Research Project

The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP for short) was an anti-immigration policy implemented during President Donald Trump’s first term in office by the Department of Homeland Security. They were justified as necessary in order to restore order and ensure safety at the U.S. Southwest border by forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases were being processed. I argue that the MPP constitutes a new form of border externalization, which refers to extraterritorial activities intended to separate the process of conducting admissions decisions from occurring at points of entry. In this case, the country of Mexico is aiding a major immigrant-receiving country (i.e. the U.S.) in their process of conducting admissions decisions, except that the decisions here are claims for asylum in the major immigrant-receiving country. I dub this phenomenon “coercive” border control, where both the government of Mexico as well as asylum seekers are forced to commit actions they otherwise would not have done. I analyzed the effects of the MPP on the asylum seekers who were made to wait in Mexico, conducting a qualitative comparative study using the three anti-immigration policies in place prior to the MPP as my counterfactual. I found that in both cases, human rights violations were a prominent occurrence even though the exact human rights that were violated differed. I end my project by contemplating the future of border externalization across the world, as well as exploring how the nature of waiting has turned Mexico into a space of inoperativeness.