
irregularly on the grounds that their arrival could facilitate the spread of COVID-19 (US CDC, 2021). Immediately
following its implementation, the measure was condemned due to its asylum implications, not to mention its clearly
xenophobic nature (MSF, 2022). To this day, Title 42 has forced hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum to
remain in Mexico, waiting for the border to “reopen,” often with devastating implications to their personal safety and
that of their loved ones (Human Rights First, 2022).
In the meanwhile, international organizations have kept trying to coordinate resources and deploy support.
Migrant advocacy groups continue seeking volunteers and scramble to line up assistance in anticipation of any poten-
tial changes. Border-based law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels report dramatic personnel
shortages; academics and think-tanks organize multiple webinars to present data, evidence and potential forecasts,
exhaustively reporting on the vulnerabilities that migrants and asylum seekers arriving at the border continue to face.
There are, however, missing voices in this landscape. Not only those of migrant themselves, whose experiences
are often reduced to numbers when not to voyeuristic depictions of suffering. What do those “never before seen
217
© 2022 International Organization for Migration.
International Migration. 2022;60:217–220. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig
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