In early June 2019, I attended a workshop for volunteers provided by a US advocacy and legal aid organization in Tijuana, the second largest city along Mexico’s northern border. One of the main activities of the organization was to assist both Mexican and non-Mexican refugees to complete their asylum applications while they waited to present themselves to US immigration authorities across the border. Emphasizing these aims, the workshop coordinator said that, “at the end of the day, we cannot save the world. The focus of our work is fundamentally legal, not humanitarian.”Footnote 1 Goal orientations would be reiterated as volunteers began to help legal counselors by gathering information through interviews with asylum applicants. In one of the meetings that culminated our workday, not exempt from a certain component of group therapy, the volunteer coordinator reminded us that:

The focus of our work is legal, not humanitarian or psychological. Of course, many of those who pass daily through our legal clinics have traumas, but at the moment we do not have the tools or specialists, for example, in psychotherapy, to deal with their cases in any other way than legal. We would love to have volunteers with that experience and that profile, but at the moment it is not possible.

Legal activists may participate in additional activities such as “observing and documenting human rights violations” or refer refugees to organizations that offer other types of aid, including guidance and resources for resettling in Tijuana or elsewhere in Mexico. According to a local lawyer and director of a small nonprofit association, however, this is not enough to help people with denied or deferred asylum cases. As part of her “more contextualized accompaniment”—which I was able to witness in December 2021—in addition to asking people if they have thought about resettling in Tijuana, she proposes alternative solutions to particular problems, taking into account various scenarios conducive to rebuilding a life project of which the city can be a part; her counseling, she told me, is “humanitarian” and considers the multidimensional issues of the relatively few cases she can follow up to maximize their possibilities.

Such emic associations of humanitarianism with positive values and actions contrast with what is, by now, a conventional criticism of humanitarian interventions, seen as depoliticizing and based on a deeply unequal relationship between donors and receivers (e.g., Fassin 2012; Pandolfi 2008). We may still consider this critique regarding some migrant shelters in Tijuana, especially one consisting of four large walls between which, under a tin roof, are huddled some sixty tents in which individuals and even entire families sleep. There are no rooms or beds, only a small space near the entrance where migrants set up plastic tables every day on which they eat food from a small kitchen. When I asked about the lack of other services at the shelter, its director asserted that his imperative was “to deal with emergency,” with no time for “unrealistic human rights discourses.”

This may be as close as one can get to the “minimalist biopolitics” of humanitarian actions—often in disaster zones and large refugee camps—in which human dignity is traded for preserving physical existence, “even while protesting the necessity of such an action and the failure of anyone to do much more than this bare minimum” (Redfield 2005, p. 329). Most of the organizations and activities discussed in this article do not come across as humanitarian in this sense. Even some migrant shelters provide legal counseling and assistance in finding jobs and housing in Tijuana. According to the director of one of those shelters, belonging to a Catholic alliance called Migrant Defense Coalition: “Over the years we realized that the model of providing room and board was not enough and we had to change our response... we started using terms such as reintegration, transition house, and labor reinsertion” (Murphy 2017, p. 20).

Thus, even if minimal biopolitics may combine with other forms of power and their corresponding types of legal, social, medical, psychological or spiritual knowledge (Walters 2011, p. 152), I prefer to begin by asking how humanitarian, legal/human rights, and political forms of activism may overlap when seeking to meet the needs and represent the interests of migrants. Even if they insist that additional tasks are not at the core of their work, “different material conditions often cause, if not force, activists to transgress the boundaries of their type of activism and take a practical approach that is more helpful for their subjects” (Podgornik-Jakil and Bens 2021, p. 298).

It should still be recognized that such a practical approach may contradict migrants’ own needs and aspirations, which seldom include staying in Tijuana or resettling elsewhere in Mexico. Compelled by border enforcement and migration control, such “second-best options” may lead us to conclude that refugee solidarity is somehow implicated in the transformation of state frontiers into privileged regulatory instruments, often susceptible to co-option and capture by official strategies of migratory control (Bigo 2002, pp. 79–80). More important than talking about the reproduction of the subordinate inclusion, control, and regulation of human mobilities, however, is to look into why such things happen the way they do. To pick up a point made by the ethnography of development, assuming that aid interventions “serve certain interests or have certain political effects is not to explain the motivations and meanings of those involved, or to undermine their ethic (cf. Crewe and Harrison 1998). The effect of things does not explain their properties” (Mosse 2005a, p. 245, n. 7).

To avoid this sort of empirical blind alley, we may inquire into the internal dynamics of activist organizations and groups to explore the intersection of norms and both discursive and material practices. Activists’ reiteration of formal orientations (“the focus of our work is legal, not humanitarian”) becomes a “co** response to job stress,” particularly the “psychological gap between capabilities and objectives” (Lipsky 2010, pp. 141, 145). Reorienting organizational goals to redefine the nature of the job—e.g., from providing bare necessities to ensuring migrants’ financial autonomy through their participation in the labor market—can also function in this way. Such co** mechanisms no doubt reflect structural constraints, but they are also a product of situated experience and the organization of the immediate work environment. Thus, we may consider a middle ground between, on the one hand, the practices emphasized by an extreme sociological interactionism and, on the other, the “logistical calculations, legal orders, economic forces, or humanitarian narratives,” and other “abstract third agents” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 10) privileged by political theory.

This does not prevent a dialog with more complex critical analyses that highlight an assemblage of control, struggle, denunciation, and alleviation of suffering to speak of humanitarianism as a “nongovernmental government” (Fassin 2007) deployed to complement, assist in, and even reproduce the management, surveillance, and discipline of migration (Walters 2011). With the aim to explore other aspects of the Mexico-US border, however, I propose a practice-oriented approach to the administration of human mobilities. Guided by an ethnographic perspective on specific areas of aid provision in Tijuana, the first section of this article presents a research framework for exploring what people involved in activism, volunteering, and social work often do. Drawing attention to these actors as providers of goods and services enables us to deal with overlap** types of activism as concrete entities via some of their practices. Delivery practices are located at the interface of the ethical orientations, organizational rules, and informal regulations by which activists see their work and relate to the people whom they help. The anthropology of organizations allows us to focus on the plurality of norms and practices that make up the different modes of governance found at the Mexico-US border. By employing “governance” to talk about modalities of service delivery—rather than the production of governable subjects—I search for exploratory concepts that are not subject to a single analytical model but directed to examining “a variety of methods of social regulation and of patterns of behaviour” (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 407).

In the second section of the article, I sketch some of the historical context and the political economy behind the recent governmental mechanisms constraining the work of those who provide different types of assistance, monitor abuses, or seek to protect the rights of migrants. Such mechanisms arise from an intensified policy of migration deterrence, implemented through a bureaucratic mode of governance that transgresses official norms for asylum, by which the USA transfers migratory controls to Mexico. This section explains how immigration and integration policies in both countries impact the lives of the diverse types of migrants and the services they may require from the different organizations at the Mexico-US border.

The third section summarizes the overlap** modes of governance found in Tijuana to then discuss the cases of a religious shelter for migrants and a cross-border advocacy organization. The norms, routines, and dilemmas of activists and volunteers who provide employment counseling and legal aid to refugees and deportees reveal the political nature of service delivery. The contradictory directives to which service providers are subject, faced with inevitable conflicts, shifting alliances, and overlap** power structures, are particularly evident in cases of co-production of collective services through complex forms of coordination between local authorities, civil associations, and projects of international organizations. As I argue in the final part of the article, these assemblages of delivery modes are frequently oriented to manage migrants’ (im)mobility in cities like Tijuana, turned into places of indefinite delay by contemporary policies of interception and expulsion.

The effects of this government of migration—always an empirical question—are produced socially in specific times and places. There is obviously no question of focusing exclusively on actors’ practices, but neither of seeing “right through them to the social structure or the destiny of which they are patients” (Latour 1996, p. 199). My aim is to examine the agency and perspectives of actors themselves, drawing attention to the complexity of migration policies as institutional practices, the social life of organizations, and the diversity of interests behind the models and procedures for dealing with human mobilities on and through heterogeneous borders.

Re-politicizing aid to migrants through service delivery

Critical writing influenced by Foucauldian theories of governmentality and biopolitics “can be at once too precise about the effects, and too vague about the location, of ordering power,” which thus risks being “abstracted from particular institutions and structures in which political and economic action takes place” (Mosse 2005b, p. 14; citing Cooper and Packard 1997, p. 3). For example, Hardt and Negri conclude that “the global, regional, and local organizations that are dedicated to relief work and the protection of human rights… are, in effect (even if this runs counter to the intentions of the participants), some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order” (2000, p. 36).Footnote 2 When talking about NGO activism, however, we need some notion of agency (Seckinelgin 2006), which entails a belief in one’s and others’ capacity of doing things—e.g., bringing about some positive change—and awareness of the situation in which people act.

To be more precise, we can begin by identifying, ideal typically, three forms of activism—and the criticisms they have received—according to the “subject position” in which activists imagine themselves and the people they engage with (see Podgornik-Jakil and Bens 2021, pp. 300–301).Footnote 3 Devoted to the prevention and alleviation of human suffering, humanitarian activism imagines its subjects as passive victims with no active role beyond showing gratefulness and acceptance of the status quo; this deepens the unequal relationship between donors and receivers, consolidating what Fassin (2012) calls “humanitarian governance.” Human rights activists are less paternalistic in constructing the people they engage with as individual rights holders, although this conception may be too restrictive and culturally specific for Western legal thought, ignoring other aspects of actors’ social identities (Merry 2006, p. 185; cited in Podgornik-Jakil and Bens 2021, p. 301) and, ultimately, fitting the moral economy of the global liberal political order (Fassin 2012). Finally, the subject position assigned by political activists to the people they work with as autonomous actors and “allies,” who are able to mobilize for a common project, can also create conflict with people’s self-conceptions, especially when they “do not want to become politically active” (Podgornik-Jakil 2020; cited in Podgornik-Jakil and Bens 2021, p. 301).

In his work on border regimes, William Walters groups these specifications of the subject under his notion of the “humanitarian border”: a complex space configured around a regime of biopower populated with suffering victims and passive aid receivers, which is variably combined with a “positive domain” of power characterized by the production of knowledge and truth about others in a socio-legal field whose subjects are governed as rights-bearing individuals, or as subjects who “are to be capacitated to mobilize for themselves” (Walters 2011, pp. 151–152).

Of course, this has to be contrasted with the subjectivities and strategies of the migrants themselves. These collaborate with activists for more immediate reasons than the struggle for human rights or political mobilization, but they also refuse to be reduced to their “bare life” by not showing docility and gratefulness for the aid received. These resistances derive precisely from the experience of the structural inequalities inherent to the encounter between activists and their counterparts: Such inequalities destabilize the discursive frameworks in which the different activists operate—unconditional solidarity, universal human rights, or collective mobilization—aimed at equating them with the people they engage with (Podgornik-Jakil and Bens 2021, p. 309).

As these authors show, such circumstances make the different modes of activism overlap in reality, creating a gap between activists’ self-description and their actual practices, or, I would add, inducing them to modify the way they understand themselves and their work. In addition to having their own areas of legal and labor counseling, those in charge of the Migrant Defense Coalition’s shelters have engaged in various forms of mobilization and lobbying for favorable government provisions. On the other hand, advocacy and legal aid organizations in Tijuana can adjust their actions to contingencies that require the provision of basic assistance, or coordinate with groups and associations that offer such help. Activists of different types may, in turn, participate alongside migrants in various forms of political bargaining and mobilization aimed at the recognition of asylum rights or the cancellation of unfair regulations. Thus, “minimalist” humanitarian assistance coexists with new approaches to social activism, institutionalization of advocacy, and diversification of means, resources, and strategies to fight for rights or change laws.

Humanitarian assistance and sociopolitical advocacy form the two end points of a continuum, within which there is a wide variety of strategies, ethical-political orientations, and languages of contention that change and intermingle in course of time. Volunteers can start working at a shelter with a relatively apolitical “religious, Samaritan attitude,” motivated mainly by a desire to help, and then develop an orientation toward “equal rights and global justice” prompted by the deportation and asylum histories of the migrants with whom they interact (Schirilla 2019, pp. 75–76). The questioning of the existing legal order can, in turn, lead activists to an attitude of “unconditional hospitality,” joining solidarity networks where the provision of goods and services “such as food, housing, and basic health-care to those excluded from citizenship rights and state welfare becomes a political act of resistance”; this radical orientation, typical of “no-border” politics, suggests “non-sovereign” forms of solidarity that call the possibility of just nation states into question (Kelz 2015, pp. 1–2, 13).

These cases show that humanitarianism can be re-politicized through blending with other forms of activism, often in a very conscious manner.Footnote 4 They also suggest that the delivery of goods and services—shared by all types of activism—may be implicated in advocacy and protest in various senses. Thus, many activists in this story devote much of their time to provide not just food, shelter, education, medical assistance, or legal counseling but also political services related to mobilization campaigns, promotion of public debate, and pressure on authorities to guarantee the rights of migrants.Footnote 5

Addressing delivery as politics provides a counterpoint to the technical and managerial character attributed to the services approach by some aid practitioners (e.g., Soal 2002, pp. 4–6; cited in Wallace et al. 2007, pp. 6–7). Along with negative views of service delivery—as opposed to “commitment”—academic works on NGOs and civil society point to discussions about the effectiveness of “Northern NGOs” in shifting “from needs to rights” and “from service delivery to advocacy” (Wallace et al. 2007, p. 2), as well as to the dilemmas of local and regional organizations about whether to focus on intermediary roles or to “dirty their hands” in service delivery (Nauta 2006, p. 155). This ambivalence is often met with self-understandings through which activists and NGO staff emphasize their role in “improving people’s behavior” more than in bringing material benefits (Heaton 2006, pp. 199–200). An underlying concern here is that the “ideals and creativity of individual practice” are “always vulnerable to the competitiveness and acquisitiveness of the institutions” (MacIntyre 2002, p. 194; quoted in Wallace et al. 2007, p. 7).

In the work of authors like Wallace et al., such dichotomies stem from an exclusive focus on “NGOs incorporated into international aid chains”—i.e., those receiving part or all of their funding from institutional donors like governments, the UN or various multilaterals—, excluding voluntary and non-profit organizations funded locally by members and supporters (2007, p. 3). In Tijuana alone, however, we find local solidarity groups as well as regional and transnational NGOs, which may work together and collaborate with public institutions and/or receive support and advice from international organizations; their sources of funding—from small individual donations to a donor system composed of nation states and large foundations—often vary, depending on the type of assistance provided to which people and in which spaces.

Thus, I shall be looking at “configurations of delivery” in which different “modes of governance” are implicated to enable a good or a service to be delivered (Olivier de Sardan 2014). While such configurations are useful to address structural issues, I will first inquire into the practices of activists within some of those particular modes of governance. This concept refers to “an institutional mechanism (‘dispositif’) for the delivery of public or collective goods and services” according to particular “official” and “practical norms,” characterized by widely shared practices and representations (e.g., of the population served) “and bringing into play specific forms of authority” (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 420). Like public modalities of delivery, activist ones are characterized by “practical norms” or tacit “informal rules,” which underpin those practices of institutional actors, “which do not conform to formal professional and bureaucratic norms,” although they can be complementary or adaptive in the “application” of official rules that are never determinate and always remain open to interpretation (Olivier de Sardan 2014, pp. 408–409).

Rather than opposing individual behavior and practice to the role of institutions—or assuming certain effects and prescribing particular orientations—the delivery approach is useful to illuminate tensions between prescribed and real conduct. In this way, we can take a step further in the old dilemma between structure and agency, which continues to be fruitful in the anthropology of organization and bureaucracy, by showing how institutional actors mediate between formal rules and practical organizational cultures (see inter alia Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014; Eckert 2011; Heyman 1995; Nuijten 2003; see Bailey 1969, on the distinction between normative and pragmatic rules). While not providing services in the same way as “street-level” (Lipsky 2010) or “interface” (Olivier de Sardan 2014) bureaucrats, activists and social workers in direct contact with migrants also face dilemmas (e.g., arising from the chronic shortage of personnel and resources), which demand particular ways of applying rules and realizing organizational objectives. Close attention to migrants converges with know-how characterized by (in)formal criteria for the distribution of goods and services aimed at dealing with vulnerability and social inequalities.

Situating empirical research at the interface between practices and normative orientations allows us to problematize the discussion of humanitarianism and other forms of activism as a philosophical problem—“a matter of elevated ideals”—through a focus on “the most mundane details of institutional life” (Walters 2011, p. 151). I seek to understand these mundane aspects in an open-ended way, without incorporating them in advance into a particular regime of power and domination. My approach does not overlook the weight of political economy and other sources of constraints on migration dynamics and refugee solidarity. It is obviously the case that the constellation of delivery actors, mechanisms, and organizations illustrates the contradictions, alliances, and political struggles that demarcate activism’s field of action. Yet to focus on these configurations of delivery enables us to explore how power is negotiated at different levels of the “aid chain” (Wallace et al. 2007, pp. 4–5), where the routine, reflexive, and strategic dimensions of agency are key to understanding organizational and institutional reproduction, but also change (Bebbington et al. 2006, p. 5). What arises as the other side of official strategies of policing and control at the unequal and abrasive Mexico-US frontier, then, is not just a “humanitarian border” configured by an assemblage of biopolitical and disciplinary forms of power (Walters 2011, p. 152) but also a delivery border constituted by configurations of provision aimed at reducing migrants’ vulnerability and creating more favorable conditions for their relative autonomy.

Rather than replacing a political lexicon with an administrative one, my use of the concept of governance is aimed at taking account of certain political dimensions of collective actions that are not reducible to domination—or resistance. Service delivery has wider significance beyond the service itself, since it can be seen as a sign of breach or fulfillment of state or NGO duties—even what counts as a “public service,” or who deserves it, is subject to dispute in different societies (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 400). In migratory contexts, the public actions of NGOs are judged according not only to their ability to deliver what is expected from them but also to their success in fundamentally challenging particular state policies. The analysis of power relationships can be combined with the analysis of service production and delivery, “a semi-autonomous field, which social anthropology should investigate as such” (Olivier de Sardan 2014, pp. 402–403).

In some of the academic literature on NGOs, there is yet another dichotomy, expressed in a divide between “us” (disinterested, critical social scientists) and “them” (biased NGO staff and activists). Despite arguing that such distinction is unclear and unhelpful for understanding organizations, Nauta reinstates the divide by highlighting the partisan character of much NGO literature produced by insiders, whose work is not “neutral” and, “frequently, has an activist purpose” (2006, pp. 149, 164). Similarly, Wallace et al. contrast the “sophisticated theoretical, empirical, and ethnographic approaches to studying NGO practice” with “much previous research [which] has been normative and carried out by people closely involved in the NGO sector” (2007, p. 3).

Surely, activism is an essential component of NGO activity rather than a hindrance, and there may be ways of reconciling action with reflection. Sometimes activists are us: researchers as volunteers in the fields of practice we are interested in. This methodological option adds up to the capacity of ethnography to create situations in which researcher perceptions are influenced by actors, who may be involved as co-researchers or, at least, as critical interlocutors who are able to challenge our interpretations. A combination of these possibilities characterizes the collective research project on which this article is based. Project activities included the writing, presentation, and discussion of research results with human rights NGOs, civil associations, and migrant solidarity groups.Footnote 6 Such results come from field stays extended in different periods during 4 years (2017–2021) in a collaborative work framework with these groups and organizations. Both project coordinators and participant postgraduate students performed volunteer work in migrant shelters, assisting social workers in employment counseling and activities for children. We also followed civil servants, lawyers, and human rights workers in their daily routines, assisting activists in providing legal advice to asylum seekers.Footnote 7

The boundary between activists and researchers is hard to maintain also because we all “mostly ‘participate in the same intellectual world’ (Merry 2005, p. 240), constantly debating what has to be done to bring about what kind of change” (Podgornik-Jakil and Bens 2021, p. 299). A comparison can be established particularly between activism and anthropology, whose practitioners are confronted with “a similar problem”: a desire to act upon the identification of crisis and suffering (Redfield 2005, p. 348). Thus, I believe the work of the anthropologists is not “to unveil and denounce untruths and violations” of organizations engaged in intervention and advocacy (Redfield, 2005, p. 330) but “to get as close as possible to their work and issues, including contradictions and aporia” (Fassin 2012, p. 300, n. 9).

Crossroads of expulsion, containment, and activism at Tijuana

Asylum petitions in the USA began to soar from 2006 to 2012, when Mexico’s federal government initiated a major military offensive against organized crime. People displaced by internal violence began to converge on Mexico’s northern border with a growing number of deportees from the USA in the wake of the post-September 11, 2001. From 2008 onward, with the international financial crisis and the decline of labor markets, President Barack Obama’s administration undertook an aggressive anti-immigration policy that culminated in some 2,500,000 people being deported. Likewise, in 2016, the Obama administration cancelled the humanitarian visas it had been granting to Haitian nationals following the earthquake that had devastated their country in 2010. Thousands of them were then stranded in Tijuana, which prompted a great deal of support from different sectors of civil society. Faced with the paralysis of the municipal and state governments, local activists and academics organized themselves through social media to identify the needs of the Haitian population and to systematize and disseminate information on shelters and resources available to them. This became an important space of experience and learning for the members of some of the organizations now most active in the city.

Prior to the watershed “Haitian crisis” of 2016, however, pro-migrant mobilization and NGOs seem to have been somewhat dormant in Tijuana—even now, some local activists compare themselves unfavorably with organizations on Mexico’s southern border, which, in the words of a human rights lawyer I interviewed in 2019, “are more united.” Wedded to securitized US protocols for entrance, the (middle-class) image of Tijuana as a city of documented border-crossers still prevailed in the mid-2000s, when the increasing numbers of deportees were widely perceived as a burden on the public (Yeh 2017, pp. 304, 307, n. 17).Footnote 8 Social boundaries shaped by the international border had, thus, excluded former undocumented “transit migrants” who became stuck in Tijuana after 1994, when the implementation of a US border security measure named Operation Gatekeeper greatly increased fencing and other barriers from the Pacific Ocean to the Otay Mountains, east of Tijuana (Agudo Sanchíz 2019, p. 90). Founded in the 1980s and mostly run by Catholic orders, the soup kitchens and shelters that catered for the needs of the transient population (a hot meal and a place to sleep before the next attempt to cross the border) were then faced with increasing demands. Over the last two decades, the definitive acceleration of the border’s closure prompted a shift in goals from humanitarian assistance to the “social reintegration of deportees,” as illustrated by some old-established shelters now belonging to the abovementioned Migrant Defense Coalition.

In these and other shelters, assistance to Mexican deportees in obtaining identity papers and jobs in Tijuana coexists with some form of legal aid to people seeking asylum in the USA. In this regard, internally displaced Mexican migrants cross paths with rising numbers of refugees of other nationalities—especially those fleeing gang violence, political turmoil, and persecution in Central America.Footnote 9 Along with the reemergence of the figure of the refugee—linked to the deteriorating conditions in the region—the proliferation of legal services indicates a growing shift from undocumented border crossing—often using human smugglers known as coyotes—to affirmative requests for asylum.Footnote 10 This serves as a reminder that the presence and actions of pro-migrant organizations are determined, in part, by the changing routes and strategies of migrants themselves, “an irreducible social element in making and unmaking global borders” (Walters 2011, p. 148; citing Mezzadra and Neilson 2003, p. 8).

Shortly following the wave of mobilization around the Haitian refugees, a new stage in the diversification of activism in Tijuana occurred between March 2017 and November 2018, when several caravans of Central American migrants arrived in the city. Two of these caravans—both massive population movements and a form of political mobilization—were assisted by Pueblo Sin Fronteras (“People Without Borders”), a cross-border organization created in 2010 by human rights defenders of diverse migratory statuses and nationalities.Footnote 11 Their “leadership development” and know-your-rights workshops for migrants gave rise to various press releases to denounce the abuses suffered by members of the caravans at the hands of municipal police and other local authorities, as well as to the organization of marches and sit-ins in front of the offices of the Ministry of Public Security to demand the issuance of humanitarian visas.Footnote 12

These initiatives are close to the ideal type of political activism, which attributes to its subjects the position of autonomous actors united with the activists in a common political struggle (Podgornik-Jakil and Bens 2021, p. 301). More broadly, they resonate with other “No Border” struggles involving activist networks in Europe and North America, whose members challenge the exclusivist logics of the nation state itself—i.e., its reliance on control and ownership of land that is demarcated by borders—and denounce its reproduction of global inequalities (Anderson et al. 2009; Walia 2013). Beyond activist perspectives based on “citizenship rights” and humanitarian, depoliticized generosity toward migrants, No Border politics promotes a radical understanding of human rights that calls for the abolition of borders, pointing precisely to their normative illegitimacy: Geo-politically and juridically, borders “produce mobile people”—otherwise exercising their “elementary human freedom of movement”—as “non-citizen ‘outsiders’… indeed, as ‘migrants’” (De Genova 2016, pp. 235–236).

Nevertheless, it is interesting to see No Border activism in Tijuana as promoting a version of the middle-class dream of an “open border” with neighboring San Diego, in the USA, a yearning that is deeply involved in the production of liberal political imaginaries at stake in the city (Yeh 2017, 2018). Paradoxically, as Yeh observes, the demands of middle-class tijuanenses for “expedited passage” and a more “agile,” user-friendly border end up “feeding into intensified processes of state mediation,” resurrecting “the state as arbiter of a new rights-bearing “humanity,” whose model for state-citizen relations is that of customer satisfaction” (2017, p. 305). Thus, “However fierce one’s criticisms of the border, one remains beholden to it” (Yeh 2017, p. 296).

Providing a parallel argument on a larger canvas, Mezzadra and Neilson argue that No Border struggles for the rights of “illegal migrants” sometimes approach the border “as an object to be eliminated rather than as a bundle of social relations that involve the active subjectivity of border crossers… This can give rise to a certain fixation on power and domination that paradoxically risks reinforcing the spectacle of the border” (2013, p. 267). A more decisive charge against No Border politics, however, is that it risks becoming a “kind of political logo that threatens to detach border activism from a wider political program by promoting primarily symbolic actions,” which is related to its “utopian” character, its failure to become a practical political project in its own right, and its need to join other political struggles (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp. 267–268). This resonates with criticisms leveled by different activists at the Mexico-US border. When speaking about the caravans accompanied by members of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, for example, a lawyer working for an international organization in Tijuana told me that “they promised them [Central American migrants] that they would be breaking borders... although they did not tell them that they would be breaking those borders in Mexico, but not here on the border with the United States.”

Without necessarily dismissing these perspectives, we may also assess the role of organizations like Pueblo Sin Fronteras from the delivery approach proposed here: Along with symbolic actions—important in themselves—this kind of activism offers key services related to political mobilization. In principle, discourses around “breaking down borders” contrast sharply with the idea of service delivery guided by “professional cultures” (Olivier de Sardan 2014). Nevertheless, the ethical-political principles of activism provide functional equivalents to these cultures and, in conjunction with the customary activities of activists, the management of their encounters with migrants, and the purpose of solving concrete problems, produce sufficient regularity for the stabilization of norms and practices. These are manifested in the defense and representation of the interests of refugees in public opinion and public space through the organization of various events, information campaigns, and political campaigns to mobilize protest.

As we shall see, these political services coexist with legal services for asylum seekers, provided by activists who are closer to the human rights type but also with resettlement, reception, and humanitarian assistance services in places of transit, intensified by the transfer of migration controls and international protection obligations to Mexico, the subject of the next subsection.

Transnational management of asylum at the Mexico-US border

At the beginning of his administration, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s current president, declared an “open-door immigration policy” by which over thirteen thousand humanitarian visas were granted to foreign nationals, especially Central American migrants (Zaragoza et al. 2020). However, the situation changed dramatically in May 2019, when US President Donald Trump (2016–2020) threatened to impose a 5% tariff on all goods from Mexico until its leaders took steps to curb “illegal immigration” to the USA (Kullgren and Kumar 2019). The Mexican government gave in to this pressure and deployed tens of thousands of federal agents to the country’s southern and northern borders to assist in the detention of migrants.

Moreover, the López Obrador administration accepted the implementation of a series of mechanisms—such as the creation of buffer zones of graduated securitization and forced sedentarization—which illustrate the outsourcing of migration controls characterizing the contemporary government of human mobilities. Culminating a series of migration barriers that have shaped the proliferation and intervention of civil organizations over the last decades, this border regime operates through a complex configuration of modalities for asylum administration involving institutions under the Mexican Ministry of the Interior. These institutions include the Beta Groups attached to the National Institute of Migration (INM, by its Spanish acronym), consisting of brigades of public servants dedicated “to the protection and defense of the human rights of migrants” who transit through national territory, as well as to the provision of orientation and first aid to them.Footnote 13

The practices of the Beta Groups in Tijuana and the other border cities in Baja California are far from these guidelines, being linked instead to migratory control actions promoted by both official and informal bi-national agreements. During the last years of the Trump administration, such agreements included a system of “shifts” to apply for asylum, managed in a discretionary manner in conjunction with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Those who showed up each morning at border posts such as El Chaparral/San Ysidro were assigned a number on a “waiting list” that forced them to wait for months in Tijuana for their turn to arrive. When this happened, asylum seekers were brought by Beta Group agents to CBP officers at the US port of entry.Footnote 14

US authorities publicly denied the existence of this unofficial “metering policy.” As an American legal activist assured me, “they would do nothing but deny it because the whole shift procedure is illegal.”Footnote 15 This mechanism started to be employed in 2016 in Tijuana at the initiative of the Mexican authorities themselves to manage the growing influx of people, mainly from Haiti, seeking asylum in the USA (Agudo Sanchíz 2019, p. 90). By July 2019, the system was operating at various ports of entry on Mexico’s northern border, although there was a diversity of local arrangements for its management. In the city of Mexicali, capital of the state of Baja California—just a couple of hours east of Tijuana—the waiting list operated through collaboration between the Municipal Directorate of Attention to Migrants and the Beta Group, whose officers took on the task of shifts as their own. In Tijuana, Beta Group’s agreements with local authorities were more ambiguous and agents operated semi-covertly with the assistance of Mexican asylum seekers who, in exchange, could see their waiting time on the list shortened.

Migration policy is thus produced through collaboration between the bureaucratic counterparts in Mexico (INM/Beta Groups) and the USA (CBP)—cooperation illustrative of the power inequalities between the two countries—as well as through variable networks and arrangements between actors belonging to different local modes of governance. In addition to the municipalities, the migrant shelters themselves were also involved, receiving those people who had to wait for their turn on the list. Among the institutions that completed this mechanism for asylum administration was the National Guard, created in March 2019 as part of a landmark strategy to combat “organized crime” in Mexico. Every morning, agents of this police-military force watched over the roster assignment procedure at El Chaparral, assisting the Beta Group and kee** curious onlookers, human rights observers, and this anthropologist at bay.

Once turned over to CBP at the port of entry, asylum seekers were held for between 2 days and 3 weeks in prisons known as hieleras (“ice-boxes”), because of the cold temperatures to which they are subjected there, while waiting for US officials to inform them when their first hearing before an immigration court would take place.Footnote 16 Non-Mexican nationals were returned to Mexico until the day of the hearing. This was due to a series of measures known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPPs), agreed by the US Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican government, which began to be implemented in Tijuana in January 2019 and were extended to other border cities 8 months later. Better known—with a certain implicit irony—as the “Stay in Mexico” program, the MPPs oblige people coming from third countries to remain in Mexican territory for the duration of their asylum process in the USA.Footnote 17 The Mexican government committed to “provide these individuals with appropriate humanitarian protections during their stay” in Mexico.Footnote 18

Those subject to the MPPs are given a document that regulates their entry into Mexico as “returnees,” although it does not allow them to work legally in the country. Under these conditions, they have to wait several weeks for their first appointment in the USA. When they finally appear in court, the asylum seeker usually goes without a lawyer, and the judge grants them another period of time to get one. Thus comes the second appointment and as many more as the immigration judges order, in a process that can last for years.Footnote 19 In August 2019, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR)—the public body responsible for refugee status determination—opened a sub-delegation in Tijuana to attend to the growing number of refugee applications in Mexico, seen by many as a prior step or an obligatory alternative to the difficult asylum in the USA.Footnote 20

Thus, migration bureaucracies operate to process asylum applications according to an amalgam of rules that conflict with the legal frameworks governing human rights organizations, although they also play with their limits and contradictions. The MPPs and the metering system are intended to circumvent the doctrine of non-refoulement under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Paradoxically, this convention also gave rise to the category of “safe third country,” which offers an escape route from the rule of non-refoulement by admitting the possibility that the country of destination may send refugees to another country it considers capable of providing them with the same assistance. Mexico has tacitly assumed this status by accepting one of the many schemes that outsource asylum to refugee transit countries.

In this context, the management of asylum services is done in a dissuasive and violent way, in the cold outdoors of the Tijuana morning, in the waiting line for shifts at one side of the El Chaparral border crossing, or through the merciless hieleras of the USA. These practices are not so much aimed at ensuring service provision in the face of ambiguities in the official rules but rather mark a radical departure from the latter and even express a rejection of their legitimacy. These “transgressive” practical norms (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 410) stem from the strategies used by US officials as “defenses” against perceived illegitimate demands from users, in a context where an increasing number of applications may worsen already overburdened asylum systems. The MPPs and metering (or “queue management”) policies normalized long-standing practices employed by US officials to turn away asylum seekers at the border. In the 1980s, in the absence of budgets and mandates to “uniformly apply the law,” the “tacit policies” of officials included encouraging undocumented entrants to resort to “voluntary departure,” alternative to lengthy procedures for formal deportation but also contrary to the possibility of asylum (Heyman 1995, pp. 266–267). The role of public bureaucracies in the systematic management of illegality suggests that “the state effects are not necessarily located in control and direct repression but in ‘double-edged, successful, but entrap** conspiracies to violate the law’” (Nuijten 2003, p. 203; quoting Heyman 1998, p. 158).

Activism and service delivery at the border

The immigration policies described above impact differently on the diverse types of migrants and the services they may require from the organizations at the border. Although equally affected by the unofficial metering policy, non-Mexican asylum seekers subject to the MPPs may need much longer stays at the migrant shelters than Mexican asylum seekers, as well as specific forms of advocacy and legal counseling. By contrast, Mexican deportees with no hope of re-entering the USA by any legal means stand to benefit more from the resettlement and social reinsertion services offered by some shelters and NGOs.

Many of these services might be subjected to the critical approach of the “rebordering” of political and territorial space, or compared with the more specific case of this trend Walters (2011) describes as the “rise of the humanitarian border”: the reinvention of state borders and gateways to the territory as zones of humanitarian government, manifested in various ways of compensating for the social violence embodied in migration control regimes. In their combination of care and assistance with practices of protest and denunciation, however, the different modes of activism do not invariably reproduce logics of government control; they may destabilize certain state norms and expose activists to prosecution on charges of encouraging illegal migration and even human trafficking.Footnote 21

Precisely, to explore how and to what extent “NGOs and humanitarians… participate in matters of day-to-day administration” (Walters 2011, p. 155), research can unravel the confluence of a great diversity of ethical-religious or political positions, strategies, and means of obtaining resources, as well as how activists modify such orientations and strategies according to the changing social-material conditions of power they have to confront. Useful to examine the gaps between official rules and actual behavior, the focus on governance as service delivery provides a methodological entry point for understanding the bundle of norms and practices by which the different types of activism deal with such constraints.

My research in Tijuana identified, heuristically, two major modes of governance: the associational mode (civil associations, migrant shelters) and the project-based mode (aid projects and interventions by national and international organizations) (cf. Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 421). Workers in shelters and associations usually make greater efforts than public service providers to adapt organizational rules to the needs and concerns of individuals. Members of international NGOs aim to treat everyone equally in providing minimum services, conceptually processing the attended population through categories contrasting with those used by state immigration bureaucracies (e.g., “refugees” worthy of protection vs. ineligible “economic migrants”).

As ideal types, however, these modes of delivery are frequently intertwined or even merged in reality, since local associations may receive funding and logistical support from international organizations. Additionally, these modalities can be combined with others such as the bureaucratic mode of governance (state services) and the municipal mode (services provided by local governments in contexts of administrative decentralization); other, more disparate modes with variable incidence in the public domain are the religious mode (related to the associational mode but with its own specificity) and those modes typical of local sponsors, private operators (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 421), and certain groups of political activists.Footnote 22 The latter’s solidarity work, like that of NGO volunteers, may have little in the way of an ethos shaped by the “professional cultures” of state bureaucracies (Olivier de Sardan 2014, pp. 411–419), here consisting of a body of official and practical norms based on in-depth knowledge of US immigration law and international humanitarian regulations.Footnote 23 Nevertheless, there are ethical-religious and political principles (“love for others,” “no borders”) widely shared by volunteers and activists who, by joining solidarity networks, also appropriate elements of the discursive framework of humanitarianism and acquire a broader understanding of the problems they face in situ.

In the following two subsections, I address the cases of a religious shelter belonging to a regional civil association and a cross-border legal services organization. Without abandoning the modes of governance to which they belong—the associational and the project-based mode, respectively—members of both institutions may come into contact with one another and/or establish relationships with actors belonging to other modes. The services they provide are aimed at protecting the legal stay of migrants and refugees, ensuring their less asymmetrical participation in the economic, political, and cultural life of the receiving society. Their “configurations of delivery” (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 423) for the co-production of resettlement and integration services, however, reveal a complex management of immobility circumscribed by a border regime that forces many to adopt cities like Tijuana as a forced or unplanned destination.

From emergency to social reinsertion

Religious institutions have a “sanctuary” quality that mitigates the effects of the “liminal legality” of migrants, but, by the same token, they “may serve more as a buffer from society than as a vehicle of incorporation” (Menjívar 2006, p. 1026). However, those in charge of the Migrant Defense Coalition (Coalición Pro Defensa del Migrante), formed in 1996 by six shelters linked to the Catholic Church in Baja California, do not see themselves in this role. Under a persistent charitable-pastoral cover, originally inspired by the mission to help the itinerant, there is in these religious institutions a core of formalization and administrative efficiency, manifested in the decisions to establish themselves as “civil associations”—essential to receive public resources—and to provide legal counseling, document processing assistance, and job placement offices—necessary measures to obtain funding from agencies such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

This has attracted criticism from various activists. The lawyer whose opinion of Pueblo Sin Fronteras I quoted above described the shelters of the Coalition as “too tepid”: “they used to be more combative, but now they remain in a comfort zone where they take great care of the resources they receive; they do not have an impact; they remain very intramural and do not want to link up with other organizations.” Such suspicions of self-promotion and administrative calculation tend to neutralize the moral and political charge of humanitarianism, illustrating the combination of contention, protest, and aid that Walters (2011, pp. 155–156) locates at the humanitarian border. The controversies in this case come from within the field of activism itself and reflect tensions along the continuum of ethical-political positions mentioned above. While they distrust the pragmatism of the Migrant Defense Coalition, some members of human rights organizations also differ from the “maximalist” positions of Pueblo Sin Fronteras. Other activists generally sympathize with this organization and unreservedly condemn the criminalization of its leaders but question their methods and their confrontation with public authorities with whom they consider it necessary to dialog in pursuit of more just immigration laws and policies.

These are precisely some of the objectives of the Migrant Defense Coalition’s shelters. Their integration into a regional network has allowed them to increase their resources and areas of attention to undocumented migrants, deportees, and internally displaced persons. Created in the 1980s, some of these shelters are accustomed to adapting their services to changing situations and migration policies such as the MPPs, which led transit cities like Tijuana to become forced destinations. Expressing the risk of the shelters becoming overcrowded spaces of indefinite stay, the coordinator of one of them commented: “A shelter is part of a process; it should not be a lifestyle” (quoted in Silva 2019, p. 19).

The rules governing the provision of services in one of the Coalition’s shelters, intended exclusively for men, where the use of such services is mandatory, stem from the above maxim and the stated goal of achieving “migrants’ social reinsertion.” Daily arrivals are given a temporary identification card, on the back of which the bearer must obtain three signatures if he wishes to remain in the shelter after 3 days. The first two signatures, stamped by the shelter’s legal and psychological counselors, are obtained in exchange for attending counseling in these areas. The signature of the head of the labor office, however, will only be granted once the migrant has obtained a job. The office provides assistance in this regard, linking the migrant with potential employers and, in the case of Mexican nationals, hel** them to process identity documents to enable them to obtain formal employment.

Once the job is secured, usually in construction, cleaning services or assembly plants, the migrant will have another 27 days to find his own dwelling.Footnote 24 For this, saving is not only necessary but, again, compulsory: The worker will have to use a shared bank account, opened in the name of the shelter, to receive the deposits of his salary, or, in case of cash, keep his money in the safe of the establishment. One of the shelter’s social workers expressed her understanding of these rules thus: “saving is to realize that you are really working and that at a certain point you are going to leave, you are going to look for a room to rent, you are going to be able to go back to wherever you want, or you are going to have a plan. Because you’ve got to have some money, even to cross back into the United States.”Footnote 25

After finding their own housing, migrants will be able to continue using the shelter’s financial services in addition to its canteen service, medical care, legal advice, and internet access; in other words, many of those services analogous to the social benefits that are not provided in their precarious jobs, whose salaries are used for other basic needs, sending remittances to relatives or paying debts incurred for the migration project. This situation can also be understood from the angle of the “palliative delivery” of collective goods and services by various private actors (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 423) in a context where state agents are limited to managing the tortuous processes for obtaining residency and asylum.

The difficult adaptation of formal shelter rules to this context leaves room for some regulated informality in daily interactions. Under the methodical provisions for the systematic performance of formal duties, there is a margin of autonomy in the decisions that the shelter’s social workers can make to allow certain exceptions regarding deadlines for finding work or housing, as well as to allow migrants to negotiate with them how much of their salary they will deposit in the safe or in the shared bank account—even when they advise them to make plans for the future, in accordance with the norms of “self-control” and “self-care” expressed publicly by the institution’s managers.

The dilemmas of action in these interactions may be due to differences between the time dictated by the shelter rules and the time experienced by the migrants. Even with the support of labor office staff, finding a job in 3 days is difficult, especially for men traumatized by their migration experiences or caring for young children. Moreover, the one-size-fits-all approach may work better with Mexican deportees than with non-Mexican asylum seekers without identity or residence papers. The latter are more prone to low-paid and exhausting jobs, pursuing strategies and informal or unstable arrangements within networks that link them with other migrants and with employers beyond the intermediation of the shelter’s labor office (Alvarado 2020, pp. 108–109).

As we shall see later, the shift from humanitarian assistance to social inclusion in this shelter—publicly presented as a “non-profit civil association”—is representative of collaboration with the project mode of governance, whose services may also be directed to “alternative solutions” like resettlement in Mexico. Yet the very idea of “reinsertion” is controversial. The shelter’s rules and goals echo the assumptions of liberally oriented, middle-class tijuanenses for whom “recent migrants… have not yet absorbed the city’s ethos of hard work and upward mobility,” or are “stubbornly backward and even criminally inclined in refusing the opportunities the city affords” (Yeh 2017, p. 297). This view sustains “the complicities with the border” that “Tijuana’s local regime of citizenship” requires (Yeh 2017, p. 296).

It is also true that Tijuana’s relatively high wages and employment rates, linked to its inclusion in the international trans-border agglomeration that encompasses the city of San Diego, in the USA, are one of the reasons why migrants are there—just as they also tend to go to Ciudad Juárez, the largest city along Mexico’s northern border and home to the maquiladora industry. However, even if there is a need to obtain a job—and the demand for precarious labor makes it easy—“getting the signature” at the shelter’s labor office becomes a more pressing need, since staying in the shelter for at least 27 more days while waiting for a turn on El Chaparral’s list or a hearing before a judge in the USA depends on it. When following official rules undermines organizational goals, social workers and volunteers can help migrants sidestep such rules in order to meet ends. Here, the practical norms underpinning the practices of service providers are more routine than openly expressed as such and less directly “observable” than identifiable from such actions (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 408). “They have 3 days for us to sign them. Getting a job is not something you can do in 3 days... I’ve talked a lot with my bosses, but they don’t understand,” said the shelter’s labor manager after attending to three people who had stopped by her office announcing with a sincere “My card expires today. I’m here for my signature” (in Alvarado 2020, p. 129).

Dilemmas of legal service providers on Mexico’s northern border

Legal services for asylum seekers show a coexistence of different modes of governance. Some NGOs of legal activism in Baja California have links with Asylum Access or reproduce the model of this international organization, dedicated to the defense of the rights of refugees through their “legal empowerment” and advocacy work in the public policies of national governments.Footnote 26 One aim of the legal advice provided is to ensure that asylum seekers “can build their cases” and defend them before the immigration authorities. Counseling is partly oriented to the “credible fear interview,” during which asylum applicants will have to know what to answer in order to have better chances to convince officials and judges of the danger they face in their home country.

This kind of service is provided by a US nonprofit legal aid organization through a special project implemented in Tijuana. The organization’s membership is typically diffuse, oscillating between a constellation of occasional volunteers—like me—who undercut its costs and even subsidize it, and a stable core of lawyers and coordinators, mostly US nationals, who have to find a balance between the fulfillment of institutional objectives and the realities of their work. After mentioning that the “waiting list” at El Chaparral’s port of entry was “illegal” during a workshop for asylum seekers in June 2019, a lawyer of the organization clarified that “no one should have to go through it, but, for the moment, there is no choice but to follow it.” The lawyer described the different stages of the legal process—including confinement in the hielera—announcing that: “some judges are going to ask you if you are afraid to return to your countries—don’t say no; say: ‘I am afraid to return to my country and I want to apply for asylum’. Remember, you will be interviewed; but the US government thinks that all of you are lying; therefore, you have the task of thinking through your own cases to put them forward.”

Underlying this emphasis is the principle that all “clients”—as they are referred to in the organization’s official documents—are credible because they are fleeing asylum-worthy situations. All persons served are considered asylum seekers, and, both in manuals and in training sessions, new volunteers are encouraged to refrain from using other categories and to “avoid making assumptions.” In contrast with the classifications employed by US state bureaucrats (Lipsky 2010, pp. 141–142), legal activists show a strong orientation against the development of any “personal theory of client behavior” that might exclude part of the population from minimum services. Everyone has the right to have their cases recorded, even though they may be considered unviable under the criteria of US asylum law. In such situations, the shared professional principle of honesty continues to prevail, and legal advisors ask asylum seekers if they wish to be referred to allied organizations that offer aid for internal resettlement—or, in the case of foreigners, for obtaining legal status in Mexico. Before arriving at these recommendations, the counselors consider all the details of the case in order to suggest to the asylum seeker as broad a repertoire of options for legal stay in the USA as possible.

Offering alternatives to particular problems is also infrequent in the norms of public bureaucracies, whose self-limitation of responsibilities and reiteration of formal goals can be “strategies to deflect clients’ claims”; nevertheless, stressing some objectives over others allows the legal aid organization’s administrators to solve the problem of what kind of institution they are running, which makes it easier to explain to new recruits what is expected from them (Lipsky 2010, pp. 147–149)—as mentioned in the introduction of this article, all volunteers knew from the start that the organizational focus was “fundamentally legal, not humanitarian.”

From the critical perspective of the governance of migration, the variation in the extension of aid as a complement to border control is due in part to the moral and political economy of NGOs: “Possessing scarce resources, [they] have to make strategic decisions as to which issues they will publicize, which situations of injustice they will politicize, and which experiences of human suffering they will seek to aid” (Walters 2011, p. 147). To return to the ethnographic example from my introduction, however, asserting organizational orientations can also be understood both as a way to protect workers from external pressures and as an internal mechanism to cope with “distress over the gap between expectations and perceived capability” (Lipsky 2010, p. 149).

There are other reasons why organizations express both their goal orientations and the costs of their decisions. Asserting that the legal takes precedence over the humanitarian, for example, promises better results than those of organizations with more diffuse goals (cf. Lipsky 2010, p. 146). The limitation of responsibilities is especially significant in the case of the bi-national legal aid organization described here, since its “clients” must accept that the free services provided in Tijuana do not include legal representation across the border. Nevertheless, these NGOs usually incorporate specialized litigation units or team up with law reform organizations to sue against unfair immigration policies. The tasks south of the border are already onerous, as activists have to help a large number of asylum seekers prepare for the credible fear interview, or offer them guidance in filling out the complex forms they will need to bring with them to their next hearing before a US judge.

While promising greater efficiency, however, specialization relieves workers from develo** skills that may be necessary in particular circumstances (Lipsky 2010, pp. 146–147). Although they try to be extremely careful in their interviews—including rehearsals for future interrogations—attorneys may lack experience in dealing with the emotional consequences of the violence inherent in the asylum figure, whose legal criteria and processes re-traumatize subjects by making them relive the aggressions suffered under the obligation to prove that they have been victims of them.

Here, I want to dwell on the counseling aimed at deciding whether the asylum seeker has a viable case before the credible fear interview. This counseling involved, on the one hand, those waiting their turn on the El Chaparral list; and, on the other hand, US law students, interns, and attorneys—but also this anthropologist, as a volunteer in charge of gathering information intended to serve as input for legal orientation. Between June and November 2019, my work was to act as an interpreter, translating the testimonies of the asylum seekers from Spanish to English. I had to go through the questions on a questionnaire and transcribe in English the responses of the interviewees, make some summaries and marginal notes, and then request the presence of an attorney or legal counselor to show the questionnaire and explain my notes. Based on this information and through some additional questions, the lawyer would weigh whether the person had a strong enough case to face the credible fear interview with a chance of success. This opinion was accompanied by recommendations for the interview—what aspects to emphasize and how, what details to exclude—and additional support in gathering and safeguarding the documentation that the asylum seeker would present as evidence to the US authorities. For non-Mexican asylum seekers who had passed the credible fear interview and were back in Tijuana under the MPP scheme, legal advice included the completion of a more complex questionnaire form to be presented at their next hearing before a US immigration court; in some exceptional cases, an effort was made to find the asylum seeker a legal representative in the USA.

Among those I interviewed was Antonia, a middle-aged woman from a locality in western Mexico. Five years earlier, her husband had been kidnapped by a local group of armed civilians, whose subsequent threats forced Antonia and her children to flee to Mexico’s northern border. Forced by circumstances, Antonia decided to leave her husband for dead and mourn him. She reacted with surprise when the young lawyer providing the advice, after reading the information I had collected, asked her if she had any “demonstrable legal ties” to her husband that could provide a “credible case” for asylum in the USA: “Didn’t I tell you that my husband disappeared 5 years ago? If he were alive, they would have found him by now.”

Always in my presence, necessary to clarify doubts about what I had just written on the form—and to translate, when the legal advisors did not speak Spanish—the attorney informed Antonia that it would be helpful if she could answer why the aggressors were specifically targeting her. This, in fact, is the most important question in the credible fear interview in establishing grounds for asylum. When Antonia said she did not know the motive for her husband’s kidnap**, the attorney asked her if she had thought about resettlement in Tijuana or elsewhere in Mexico. She shook her head: “It’s the same everywhere, you can’t be here anymore. Sooner or later, those who did that to my husband would find me.” Antonia was unaware that this answer would be insufficient in a credible fear interview, unless she could specify how her victimizers might find her: “Do your persecutors have links to any cartel, armed group, police, or army?” Antonia showed trepidation at the lawyer’s questions, glancing at me fleetingly as if seeking my help before answering.

Some of the information I had to collect as an assistant to the legal advisors was not what the interviewee provided spontaneously but what they should provide in the future in order to have a better chance of success with US officials. The character of my initial interview as a training or practical exercise made me lose sight of the limits of my responsibility; I tended to advise the asylum seeker myself on how to answer the questions in the questionnaire. When the lawyer subsequently attended, a tacit game was initiated in which the roles of the legal advisor or advocate and the authority before whom the applicant was to appear were reassigned and exchanged. For the would-be asylum seeker, the situation could be disturbingly ambiguous as to the actual position of the participants in the exercise—especially if, as in Antonia’s case, the consulting attorney was American. On another occasion, a woman asked me not to say anything about her eldest son to the lawyer who would be guiding her, because he was in the USA after crossing the border undocumented, fleeing, like her, criminal violence in his home town in southern Mexico. I assured her that the lawyer was “on our side” and that, like all of the organization’s activists, he made it a rule to protect the identity of family members in the USA.

Being Mexican myself, and owing to my intermediary job, I might appear more as an “advocate” for migrants before the legal activists. The task of interpreting migrants’ experiences in terms of US asylum law—through its key instrument of credible fear interviewing—also placed me in a faulty role as translator between norms and practices. The gap between them seemed to me particularly unbridgeable in the case of individuals or families who, displaced by violence in their places of origin, had suffered kidnap**s, extortion, and threats on Mexico’s northern border even before encountering the pitfalls of the waiting list and MPPs. While I emphasized these circumstances as an additional factor in asylum cases, they did not seem to carry much weight for the consulting attorneys in their diagnoses of the viability of applications (I also did a poor job in trying to help migrants to bend the rules of the US asylum system).

A case in point is that of Reina, a 27-year-old Guatemalan woman who, along with her three young children, was fleeing a history of abuse at the hands of a violent husband and death threats from members of a criminal gang. Upon arriving in Tijuana, Reina and her children were held for 2 days by human traffickers who demanded a ransom payment from her relatives. Reina managed to escape with her children from the hotel where they were being held; since then, she said, showing me her cell phone, she had not stopped receiving threatening calls from those responsible for her kidnap**.

Pablo, one of the organization’s most experienced attorneys and bilingual in Spanish and English, read the form I had just filled out and asked Reina a few questions. He told her that seeking asylum in the USA was a viable option, for which she could use the comparative advantage of being under a “double threat”—her husband and the gangs in Guatemala. Reina replied that, in addition, she was exposed to persecution by her vengeful kidnappers, arguing that she had as “proof” the phone numbers from which she had received their threatening calls. I appealed to Pablo by showing him the part of the form where I had included this information, asking if the immediate risk in Tijuana would not count for the asylum case. Pablo denied it with a slight gesture.

Attorneys like Pablo have to reconcile the empirical reality of the subjects with the reality of the law for the sake of the best possible outcome—hampered, perhaps, by implicitly questioning the MPP scheme itself through the emphasis on the threats suffered by asylum seekers in Tijuana. As specialists, they tend to perceive their clients’ problems according to categories and procedures influenced by their training and experience. With a large caseload assigned for legal advice, it is reasonable to think that they are relieved from considering broader issues by colleagues working in litigation and legal reform departments.

By reducing tensions between institutional ideals and actual conditions, specialization becomes a co** response for suppliers against their strained service worlds (Lipsky 2010, p. 146). While task specificity solves some problems for workers and their organizations, such co** mechanisms may contribute to distort the ideal of volunteering. Activists try to reduce the gap between norms and practices by “doing the best possible considering the circumstances,” but recipients of their services may perceive them as manipulating the public on behalf of the institution from which they seek help. One Honduran woman who had received orientation from the legal aid organization I collaborated with said: “what they do there is convince you not to try to cross into the United States in a racist way.”

It is inevitable that some perceive the lawyers’ frankness about the possibilities of asylum in the USA as one more component of the immigration management complex at Mexico’s northern border, aimed at hindering the application process. Without this being the intention of legal activists, a neo-Foucauldian approach would lead us to the conclusion that the effects of immigration control manifest themselves at a “molecular” level, materializing “within the institutions and practices of humanitarian government” (Walters 2011, p. 147). This conclusion is reinforced by the discrepancy between the technical advice offered by legal activists and what migrants believe are justifiable grounds for an asylum claim.

Precisely for this reason, however, the Honduran woman’s complaint has an additional reading. As part of their strategies, migrants evaluate what is offered to them in terms of assistance and the possibilities of demanding attention to their specific needs; they negotiate their personal biographies with the advice of those who help them find the right terms to make their case. Some Mexican attorneys advised the same people who had gone through the organization described above, suggesting the possibility of considering their circumstances in a more personalized way, less schematic or not so attached to the credible fear interview form, to assist them in building asylum cases with a greater chance of success. The local lawyer I mentioned in my introduction assured me that, thanks to her more “humanitarian” counseling, some people returned to the American NGO with an “asylum case” that, unlike the first time, was deemed “viable.”

Beyond the differences in the modalities of service provision among various actors, it is important to recognize how difficult it is for specialists, intermediaries, and legal operators to fully master the convoluted and ambiguous field of immigration law. In the professional legal culture, there is also a tension between the specific technical dimensions and the full socio-legal picture of each case. While many litigators are adept at detecting the procedural details and legal mechanics of the case, the “spirit” of what is being tried will be left to the judge. This, however, does not detract from the specialist’s need to retain a comprehensive conception of the client and the alternatives available for processing. Should legal advisors have an in-depth understanding of the meaning and implications of forced disappearance in Mexico, or of the dynamics of organized crime and human trafficking on its northern border? What steps would be necessary to move asylum seekers from victims to “advocates for themselves”? The problem revolves around striking a balance between, on the one hand, the contradictions of specialization (when it prevents service providers from seeing their work as a whole) and, on the other hand, the benefits brought by specific skills that organizations cannot develop in their staff as a whole.

Configurations of delivery and the administration of immobility

While “No Border” activism may be mired in controversy, there is greater consensus as to the right of refugees to seek protection in another country. However, “the right to ask for asylum” is different from “the right to be granted asylum,” which depends on the particular criteria and mechanisms by which every nation state implements international law categories (Schirilla 2019, pp. 71–72). Reflecting this, the American NGO described in the previous section publicly presents itself not only as a legal services organization but also as an initiative aimed at defending the rights of migrants against “systemic” arbitrariness and “unjust US immigration policies.”

Aimed at modifying the rules that constrain the work of activists, legal procedures to reverse measures such as the MPPs are, however, tortuous and have a doubtful chance of success. The NGO administrators still have to confront the fact that thousands of displaced persons, held back by the barriers and legal filters of the asylum process, have to remain in Mexico indefinitely. Subsequent actions may diverge from the ideal of equal rights and global justice—one of the ethical orientations of activism mentioned here alongside those of humanitarianism and radical politics. Beyond organizational culture itself, the attitudes by which the new practices are justified express something of the political culture of US activists, their ideological pessimism (“we can’t save the world, our work is not humanitarian”) and weariness with their country’s institutions. In the words of one of the organization’s directors: “we tell people that [the US] is not the American dream, it is a nightmare; so, if they have the opportunity to stay in Mexico, we help them.”

Efforts to provide alternatives to asylum seekers led the managers of this and other organizations to participate in complex forms of coordination between different modes of service delivery. They joined members of Asylum Access in counseling provided by specialists from UNHCR’s Durable Solutions Program, aimed at offering refugees options such as “assisted voluntary repatriation” or “resettlement.”Footnote 27 These actions could be articulated with those of the Mesoamerica Program of the International Organization for Migration, one of the schemes aimed at the bureaucratic-managerial ideal of promoting “orderly and safe migration.”Footnote 28 Financed by the US Department of State, this program included a job placement component. Its main activity in Tijuana was to link business organizations with the Municipal Directorate of Migrant Support in the organization of “job fairs,” established years ago by the city council with the aim of assisting deportees from the USA. These fairs were joined by NGOs and shelters like those of the Migrant Defense Coalition, which offer job orientation services.

The “social reinsertion” objectives of these shelters illustrate the spatial, economic, and political dimensions of migrant (im)mobility. Its management entails a palliative delivery of services that Mexico barely offers even to its deported or internally displaced nationals. This delivery occurs through a combination of various actors, organizations, and means: migrant shelters, the American legal aid NGO and its allied international organizations, and the municipality of Tijuana. The state still plays a part as a joint actor, regulator, or guarantor in this “co-delivery” (Olivier de Sardan 2014, p. 423). Because of its alignment with restrictive US immigration policies, the Mexican government has to participate in providing services for those who are returned or detained in border cities like Tijuana. In addition to educational services for children of migrant families (Agudo Sanchíz 2019, pp. 87–88), there are also the migration services themselves such as the granting of refugee status by COMAR, or visas by the INM. In fact, civil organizations direct part of their denunciations to the scarce resources and dispositions of the Mexican government to take care of refugees.Footnote 29

An area in which to observe the gaps between actual practices and explicit normative orientations, the palliative co-provision of resettlement and integration services also exemplifies the complex social and institutional networks through which various NGOs deal with the contradictions of migration policies. Organizations denounce migration reception practices as not being in line with international refugee regulations. However, in view of the proliferation of barriers for those seeking asylum in the USA, offering the option of staying in Mexico may seem one possibility among others. However, this type of solution conflicts with the expectations and life projects of migrants, who may not want to be in Mexico not only because of the risks to which they are exposed but also because their family support networks are in the USA.

The forced immobility of refugees in Tijuana has only worsened during the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the goal of curbing the spread of the disease, the rules issued by the US government as of March 21, 2020, including the entry into force of the so-called Title 42, allowed officials to return thousands of people to Mexico without the need to initiate a process in their detention centers. Title 42 is still in effect as are the MPPs, which were reinstated by court order after new US President Joe Biden announced their cancellation at the beginning of his administration.

In February 2021, Biden issued an executive order by which the Department of Homeland Security would begin processing the asylum cases of the approximately 25,000 people who were still in Mexican territory under the MPP scheme since the Donald Trump administration.Footnote 30 This allowed 13,256 people to enter the USA to await the resolution of their asylum cases, although legal challenges to Biden’s executive order halted the processing of the other pending asylum applications (UN 2021). Nonetheless, the expectations generated by the new US administration caused thousands of people to congregate near the El Chaparral border post, eventually establishing an encampment that, by March 2021, numbered between 1500 and 2000 people (Torre 2022, p. 9).

On my last visit to El Chaparral, in December 2021, the refugee camp had less than 400 people, mostly from Central America or from internal displacement forced by criminal violence in Mexico. My presence there was as a volunteer to assist in the counseling provided by the Baja Californian lawyer to whom I referred in the introduction and the previous section, in the framework of a “day of services” provided by various civil society organizations. This was the last in a series of interventions that began in the spring of 2021, when a group of Mexican and US organizations (Psychologists Without Borders, Border Line Crisis Center, etc.) formed the Chaparral Humanitarian Alliance (CHA) to provide direct assistance to the migrants in the camp. The CHA provided “comprehensive care” consisting of psychosocial support, medical assistance, and the legal processing of the exception introduced in May 2021 to Title 42, thanks to an agreement between the US government and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Through this exception, the opportunity was created for a number of migrants with certain vulnerability profiles to enter US territory on a daily basis to pursue their legal asylum procedures (Torre 2022, p. 13).

The exception to Title 42 led to a new configuration of delivery. The US government left it up to various civil associations—including those of the CHA and the legal services organization I collaborated with in 2019—to identify and screen migrants with suitable profiles, whose cases they would send to the ACLU before this, in turn, referred them to US authorities. The government did not even provide guidelines on how to screen vulnerable profiles for admission, so each NGO implemented its own questionnaires and criteria according to the area, specialization, or type of activism it was most focused on (medical-humanitarian, legal, psychosocial, etc.). According to the guidelines chosen by each organization, the migrants in the camp presented themselves as people who did not speak Spanish, who belonged to the LGBTI community, who had suffered threats in Mexico, pregnant women, seriously ill, etc. (Torre 2022, p. 17).

Hundreds of people were thus able to cross into the USA, including those who had resettled in the El Chaparral camp after waiting for years in Tijuana for their asylum applications to be reactivated. Faced with the large influx of people, attracted by the possibility of the legal process, some civil organizations stopped providing their “vulnerability qualification” services at the camp, considering their work with those who had formed it since its inception to be concluded. The situation worsened after the exception to Title 42 was cancelled by the US authorities in August 2021, since the Biden administration has not reactivated the asylum processes since then, not even in the limited and tortuous way that was done during the administration of his predecessor in the White House with the metering system and the MPPs (Torre 2022, pp. 15–19).

During the December 2021 service day, the counseling in which I participated included telling the people settled in El Chaparral that, until further notice, no more asylum applications would be accepted in the USA: They could “prepare everything” for when—or if—the process restarted, in addition to finding alternative residency options for the precarious camp in the face of the imminent onset of winter. Once the day was over, during a conversation between members of some of the participating organizations, one of them commented: “not even the model of the Migrant Defense Coalition is useful anymore.” The shelters and reception spaces in Tijuana are saturated, and there is not enough or affordable housing for most of the migrants. My interlocutors spoke of an “unsustainable situation” in the city, blaming the government for always being on the back foot and not acting “until the crisis erupts.”Footnote 31

Conclusions

Many critical studies of border regimes imply a normative message, yet this is seldom justified and its conclusions are hardly made explicit (Hoesch and Laube 2019, p. 3). If “humanitarianism” is a domain of government deployed as a complement to border control, then what position do we adopt with regard to the intervention of humanitarian actors? As Redfield observes, “Even critics of humanitarianism rarely embrace openly antihumanitarian alternatives, such as the conscious sacrifice of individuals or populations for material or political gain” (2005, p. 348). If I were to express my own stance, I would say that many activist interventions—including many humanitarian actions—are defensible, among other reasons, because they contribute to the creation of conditions for the relative empowerment of migrants and refugees in contexts that are hostile or unfamiliar to them; that when, in our authoritative voices, scholars speak of such interventions as part of an order of global domination, we intervene in political contests with profound consequences for those whose efforts and convictions we thus call into question; and that, therefore, domino-centric representations are politically counterproductive and ethically questionable, as well as empirically partial.

Rather than being explained, “humanitarianism”—or all that is grouped under this term—is often replaced by a function expressed in terms of artifacts of power—for example, the reproduction of control practices and effects—so that we do not get to know it substantially, in terms of its properties, beyond its supposed political utilities and instrumental effects; these effects, like those of aid policy in general, have to be socially produced by a host of intermediary actors (Mosse 2005a, 2005b, p. 15). It is necessary to understand the configuration of borders not only as privileged regulatory devices but also as welfare and socio-legal spaces, from the perspective of the mundane events and relations of institutional life, organizational dynamics, and service provision through complex modalities of advocacy, state arrangements, citizen participation, activism, and community work.

We can situate these relations and practices along a continuum between, on the one hand, the biopolitical experience of migrants in a state of exception and, on the other, their legal, political, and social inclusion in terms of equality. In their cooperation with actors belonging to other modes of governance, activists and humanitarian workers may come close to legitimizing or reproducing the subordinate inclusion, control, and regulation of human (im)mobilities. It must still be recognized that the work of activists and NGOs can be incorporated into the mechanisms and strategies of interception, deportation, and resettlement coordinated by intergovernmental agreements so that complex relations between the provision of services and the production of governable subjects can occur in contemporary militarized borders.

It is, therefore, necessary not to disregard a possible link between the notions of governance inspired by political theory and the definition I have privileged here. The use of the term to refer to institutionalized modes of social action aimed at the provision of collective services also implies the production and implementation of binding norms, regulatory programs, and governmental codes, or rationalities. Yet “getting inside” activist organizations and groups allows us to explore also how people have the practical knowledge necessary to deliberately create and use space for change. My more empirically friendly understanding of governance thus leaves open the question of whether, and to what extent, the people to whom such codes and rules are addressed show obedience and conformity to them. This would make it possible to address a more complex view of humanitarianism and other forms of activism “as a field which exists in a permanent state of co-option, infiltration but also provocation with the state (but also with other supranational and international entities as well)” (Walters 2011, p. 149).