Immigration Law Commons^™

Close Encounters Of The Deadly Kind: Gender, Migration, And Border (In)Security, Anna O. Oleary

Anna Ochoa OLeary

In this article I discuss some of the findings of my study of migrant women temporarily suspended in the “intersection” of diametrically opposed processes: those posed by border enforcement measures and those posed by transnational mobility. A pressing issue that emerged from this research was how close women come to encountering death as they skirt around the border wall to cross without authorization into the U.S. Their testimonies shed light on how the intersection of contradictory processes contributes to a humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border in which the likelihood of death is increasingly present.