Lockdown and the list: Mexican refugees,asylum denial,and the feminist geopolitics of esperar (waiting/hoping)

Introduction: Waiting for number 4499

Cristina waits. She sits outside the unmarked private shelter in a small Mexican town along the Arizona-Sonora border. ¹ She worries about her adolescent children; they have missed so much school. And she worries how she will get them to her family in Chicago. A year and a half ago María Cristina fled her hometown of Morelos, Mexico. Her husband Ángel, a construction worker, disappeared after passing through a “cartel-controlled” town in Guerrero. Unlike many families too fearful to report the disappearance of their loved ones, María Cristina pushed for a formal investigation. The death threats were immediate, including texts depicting dismembered bodies. She was later instructed to file a complaint in the town where her husband disappeared, but the ‘commander’ from the Policía Comunitaria who followed her case was himself murdered, and the evidence destroyed. She fled with her children to a nearby town. For a while she was able to hide there. After she changed her national ID address to register her children for school, the cartel found her. A man wielding a gun showed up at her home threatening: “You are too young to die, and you have two very beautiful children… your whole family will be gone. You have been warned.” María Cristina left for the border that day with her children. She hoped to request asylum and accept an offer of assistance from family in the US.

Each day now, as she waits, María Cristina hopes. She hopes for notice that it is their turn to cross into the US and apply for asylum. But while the process is enshrined in international law, with defined criteria for rights and protections, this is not the case on the ground. During the Trump administration a range of draconian immigration policies were implemented. These aimed to close the border to refugees - a form of de facto asylum denial. For thousands of asylum-seekers then, lockdown started long before the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of these policies, a new, informal refugee system is in place. María Cristina has been told she must add her name to a now-infamous lista de espera. She finds the new process opaque, the people managing the list unclear and corrupt, and the timeline undetermined. But she follows these new rules obediently. And, like many other asylum-seekers suspended in this protracted limbo, she can cite without hesitation her number: 4499. She recalls the day in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic descended, when the US border closed to asylum-seekers. That day “la lista” stopped at 3870 – placing María Cristina and her family 629 people away from safety. With no other options, she continues to wait.

María Cristina’s story is neither rare nor extraordinary. Over the last 2 years, our binational interdisciplinary team of Mexican and US-based scholars have documented hundreds of narratives of Mexican children, women, and families like hers who are waiting and hoping (Torres et al., 2021a, 2021b). Thousands of asylum-seekers have been illegally funneled onto makeshift waiting lists by US and Mexican authorities, who work in cooperation with the humanitarian aid sector. These lists emerged to bring a semblance of order to the chaos of the “orchestrated bottlenecks” of refugees (Human Rights Watch, 2018) already stranded for months, and sometimes years, as a result of draconian US immigration policies (American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), 2021). The haphazard lists took different forms across different border communities, and were managed by diverse state and non-state actors, including migrants themselves. The lockdown and death of asylum (Mountz, 2020) at the US southern border, while non-linear, chaotic, and uneven, has been a gradual continuum of the closure and denial. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt the final blow.

María Cristina and thousands of other displaced Mexicans (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2021) are the “invisible refugees” ² historically excluded from the US asylum system, and generally erased from policy, academic, and media attention (Torres et al., 2021a, 2021b). Women and children form the majority of asylum-seekers waiting “their turn” in the shelters where we worked along the Sonora-Arizona border. Single or widowed mothers seek safety there from gendered and child-focused violence. The drivers and impacts of displacement are different from men, and women also exhibit different kinds of agency and responsibility as they wait. They often take the lead in negotiating their place on the lists and securing the material and emotional needs of their family. The testimonials of internally displaced Mexicans, children and adults, depict a nightmarish constellation of intersecting violences in their home communities. These women survivors describe living under spectacular cartel violence and everyday terrorism in spaces of impunity where the state-criminal nexus is deeply entrenched (International Crisis Group (ICG), 2015, 2020; Schmidt and Spector, 2020; Slack, 2019). The majority are from Guerrero, where María Cristina’s husband Ángel was abducted and disappeared. This state is now recognized as Mexico’s epicenter of organized crime (ICG, 2020) and a “neglected displacement crisis” (Deslandes, 2020). At the root of the violence is a complex confluence of historical conflicts (Glockner, 2008; Illades and Santiago, 2015) and, more recently, cartel co-optation and control of traditional small-holder poppy growing regions to feed US demand for heroin (Glockner et al., under review).

In this article we engage María Cristina’s experience through a feminist geographic lens. We examine her slow and unclear path to asylum, recognizing it as one part of the intermingled cartel, state, and intra-state violence she, her children, and the larger community of asylum-seekers experience. In particular, we analyze the fallout of lockdown via “metering” and the “Migrant Protection Protocol” (MPP) prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and later, as the pandemic unfolded, via the deployment of Title 42 expulsions. Here we attend to the intimate geopolitics of la(s) lista(s) de espera that emerged in the wake of these policies. We examine their management, the networks of humanitarian and government agencies, organizations and individuals that maintained, sustained, and exploited them, and the impacts on asylum-seekers. We argue that these lists emerged as an extra-legal response to pre- and post-pandemic US immigration policies and were implemented with the explicit intent of shutting down the border to deny asylum to refugees. In this way we demonstrate that the lists served as an everyday technique of bureaucratic governance, disciplining asylum-seeking bodies (especially women and children) through prolonged waiting in lockdown. Yet we also show how the lists became a source of hope to asylum-seekers, who appropriated them for rights-claims, legibility, and to resist the hierarchies of the US nation-state and its territorial impositions. Our work complicates and extends established political geographic analysis of migration by attending to the interscalar, quotidian, and embodied realities of border practice – manifest amidst today’s lockdown by the slow violences of waiting.

A feminist geopolitics of border bureaucracy, lockdown, and waiting

Geographers researching migration show how state borders and bordering projects extend beyond and within territorial lines of the nation-state. In doing so, these projects not only reorganize how we understand the spatialities of border and territory, but also the sites, scales, and actors involved in their production. Increasingly, border projects involve various agencies with overlapping legal jurisdictions and contradictory social mandates. These include local police forces in the interior of the US (Coleman, 2007); humanitarian, security, and surveillance institutions in southern Mexico (Hiemstra, 2019; Walker, 2018); and intergovernmental and local civil society organizations in the EU-Mediterranean region (Collyer, 2016). Work on the US-Mexico border, in particular, has shown how such bureaucratic devices can operate via spatial and temporal bordering to block access to Mexican asylum-seekers (Slack, 2019; Slack and Martínez, 2021). But of particular note is scholarship on the “slippages” and “incoherences” that occur when regulatory management of borders slides between scales and institutions (Walker, 2018). This work valuably highlights the interplay of formal and informal organizational practices shaped by “intermeshing hierarchies and networks that transcend national borders and public/private divides” (Kuus, 2020: 119). As political geographers have shown, the hierarchies shaping bureaucratic power extend beyond what is considered the formal political orbit to include technological, cultural, and local factors in the implementation of official policy. Even when the standardization of governance tools is the goal, it is often in tension with informal policies and practices within and outside of official bureaucratic organizations. These can mimic, transform, or dilute institutional power in intended and unintended ways (Collyer, 2016; Kuus, 2020; Walker, 2018). Our research engages this work, centering the practice of list-making by formal and informal regulators of migration. This body of work helps us understand lists as bureaucratic tools meant to classify, standardize, and order, while remaining flexible, indefinite, and open. They operate thus, with the “logic of possible infinite addition” and localized interpretation as they are put to use (De Goede and Sullivan, 2016). Importantly, this research complicates the tendency for political analysis to center state power only. Instead, political geography opens up space to examine how non-governmental organizations, agencies, and individuals informally use devices like la lista as tactics of diversion and delay to block migrants’ legal claims for asylum.

María Cristina’s story demands that scholars of border politics interrogate the violent and everyday spatialities of waiting and hoping on the border. A feminist political geographic approach offers vital guidance here. Feminist geographers Pain and Cahill (2021) examine the spatialities of slow violence and resistance, revealing hidden, connected and multi-sited violences, and always centering the grounded experiences of those most affected. Central here is an intimate-geopolitical approach to scale, one that understands macro, and often abstracted, geoeconomic and geopolitical processes, practices and outcomes as deeply embodied (Faria, 2017; Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Smith, 2012). This approach asserts that we cannot understand formalized political processes or legal frameworks, such as migration policy, without attending to the visceral, enacted, and affective experiences of individuals and communities “(and non-human entities)” (Sundberg, 2011). This demands attention to how intersectional power - the connected work of racism, sexism, patriarchy, heteronormativity nationalism, speciesism, antiBlack and indigenous humanism, and ableism for example, operate together to produce, reinforce and reiterate violent politics. Along with others (e.g Christian and Dowler, 2019), they powerfully demonstrate the inextricable ties between state and intimate violence. Their work helps us understand normalized bureaucratic and legal practice as violence, to recognize the viscerality of state and organized crime’s aggressions, and to attend to the ways that “private” violence are bound up with the possibilities for, or restrictions from, asylum. Specifically, feminist political geographers insightfully examine the embodied practices of international asylum law and immigration enforcement, uncovering often-hidden rights violations (Williams and Coddington, 2021). Chief among the embodied experiences of migrants navigating immigration institutions is the act of waiting. Feminist geographic work makes clear that the move to wait is not an aberration but rather is a de facto norm for displaced asylum-seekers (Hiemstra, 2019; Hyndman, 2019; Maillet et al., 2018). Bordering bureaucracies strategically stretch the “tunnels'' of legal entry into a nation-state state (Maillet et al., 2018; Mountz, 2011), requiring migrants to remain in “protracted uncertainty” until their cases are resolved (Biehl, 2015; Loyd et al., 2018; París, 2020). This temporal suspension of mobility works in tandem with spatial ambiguities concerning when, where, and how migrants may make claims for legal admission to a country (Biehl, 2015; Conlon, 2011; Ehrkamp, 2017; Loyd et al., 2018; Mountz, 2011; Mountz and Hiemstra, 2014). In turn, while the act of waiting might be seen as an “appropriate” (non-threatening, passive, feminized) means of achieving legal entry to a country (Hyndman and Giles, 2011), it extends the time spent sitting with painful emotions like uncertainty or despair. In this time, migrants sometimes choose to give up their claims, voluntarily return or otherwise “get out of line” to keep moving through extra-legal channels. This often risks further exposure to harm (Hyndman and Giles, 2011; Ilcan, 2020; Mountz and Hiemstra, 2014).

Feminist political geography helps us understand how waiting operates both as a disciplinary state practice and as an outcome of exclusion and state withdrawal (Conlon, 2011). Importantly, feminist scholarship also makes clear that waiting is not simply a passive process in which migrants are subjected to the state’s disciplining power (Ehrkamp, 2020). Rather, and as we argue here, in waiting, individuals can reflect, organize, and re-assert claims that challenge nation-state (b)orderings. In fact, our research investigates how standardizing tools of the state, such as lists, are appropriated by migrant populations to adapt to emerging constraints and to make their claims visible and legible to state institutions. At the same time, these lists defy the legal standards of nation-states, instead suggesting self-defined visions of belonging that move beyond statist notions of territory.

Methodology: The geographies of Mexican displacement project

The data used here draws from our ongoing (2019–2023) bi-national “geographies of displacement” research on the feminist geopolitics of Mexico-US migration, asylum, and detention. This project focuses on forced displacement, the nexus between displacement, internal migration, and international migration, and access to immigration relief for Mexican youth and families. We center the border regions of Sonora-Arizona and Chihuahua-Texas. The project integrates researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (UT), Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (CINVESTAV), El Colegio de Sonora (Colson), and the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) along with 22 bi-national working group members, including lawyers, activists, and other migration professionals and advocates. In particular, this article utilizes quantitative and qualitative data collected between 2019 and 2021 in Nogales, Arizona and the wider Sonora-Arizona borderland region. This included: 63 oral history interviews with displaced families and teenagers (12–17 years), one with an unaccompanied child, 14 interviews with young adults in Guerrero (the primary home-region of asylum-seeking study participants), and 91 interviews with shelter staff and other key informants along the Sonora-Arizona border. This was complemented by workshops and art-based participatory research, participant observation in three shelters and other border spaces, and the collection and analysis of primary and secondary quantitative and qualitative data on border politics, migration, detention, and shelter records.

Our analysis follows feminist geographic concerns with the everyday and embodied techniques of border governance. In the formalized, state-sanctioned context of metering policies, the MPP, and Trump’s weaponization of COVID-19 via Title 42, we examine the informal bordering techniques that emerged in their wake. We do so via an examination of the formation and management of las listas de espera used by municipal Mexican governments, NGOs, and US border patrol agents to discipline and hold-back Mexican women and children’s bodies. Last, we attend to the intimate geographies of esperar. We examine the embodied impacts of waiting/hoping for families like María Cristina’s, as well as their “agency in displacement” (Ilcan, 2020) as these women navigate the aggressive practices of US-Mexican border control.

Everyday bordering: Lock-down, asylum denial, and the rise of la(s) lista(s)

It’s just cover for an agenda that the White House has been having for a long time. Even before COVID – MPP, the transit agreements (asylum bans), etc. – all of that was part of it making it difficult for people to seek protection and to deter immigration. So, this pandemic was a perfect opportunity for them to say, “Oooooh, we don’t have to take them in. We don’t even have to deal with it in the longer term” (Grace, Arizona, NGO Immigration Attorney, 5/27/2020).

In the last 5–6 years, two connected policies have definitively restricted Mexico-US border movement for asylum-seekers and underpin the formation of Las listas: Metering and MPP. “Metering” was introduced by the US Customs and Border Protection in 2016 and was widely adopted at key crossing sites by 2018. Metering empowered CBP field officers to set limits on the numbers of asylum seekers who could be processed each day (Owen, 2018). This was followed in 2019 by the MPP (Migrant Protection Protocol) in January 2019 (American Immigration Council (AIC), 2021b). Popularly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, this forced would-be asylum-seekers from non-contiguous countries to have their claims processed in that country, instead of the US. Both MPP and metering created, reinforced, and routinized (in)formal cooperation and infrastructure deployed by US and Mexican authorities to stop, manage, and deter refugees from seeking asylum in the US.

Metering and MPP are designed to make migrants wait, and have each received widespread criticism. Metering was implemented under the guise of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) lack of processing capacity. However, this was debunked in a 2018 DHS internal investigation which found that daily processing was well below capacity, and that 7 of the 24 Southwest Borderland ports of entry were closed to all asylum-seekers (Cuffari, 2021). In fall 2021 metering was ruled an illegal practice in federal court (AILA, 2021; Al Otro Lado et al. vs Mayorkas et al., 2021). While not officially applying to Mexicans, MPP, along with metering, created the bottlenecks, waiting lists, and infrastructure that forced Mexican nationals to remain in their country of persecution (AIC, 2020; Human Rights First, 2019; Leutert et al., 2019). Biden attempted to suspend MPP but the program has faced continued litigation. Currently, the vast majority of asylum-seekers at the US southern border are still turned away, now due to Title 42 public health restrictions. Women and children have been particularly impacted by these shifts. A disproportionate number of those locked-in-place are women and children. They are displaced by narco-state terrorism entangled with normalized, intimate gendered violences. Leaving the violence of home to protect children, and caring for them while indeterminately waiting in extremely difficult shelter conditions, means women bear the disproportionate burden of displacement.

La(s) Lista(s) emerged in the wake of metering, as part of a pact between Mexican authorities and the US CBP. They grew in importance with the deployment of MPP. Understanding the lists from this policy perspective, they clearly emerge as a technology of governance via waiting. The lists dovetailed effectively with these policy measures, providing municipal leaders, NGOs and even groups of asylum-seekers themselves, with a short-term emergency response to manage the sudden restrictions they caused (AILA, 2021; Human Rights Watch, 2018). Unlike the top-down, seemingly orderly waiting lists typically created and controlled by states for post-disaster governance and humanitarian aid elsewhere (Sökefeld, 2020), the listas de espera in northern Mexican border communities formed a haphazard patchwork. They took on many configurations: sometimes run by Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM), Mexican municipalities, shelters, humanitarian organizations, or even by migrants themselves (Leutert et al., 2019). They appeared and disappeared, saw sometimes mysterious changes in order, and regularly changed hands.

We started conducting interviews on the eve of the pandemic, in late 2019 and early 2020. By then, many had been in the shelters for a year or more, and the waiting list process had become dominant. Primarily, the shelters were filled with women and children fleeing violence in their communities. While illegal CBP turn-backs and “express deportations” of Mexican nationals were reported (AIC, 2020, 2021a; Amnesty International, 2021; Human Rights First, 2019), and confirmed in informants’ interviews (e.g. Mariana, NGO Administrator, 6/9/2020; Diego, Soup Kitchen/Shelter Social Worker, 7/9/2020; Daniel, INM Official, 8/19/2020), most study families had limited contact with CBP officials. Instead, they had been intercepted by either Mexican INM officers or municipal police before they could reach the border. They were informed they could not approach the port of entry, and should sign up on a waiting list run by the municipality. This was the case for María Cristina. When she and her children reached the border in late January 2020, they were prevented by Mexican municipal police from reaching the US port of entry on foot to request asylum. She explained to the police, “I have come to seek asylum. My life and those of my children are in danger. I am fleeing my country and place of origin.” The Mexican agents explained the “new process.” When they attempted again, walking where cars were passing, the police warned, “Señora, understand you need to wait or we are going to arrest you and send your kids to DIF [Mexican equivalent of Child Protective Services]” (9/29/2020).

Many others recounted similar experiences, each forcibly stopped by Mexican officials from reaching US entry ports via direct orders, threats, and intimidation. Here, distinctly gendered threats were used to make asylum-seekers wait. Mothers were often told CBP would separate them from their children if they approached the border. Not only were Mexican nationals illegally blocked by Mexican officials, but so too were their US citizen children (e.g Ramon (15) born in Austin, Texas, 8/19/2020; Alicia (14) born in Florida, 11/7/2020). Typically, however, interviewees detailed a more cordial exchange where Mexican authorities matter-of-factly explained that there was a new system and they would now be given a number on “the list”. Marlene, a young mother of three from Guerrero described her interaction with local authorities:

He was a Mexican (official). He says “no one passes through here, only those who have papers. If you want at 7 a.m. tomorrow, someone who gives numbers will come so that you can request asylum but it’s going to take months waiting… if you just go they will just throw you out.” So, we paid attention to the official, and I told my kids, “Well, we have no other option but to wait until they say we can go – we can’t break their laws over there. Maybe here (in the border town) we’ll be safer and those people will no longer find us, because it’s far away and we aren’t going around announcing where we are.”         (Marlene, from Guerrero, Mexico, 9/16/2020).

Marlene’s words summon the ambivalence of espera in Las Listas. To wait, yes, but also to hope. Because of that hope, and like all others who signed up for waiting lists, Marlene provided her and her children’s personal information, the address of the shelter where they were staying, and contact information to the Mexican official charged with running the list.

As time progressed, we noted more people who never even attempted to approach the US port of entry, or did so only to get on the list rather than attempt to ask for asylum. By then, the informal waiting lists had hardened and become formal practice. Taxi drivers, shelter workers, humanitarian aid organizations, and other asylum-seekers informed newly arriving migrants that the process was to get a number, get on the list, and wait their turn. Some believed this in fact initiated the formal asylum process, others recognized this as the de facto alternative now that the border was effectively closed to asylum applications. Indeed, Mexican authorities were so effective at blocking the port of entry for nationals seeking asylum that, over time, our interviewees rarely spoke of interactions with CBP at all.

Managing La(s) Lista(s): Humanitarianism, corruption, and the currencies of waiting

In the communities we worked with, waiting lists were managed by a range of actors and agencies. We found lists held in municipal authorities, INM, shelters, humanitarian organizations like Grupo Beta (humanitarian arm of Mexico’s immigration agency), with a Mexican asylum-seeking family, and with a guard in charge of taking people’s coins at the international bridge. In one community the list was run by Tomás, the director of a private shelter located miles from the port of entry. His was a simple, handwritten paper ledger which, he said, he guards in a safe in his private home in the country.

That shelters and humanitarian agencies are managing some of the lists exemplify what McNevin and Missbach (2018), in their work on Indonesian refugee camps, call “the humanitarianization of waiting”. In the US-Mexican case, we extend this to suggest a “bureaucratization of waiting”. While allegedly for humanitarian purposes it in fact enables a normalization of informal migration governance mechanisms, which block the right to asylum. Indeed, as the lists became the de facto approach to asylum, this once-informal, yet imposed, tool became enmeshed in formal, state-managed border policy. Local list managers began to coordinate with CBP agents daily to determine who could approach the port of entry to seek asylum. Tomás, the shelter director introduced above, said that local US Border Patrol station contacted him directly each day, providing the number of people it could accept. The director then determined what combination of families and individuals at the top of the list would reach that limit. To curb demand for shelter services in the region, he devised a system whereby asylum-seekers could register with his list prior to traveling to the border. He then messaged them when their number got closer, allowing them to shelter in place or seek shelter closer to home (8/19/2020).

Over and over, asylum-seekers described being informed of “the process” on arrival at shelters, Grupo Beta, soup kitchens and, in rare instances, the US port of entry. One migrant, Ramon recalled: numbers are allocated on “Tuesdays from 7 a.m. until 9 a.m.; [we are given] the phone numbers for political asylum, and the attorney named Roberto – who is the one who hands out numbers; you have no choice but to wait your turn.” (Ramon (15), 8/19/2020). Fifteen-year-old Sinaí, her mother, and five siblings (12–23 years old) had been waiting in the shelter for 8 months. The family left their highland community in Guerrero after her uncles were murdered, and a man attempted to rape her seventeen-year-old sister near their home. Sinaí recalled a taxi driver telling the family where to walk along the road to reach the US port of entry:

We were almost entering the US. But the guard (CBP) told us we needed papers to enter and it was better to go back. And there were the Mexican guards who told us we needed to wait for Roberto to give us a number if we wanted to request asylum. So, there we waited like three, 4 hours in the terrible cold. We were there with all our things waiting for him. (8/25/2020).

Roberto, the bureaucrat Ramon and Sinaí describe, was indeed tasked with list-keeping in his role as administrative assistant to the municipal president. His name was mentioned in nearly all the interviews, with both children and adults, with familiarity, ambivalence, and sometimes disdain. The young bureaucrat would arrive with his notebook-in-hand between 6 and 9 a.m. to a makeshift space in the shelter. There, asylum-seekers lined up to receive a number or check on the progress of the list. Included in the personal information he collected were WhatsApp numbers that he used to communicate with thousands of asylum-seekers.

Several accounts confirmed this kind of bureaucratization of waiting: the coordination between US and Mexican authorities to funnel asylum-seekers to the lists and deny direct entry into the US. And like the case described by Sinaí and Ramon, we found widespread examples where international humanitarian organizations, local NGOs, and shelters either looked the other way, or validated the lists by integrating them into the daily rhythms and operations of shelter life. In defending the lists, NGO and shelter staff argued it was the only way forward, incapable or unwilling to challenge the status quo. They argued that they brought organization to the confusion created by the backlog, allowing humanitarian organizations and government agencies to coordinate their services. Staggering the number of migrants travelling to the border each day alleviated the burden on services there and reduced the time migrants spend in one of the most violent locations in the hemisphere. In turn, channeling clients onto the lists also served to quell anxieties and conveyed some hope. To some extent they also discouraged dangerous attempts at crossing, undocumented, in the company of unscrupulous smugglers. Staff in humanitarian organizations and shelters reasoned that people on the lists had indeed been called and that some had successfully made it into the US. And though never articulated directly, women and children formed the majority of listees, and their assumed docility and pliability surely made this an easier assertion to make. But while often well-intentioned, humanitarian groups embedded in the formalized migration management process have in fact played a critical role in normalizing the everyday violation of asylum-seekers’ rights and perpetuating the bureaucratic violence of list-keeping and waiting.

Asylum-seekers have not only been forced to wait at the border. They are forced to hope. They are also often misled to believe that placing their name on the list is equivalent to formally commencing the asylum process, and that their right would be guaranteed. As such, the management of waiting, and the bodies of waiting migrants, has taken on varied kinds of currency in border towns. Asylum-seekers often have no option to return home. Thirty-five-year-old Javier, who fled Michoacán, notes. “If I could return to my community, if there wasn’t what there is [cartel violence], I would be there. I wouldn’t need to go anywhere, not the United States, not any other part of the world” (11/8/2020). But instead he, and many others, must flee, and wait. And as they wait they form a captive labor force for exploitative working conditions, are targeted by cartels for drug and human trafficking, and have become a lucrative revenue source for slumlords. In turn, the lists themselves are incredibly valuable. Sometimes, these informally managed lists contain the personal information of thousands of people, such as full names, family members traveling together, and contact numbers. Until the pandemic, and while restricted, they could still powerfully determine access to asylum in the US. Unsurprisingly then, access to and control of the lists is highly sought-after and their management is vulnerable to manipulation.

Reports of corruption were openly aired, prolific, and consistent. Most typically, list managers were paid to move individuals and families up the lists. For example, Demetria, a member of the Ñomndaa (Amuzgo) indigenous group from the highlands of Guerrero, was placed 3,807th on the local waiting list. She expressed dismay when she learned an acquaintance behind her reached the US by paying the local Mexican police US $1500 for adults and US $3000 per child. She explained that “the police have contact with Roberto and they can change the numbers so those who pay go next when border patrol calls with openings” (11/10/2019, and 9/3/2020). Roberto, the list manager introduced above, was often featured but his actions were by no means unusual. María Cristina noted, “Roberto asks for money in exchange for moving numbers up the list… People asked, ‘how is it possible that they have a number after mine and they have already passed?’” She explained that Roberto was often accompanied by municipal police who would intimidate people if they tried to ask questions or seek clarity (11/29/2020). Corruption was not limited to those physically proximate to the border, with reports of “turns” on the list being sold as far away as Tapachula (Fieldnotes Shelter Group Discussion, 2/12/2021).

Corruption occurs in other ways too. The information they hold could put many in danger if the lists fell into the hands of cartels seeking out particular migrants on their hit lists. Asylum-seekers recognize these dangers. In Marlene’s case, she provided details of her home address to Mexican officials in a border community where it is widely known that the mayor and much of the leadership are cartel members. This was a common fear amongst interviewees. In turn, given the corruption bound up with the lists, and the massive scale of migrants this system must now support, some list managers carry a heavy burden and are deeply ambivalent about their role. This was particularly articulated by shelter directors and individual migrants who argued that the lists placed them in the cross-hairs of criminal organizations seeking to extort them. Shelter director Tomás carries a gun with him at all times. He regularly receives threats from organized crime groups who want access to the document (8/19/2020). Because of the violence and corruption posed by this system, the lists regularly change hands. This further hinders the confidentiality of those named on the lists, and deepens the overall opacity of the process, opening the system to yet more corruption. And while many international and domestic humanitarian agencies do not want to touch them because of these issues, many formal migrant services, including shelters, remain deeply embroiled in their use.

Clearly, espera - waiting, hoping, expecting - has great currency. Local officials, shelter directors, US attorneys, asylum-seekers, and NGOs were all aware of the corruption surrounding the lists. Meetings organized by civil society and federal government entities in Sonora and Chihuahua centered the problem. However, there is little agreement on how to address it. In one community, immigrant services members have attempted to wrestle the list away from the local government. However, given the municipal president’s known ties to organized crime and the local cartel, this is a risky and slow endeavor.

Trauma and resistance: The intimate geographies of esperar

Esperar in Spanish has a double meaning: “to wait”, but also “to hope.” This captures the dual and embodied inscriptions of the Lista(s) de Espera upon asylum-seekers. They work as a disciplinary tool of governance that entraps them at the border. But they are also imbued with the possibility of something better to come, a device to be negotiated, managed, and leveraged as a tool of resistance. Possibility (esperar, to wait/to expect), and esperanza, hope. We turn here to asylum-seekers’ lived experience in lockdown. We deepen our gendered analysis furter, attending to the emotional and psychological impacts of the lists and the ways that they offer women, in particular, “agency in displacement” (Ilcan, 2020).

First here, waiting in border regions can be incredibly dangerous, even lethal, for asylum-seekers. Like so many hiding in the border shelters, Rosanna lives with the very real fear of being discovered by her persecutors. She fled from the Costa Grande region of western Guerrero because of kidnappings and escalating violence in her community, and the direct threats made to her daughter’s father. Reflecting on her decision, Rosanna noted, “what future waits for [my child] in La Unión [a municipality in Guerrero]? Only that they rape her, murder her, turn her into a slave, or who knows what. All for what? For her father’s problems… and she has never had contact with him.” Rather than wait for this inevitability, she left, but fears that cartel members will find her on the border. This concern is exacerbated by the need to register children for school, which exposes their location. She sighs, “we are risking our lives here waiting… I don’t want to be here… it is a time bomb. It could be tomorrow or the day after, or in 20 minutes or 20 days” (Rosanna, from Guerrero, Mexico, 2/20/2020).

More quotidian factors also bear down on women as they wait. The demoralizing lack of privacy, strict rules, and limited personal freedom of shelter life weighs heavily – resulting in conflicts between residents and even within familial groups. Single mothers in shelters fear their children will be abused or sexually assaulted in their absence if they take outside jobs. Most have lost a year or more of education. Many will likely never return to school. As to the emotional toll, the multiple levels of trauma experienced by this entire population cannot be overstated. And while the list and “the number” provides some hope, the prolonged waiting in lockdown has resulted in anguish and desperation. Many have untreated PTSD, anxiety, depression, and in some cases suicidal thoughts/attempts. Further, we witnessed first-hand the re-traumatization of many asylum-seekers in response to new policies that clearly erased them. At a therapeutic workshop with author 3 (Nińo-Vega), a psychologist, several mothers wrote about their frustration and anxiety about this. One noted, “I am desperate not knowing if we are going to get out of here soon. I have been waiting a long time for them to give us some hope that we will arrive at our destination [in the US]. Up until now we still know nothing.” Another mother, also from Guerrero, wrote in one reflection of her “thoughts of desperation, sadness, rage and anger…” (Fieldnotes, 3/19/2021). After waiting for so long to “do it the right way” through formal channels, there are now few clear paths to asylum or safety.

Despite these incredibly negative impacts, elements of the lists also reflect migrant agency and resistance. The lists made them visible and legible to local officials and humanitarian agencies, despite the lack of formal legal entitlement. Signing up was a way of making claims on the state and asserting their right to petition for legal standing. Having a number legitimized their position as “real” law abiding refugees who wait their turn, as opposed to those crossing undocumented. The refugee subjectivity is relatively recent among Mexicans, with asylum applications increasing precipitously only since 2015 (TRAC, 2021). In conversations, many evoked tropes of the “good migrant”, doing it “legally” and the “right way.” They believe by “following the rules” they strengthen their rights claims and authenticity as asylum-seekers. María Cristina pointedly told us, “I am a good person, I am waiting my turn”. Her sister and sponsor in Chicago told her “Ask for it [asylum] so you can enter legally – you need to do it the right way” (9/29/2020).

In turn, while waiting is an emotional, spatial, and temporal device of immigration control, this could be subverted or managed by asylum-seekers themselves. Where asylum-seekers took leadership in reinforcing, policing, and managing the lists, they could be co-opted to self-discipline, create order, and make themselves legible to US and Mexico border authorities. For example, a young couple migrating with their eight year-old son, originally from the Tierra Caliente region of Guerrero, came to be in charge of a list in a remote Sonora-Arizona crossing outpost. A vacuum in list control emerged amidst conflicts between previous administrators. The husband Marcelo noted, “we started to guard the line because a lot of people were just going directly up to [US] Immigration. So, [then] we had [more] order with the list and we decided the list would go to whoever was up next, whoever was number one would get the list. So now I am one and I have the list.” He explained they would approach newcomers and tell them “we are many families here and we have order, we have a list, we invite you to sign up so there are no difficulties” (8/20/2020). The local border patrol station did not recognize the list holder or communicate with him in advance. So, he presented at the border every morning and the officers would inform him of how many could pass that day. The list was a collection of several spiral pages, hundreds of names, that the family recopied by hand each time names were removed. In this and other examples of list management, migrants took control of the lists. In some ways this emerged as a new iteration of border control, with the lists becoming a disciplinary tool of self-surveillance and regulation. As Marcelo noted, “we make them respect the numbers” (8/20/2020). The lists imply that they are following “the rules”. And while the structure is unchanged, at least asylum-seekers themselves have some control and determination. They define the terms for who is added to the list, thus presenting their own notions of who has a right to exist in which places, resisting confines of political boundaries and border governance (Rizzo Lara, 2021). Such agency in list-making points to alternate visions of territorial belonging that are not defined in statist terms, even if statist tools are used to make them legible.

In these ways, the list and the waiting it incurs, could create a deeper threat to asylum-seekers. But they could also create order, solidarity, and a means to organize for legitimacy and rights claims. Women, in particular, described communicating and sharing information via WhatsApp on the status of the waiting list, and coordinating visits to check on the list administrator. Some used shared information about uneven border restrictions to move to different border communities and sign up for various lists (Arnoldo, Grupo Beta Official, 11/28/2019 and Lisa, Asylum-Seeker from Guerrero, 4/1/2021 and 5/19/2021, among others). Women exchanged information and resources and took turns bringing food from the soup kitchens and cooking. Women cared for each other’s children while others worked outside jobs. When the pandemic started, Mexican schools offered classes via televisions which most families did not have access to. Several parents described their children trying to do online lessons with a shared pay for credit cell phone. Mothers banded together, and along with the private religious shelter staff, pressured government authorities to provide a teacher in the facility. The women also organized a small business making embroidered items for outside sale. These activities not only helped meet short-term material needs, they also created friendships, and were a welcome distraction from past traumas, present fears, and the uncertainties ahead.

Life after Las Listas, feminist inventories

Since March of 2020, the Trump administration has deepened the lockdown caused by metering and MPP. The public health emergency of COVID-19 provided the administration with a new instrument to achieve its long-held objective of near total border closure to asylum-seekers. Title 42 enables border patrol to expel anyone who poses a “health risk”. Under this measure, the border patrol used “express deportations,” including of unaccompanied minors, with no screening or due process (Amnesty International, 2021). This stopped any new MPP enrollments and suspended hearings. Most of the waiting lists, and the thousands of names they contained, were frozen or fell out of use (AIC, 2021a). Title 42 effectively shut down the US-Mexico border to migrant and asylum-seeking bodies, creating new states of (im)mobility, insecurity, and lockdown (Blue et al., 2021).

News of the border closure was devastating for the thousands of families that had been waiting, sometimes for over a year and a half, in shelters. Some continue to wait in hope that their place on the lists serves as testimony, legitimizing asylum claims and securing a turn, once processing resumes. Marcelo, having finally risen to number one on the local list, still presents himself and his family at the border at 6:00 a.m., 4 days a week – checking on whether the border has opened to asylum-seekers. The CBP officers consistently tell him “with the Coronavirus they aren’t going to process anything until the situation is under control.” They often give him dates they may open, but it continues to drag on month after month (8/26/2020). Jeni, a young mother from Mexico City, explains that the larger municipal-controlled list she had been on “no longer exists.” She notes, “it’s been many months since the person who had control (Roberto) responds to messages” (11/7/2020). Beatriz, a sixteen year-old girl from Costa Chica, eastern Guerrero, was only 11 numbers away from her “turn.” She describes feeling “…very, very disappointed and angry. We were almost able to … make it and from 1 day to the next they said ‘the garita is closed … now nobody passes.’ Beatriz fled Guerrero when her grandfather was murdered and her family began to receive threats from cartel members. She fears returning. She describes feeling despair with hopes dashed and the daily waiting as “an emotional roller coaster” (9/11/2022). To this day, 1.2 million people have been turned away or expelled based on Title 42. It remains in place under President Biden despite advances in COVID testing and vaccines (AIC, 2021a). Thousands of displaced Mexicans remain in indefinite lockdown as they hide from their persecutors and wait for the border to open to asylum applications.

As the experiences of María Cristina, Beatriz, and so many of the displaced people’s stories we collected make clear, the actually-existing, grounded realities of asylum differ greatly from those rights enshrined in international law. While metering, MPP, and Title 42 policies have been the focus of considerable macro-scale analysis, we understand very little about the everyday and gendered vagaries of daily border waiting lists. A feminist geopolitical approach pays attention both to invisiblized and marginalized subjects such as Mexican asylum-seekers, and to the grounded/de facto ways that borders are policed, and migration is managed via technologies like Las Listas. It focuses our attention on the particular bodies and places that engage these bordering practices, examining the state at the scale of its everyday implementation (Billo and Mountz, 2015; Carte, 2014; Fluri, 2009; Torres, 2018) and it emplaces the production of border-crossing lists without overly fetishizing such tools as apolitical agentive objects. An intimate geopolitics of Las Listas shows us how bordering actually operates, how it is experienced, who it impacts, and how it is, with great difficulty, negotiated. We deploy this lens here, centering the daily management of the lists, their bureaucratization and tacit acceptance by all parties, including the humanitarian aid sector, and their negotiation by asylum seekers. In connection, a great deal of scrutiny has been placed on how the US and Mexico, through policies such as metering and MPP, violate the right to seek asylum under the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees – particularly for Central Americans, Haitians, and Cubans. However, little attention has been paid to Mexico’s violation, amidst US pressure, of its own citizen’s rights to leave their country. Regardless of admissibility, this right is protected in Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Article 12(2) International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Guild and Stoyanova, 2019). We respond here with a focus on Mexican migrant lives. Our intimate accounts of the everyday bordering experienced by Mexican women, children, and families via these lists, exposes quotidian bureaucratic violence, stunning rights violations, and their life and death consequences.

These are all deeply gendered processes, as a feminist lens also make clear. As the geographical contours of Mexican displacement emerge in our wider research we are beginning to unravel the complex layers of violence woven across the landscapes of their home communities. The violence is heavily gendered, with accounts of cartel wars where rape and feminicide are deployed as weapons. Boys and men are forcibly recruited to work for cartels or the auto-defensa community militias. In some places they are embraced as heroes, and in others demonized as criminals indistinguishable from organized cartels. We see women bearing a disproportionate burden of displacement, often widowed or fleeing intimate partner violence that intersects with cartel control, and the organized crime-state nexus of impunity. Understanding these relationships and making them legible to US immigration courts is critical to the asylum process. These gendered vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the formal and informal policies around asylum introduced since 2018, and deepened with the pandemic. In this moment, waiting has become an active form of displacement. This displacement too is gendered, with women playing a key role in securing the material needs of the family – the housing, food, education, and income earning, and building networks with other women to share resources. This solidarity offers comfort and crucial resources as women like María Cristina, and their children, continue to wait, and to hope.