Encroaching Borders and Defenselessness of Migrants at Checkpoints in Southern Mexico

Alethia Fernández de la Reguera

National Autonomous University of Mexico

alethia_reguera@unam.mx

Abstract

After an intimidating experience I had during a checkpoint on the southern border of Mexico in 2023, I began to investigate the prevalence and impacts of immigration checkpoints. Despite having been declared unconstitutional by the Mexican Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (Supreme Court of Justice) in 2022, checkpoints are still one of the most common and least regulated practices to detain people on the move, especially in the context of anti-drug operations. In this paper, I show how checkpoints have become a violent infrastructure dispersed across the Mexican territory. The flexibility and mobility of checkpoints and the actors administering them—governmental actors, extra-legal groups, and criminal networks—expose migrants to racialized and gendered forms of extreme violence and human rights violations. I present the findings of research conducted in 2022 and 2023 in the city of Tapachula, Chiapas, and its surroundings, consisting of participant observation and interviews with migrants who interacted with the Guardia Nacional (National Guard) during waiting, transit, or detention. I also interviewed ten civil society organizations that provide psycho-legal assistance to migrant people detained at checkpoints throughout the country. I analyze how, in hazardous conditions, being stopped in a checkpoint while traveling in Mexican highways can generate intimidation and defenselessness against all kinds of human rights violations.

Resumen

Tras haber vivido una experiencia intimidante durante un control fronterizo en el sur de México en 2023, comencé a investigar la prevalencia y los impactos de los retenes en carreteras para las personas migrantes. A pesar de que en 2022 la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación declaró la inconstitucionalidad de las revisiones migratorias al interior del país, los retenes siguen siendo una de las prácticas más comunes y menos reguladas para detener a las personas en movilidad, especialmente en el contexto de los operativos antidrogas. En este artículo analizo los retenes en carreteras que funcionan como infraestructuras violentas dispersas por todo el territorio mexicano. Tanto su flexibilidad y movilidad, como los actores que los operan—actores gubernamentales, grupos extralegales y redes criminales—exponen a las personas migrantes a formas de violencia racializadas y de género y a serias violaciones de los derechos humanos. Presento los resultados de una investigación realizada en 2022 y 2023 en la ciudad de Tapachula, Chiapas, y sus alrededores, que consistió observación participante y entrevistas con personas migrantes que interactuaron con la Guardia Nacional durante los procesos de espera, tránsito o detención. Incluyo las entrevistas realizadas a diez organizaciones de la sociedad civil que brindan acompañamiento psico-jurídico a personas migrantes detenidas en retenes a lo largo de todo el país. Analizo cómo, en condiciones de riesgo, la detención en un retén por las carreteras mexicanas puede generar intimidación e indefensión ante todo tipo de violaciones de derechos humanos.

Keywords

checkpoints, borders, human rights violations, migrants, infrastructural violence

“Borders are quintessential sites of embodied, material and politicized mobilities of harm; they produce movement and detention, protection and anger, success and failure.”
—Alisa Winton, 2015, “Violence, Borders, and Boundaries: Reframing Young People’s Mobility”, 12.

Introduction

On January 13, 2023, on a fieldwork visit on the southern border of Mexico, I was in Chiapas, traveling from Tapachula to Tuxtla Gutiérrez in a taxi; it was a white car with no taxi logo. I was with my friend and colleague Juan Carlos. The distance between these two cities is approximately 230 miles, and the journey takes just over four hours. We shared the car with two young Ecuadorians traveling with a Forma Migratoria Multiple, a permit the Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) (National Institute of Migration) granted them to stay regularly in Chiapas for thirty days only. As soon as we left Tapachula, we began to pass through checkpoints (eleven in total), an average of one every 20 miles. The Guardia Nacional (National Guard) operated some checkpoints together with the INM and others were operated by the army.¹ Passing Pijijiapan, the taxi driver told the two young men, “They are going to stop us and take your money away.”

After approximately ten minutes, we came across a checkpoint managed by four men dressed in black, one of them hooded, wearing black caps with the Mexican coat of arms in black. They opened the car doors, and when the driver got out, they began to inspect the floor mats and the doors with mirrored poles. They immediately asked us for our IDs. When we asked them to identify themselves, they ignored us. They opened the boot and, in a very disrespectful manner, went through our belongings. My reaction was to get out of the car and ask them why they were doing this search; we demanded again that they identify themselves and show us permission to search the vehicle and personal belongings. One of them, the one who looked like the boss, quickly showed me a credential with the logo of Fiscalía General de la República (General Prosecutor’s Office) and just showed me a document on the screen of his mobile phone. Still, he told me that I couldn’t take pictures of the document and didn’t let me read it. He said it was an anti-drug operation. He didn’t expect Juan and I to get out of the car and demand they identify themselves and show the legal basis for this search. They let us go. Checkpoints have been operating for many years in this area. Migrants know they will be detained and possibly extorted, and local people have also normalized the checkpoint.

Despite my privileged position as an academic woman from Mexico City traveling in my own country, I felt insecure when the vehicle was stopped and inspected. My privilege allowed me to reflect and write about an everyday situation that affects Mexicans and foreigners on Mexico’s roads and has become normalized. While on previous occasions, I had witnessed operations while traveling on buses in Chiapas, on this occasion, the fact that the people who inspected the car were not identified and that everything happened so quickly made me reflect on the lack of accountability and transparency of the operations and the serious repercussions they can have, especially for racialized migrants transiting through Mexico. Daily encounters in checkpoints can end up in extreme forms of violence, especially when the army is involved. Between 2021 and 2024, the National Commission of Human Rights and journalists documented at least three very brazen cases of migrants shot and killed by Mexican authorities while traveling in what could be identified as “suspicious” vehicles (CNDH 2022, 2023). One of the most recent cases happened on October 1, 2024, when the army killed six migrants (including one girl) who were traveling in Chiapas, and twelve people were injured (Rodríguez Mega and Wagner 2024) for being considered suspicious.²

In Mexico, the INM is the only authority responsible for immigration control. The Guardia Nacional is authorized to support the INM in these operations but cannot act independently. As I will further explain, after four decades of militarization at the southern border of Mexico, the Guardia Nacional was created in 2019 and started to conduct immigration control operations initially in coordination with the INM. However, recent research shows that these tasks are not necessarily done in coordination with the INM, but that sometimes the Guardia Nacional acts independently or in collaboration with other authorities such as the army, navy, state police, and municipal police conducting immigration control tasks (FJEED et al. 2021; García Alanís 2024; REDODEM 2023). Immigration control operations (mostly checkpoints and raids) in border areas, on highways, on the outskirts, and inside cities might sometimes be called humanitarian rescues (García Alanís 2024; REDODEM 2023). In the case of Chiapas, checkpoints have become essential to maintain the country’s south as a securitization belt that prevents mobility towards central and northern Mexico (Colectivo 2022).

Between January and August 2024, the INM broke a record for immigration detentions, with 925,085 people detained. Of these, 719,690 people (77.7%) were deprived of their liberty in an immigration detention center, and 205,395 (22.2%) were channelled to shelters. Of these detentions, 81.9 percent occurred in the states of Tabasco and Chiapas (Unidad de Política Migratoria 2024).

These numbers show that in Mexico the intertwining of immigration control and anti-drug operations has significant effects on the criminalization and human rights violations of migrants by multiple actors. Drawing on observations and interviews with migrants and NGOs, I show how checkpoints have become a violent infrastructure dispersed across the Mexican territory. This infrastructure is flexible and mobile because checkpoints serve multiple, often unclear purposes and are operated by governmental actors, extra-legal groups, and criminal networks. This flexibility and mobility make checkpoints and the actors administering them unaccountable as they expose migrants to racialized and gendered forms of extreme violence and human rights violations.

In transit countries such as Mexico, checkpoints are critical infrastructures of a border control industry that operates to prohibit the mobility of certain groups (Wonders 2006) while facilitating extortion and abuse of migrants by different actors (París Pombo 2017). Moreover, in the context I study, their modus operandi commonly remains unaccountable for two main reasons: the remote and uncommunicated locations where they operate; and the lack of external controls when the armed forces, including the Guardia Nacional, are involved.

The paper has four main sections. The first section presents the methodology, my positionality, and a brief context of the studied area. The second section presents some relevant concepts from the perspective of mobilities and critical border studies, such as infrastructural violence, borderities, and racial profiling. The third section presents a historical context of border’s securitization in Mexico, particularly in Chiapas, as well as the proliferation of actors operating checkpoints parallel to the Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (Supreme Court of Justice) (2022) ruling that decreed the unconstitutionality of immigration checks outside border areas. In the final section, I analyze some of the main findings of the research related to the modus operandi of multiple actors at checkpoints that have become spaces of enormous risk and human right violations of migrants.

Methods

I analyze some of the findings of a research project I began in 2022 on the effects of the militarization of immigration policy on the human rights of people on the move. In 2022 and 2023 I conducted three fieldwork visits in Tapachula, Chiapas, to document the effects of the involvement of the Guardia Nacional in immigration detention. I prioritized observation and semi-structured informal interviews in environments where people on the move are waiting for procedures, such as the vicinity of the INM’s offices, the Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados (Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid), the Estación Migratoria Siglo XXI (Twenty- First Century Immigration Station), and the Viva México checkpoint. Additionally, I visited the Estación Migratoria Las Agujas (Las Agujas Immigration Station) twice in Mexico City. In total, I conducted ten interviews with people on the move who, at the time of the interview, had recently interacted with the Guardia Nacional during waiting, transit, or detention in Tapachula and Mexico City.

I analyze the case of Chiapas as a security belt and a place of threat and immobility under the simulation of immigration regulation and provision of international protection. This state is the most crucial entry point to Mexican territory and has recently experienced an increase in homicides resulting from confrontations between two drug cartels.³ The Sinaloa Cartel has been present along the Chiapas- Guatemala border. As of 2022 the Jalisco New Generation Cartel seeks to control some areas in that region (Instituto para la Economía y la Paz 2024).

In addition to the fieldwork visits and the ten interviews, in 2023 I began collaborating with the organization Fundación para la Justicia y el Estado Democrático de Derecho (FJEDD) for the second edition of the report Bajo la bota: La militarización de la política migratoria en México. Between July and September 2023, I conducted ten in-depth interviews (in person and virtually) with civil society organizations that provide psycho-legal accompaniment to people on the move in southern, central, and northern Mexico. Together with the FJEDD team, I contacted organizations that have documented and accompanied or legally represented cases of human rights violations of migrants involving the armed forces, especially the Guardia Nacional.

Throughout the research process, as a team, we respected ethical principles, obtained informed consent from the organizations to share their testimonies, and ensured the confidentiality of sensitive information. We also ensured that the data presented respected the dignity of the migrants and did not expose them to additional risks. I previously agreed with the FJEDD and the organizations that shared their testimonies with me that I would also use the information for my academic research. For ethical and security reasons, I maintain anonymity in the testimonies shared by the activists on behalf of their organizations.

I also add to my analysis the experience derived from my previous research in immigration detention centers (Fernández de la Reguera 2020, 2022), as I was invited in 2022 by the legal team of the Instituto de las Mujeres en la Migración A.C. (Institute for Women in Migration) and the Programa Universitario de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights University Program) of National Autonomous University of Mexico to the Supreme Court of Justice to speak about the context and effects of immigration detention in the country. I presented some elements to measure the risks to which all people who pass through a checkpoint are exposed, whether Mexican or foreign, due to the widespread practice of racial profiling in a country as ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse as Mexico. Four months later, on May 18, the Amparo en Revisión 275/2019 ruling was approved, which determined the unconstitutionality of the immigration checkpoints. Subsequently, in 2023 I participated in two meetings—one in Congress and the other in the Senate—to raise the relevance of the ruling and the urgency of reforming articles 97 and 98 of the Ley de Migración (Migration Law) to comply with this ruling.⁴

From a feminist perspective, I question the checkpoint as a technology and a mechanism of power that should be problematized through the lenses of Donna Haraway’s (1988) situated and contesting objectivity. In the name of objectivity, scientific androcentrism concentrates unquestionable power over knowledge production over matters of securitization of borders and control of mobility. Previous studies focus on a security, economic, and political approach to checkpoints. I aim to analyze the checkpoint as a flexible and mobile infrastructure of violence serving different purposes and operated by various governmental actors (including the armed forces) and extra-legal and criminal actors, exposing migrants to racialized and gendered extreme forms of violence. I acknowledge that my own experience as a middle-class Mexican female researcher provides a situated and partial understanding. I intend to problematize the checkpoint in constant dialogue with vital epistemological questions posed by feminists (Fonow and Cook 2005), such as, Who are the authorized voices to generate knowledge? Who observes? How do they observe? Who was silenced? What can and cannot be known?

Encroaching Borders

Since 9/11, an “insecure society” has been consolidated globally, in which anyone can be a potential security threat and, therefore, a target for surveillance (Bissonnette and Vallet 2022). Certain groups are more “threatening” than others in this insecure society, certainly racialized and impoverished people. It is in this context that mobility control has not only strengthened and securitized international borders but also created subnational borders emphasizing racial profiling and surveillance practices.

Didier Bigo (2002) argues that the surveillance and securitization of migration is a consequence of the existence and functioning of a transnational field of professionals (including the military, police forces, border patrols, judges, security companies, and some reporters) in charge of managing the unease. Migration as a national security problem derives from a global public discourse that is part of a “continuum of threats and general unease in which many different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous society” (Bigo 2002, 63). Therefore, the securitization of migration is intrinsically related to the need to maintain the symbolic control of the state and as a consequence of the development of the surveillance technology industry.

Mobilities and critical border research focuses on power relationships and the systems of governance of mobility and immobility, critically analyzing who can move and under which conditions (Sheller 2011). As Cunningham and Heyman explain, “Enclosures and mobilities thus join at borders, in the multifarious processes of entering, avoiding, detecting, classifying, inspecting, interdicting, facilitating, and revaluing that are borders of everyday routine” (2004, 295). This approach departs from two opposite social processes (enclosure and mobility) interconnected at the material border.

The field of mobility research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of spatial mobility of people, objects, and information, as well as the physical means for movement, such as infrastructure and technology that enables or limits mobility. As Mimi Sheller (2011) writes, “it brings together some of the more purely social concerns of sociology (inequality, power, hierarchies) with the spatial concerns of geography (territory, borders, scale) and the cultural concerns of anthropology and media studies (discourses, representations, schemas) while influencing each with a relational ontology of the constitution of objects, spaces and meanings.” For border studies, checkpoints are crucial to the new mobility regimes that produce securitized corridors that facilitate the movement of specific global flows and prevent others. Therefore, in the last decade, border studies have advanced to more complex understandings of bordering practices (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015).

Furthermore, the securitization policies of borders exposes a geopolitical and colonial system of power relations. In this case, the “Mexican Transit Control Regime,” as Amalia Campos-Delgado (2021) calls it, characterized by control strategies, punishment, and deterrence, responds to the US externalization of borders. As migration scholar Yasmin Ibrahim argues, “Hence, borders as symbolic, performative and racial instruments tightly welded to sovereignty, jurisdiction and legal framework yield a human theatre of suffering to retain coloniality as an immanent part of modernity augmented constantly in the guise of newer technologies which tightly fuse with the corporeal body as a biometric assemblage” (2022, 17).

My research analyzes the flexibility and extension of border zones that have created “borderities,” or multiple experiences and rules for understanding a border (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015). Therefore, two parallel phenomena, such as the simultaneous opening and closing of borders in the same space, are currently being studied. Within the assortment of sites of enclosure and openness, “the forms and functions of borders no longer coincide” (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015, 4). Walls and barriers are only one part of border mechanisms, as there are other technologies to divide, regulate, and control mobilities, which are constantly changing. Andréanne Bissonnette and Élisabeth Vallet explain, “Checkpoints are part of this contemporary (re) definition of borders, contributing to both their internalization and individualization” (2022, 681).

Previous research has studied the importance of the checkpoint as a mobility control mechanism, demonstrating that the checkpoint is the fourth central border regime of the US-Mexico border (Nail 2016). It is an increasingly central element of immigration enforcement infrastructure, in addition to walls, fences, and detention centers. Moreover, checkpoints in the Global North have been studied as an action to control mobility in contexts of perceived insecurity while creating an economic balance in the precarious labor market (Nail 2016) and as strategies to control and deter mobility rather than to detain (Bissonnette and Vallet 2022).

Across the globe, border areas are encroaching into national territory. Previous studies in the US classify three types of checkpoints: police, security, and informational (Nail 2016). In the case of the US-Mexico border, previous research shows how the law establishes processes of spatial containment by establishing roadblocks and checkpoints, creating zones of immobility as central axes of bordering processes (Castañeda and Melo 2019). Rapidly, technologies enable the respatialization of borders and, thus, the legalization of border practices and their extension to new places. As geographers Heide Castañeda and Milena Melo explain, “While the permanent checkpoints trap people within a distinct space, the temporary roadblock checkpoints fuel fear and uncertainty within that space” (2019, 99).

Additionally, checkpoints can be permanent and tactical; distinct in location, size, infrastructure; and have various effects of intimidation and entrapment. Scholars have noted that, “The reaffirmation of sub-national borders have underlined the hybrid nature of the checkpoint, at once fixed and mobile, temporary and permanent, exceptional and normalized, simultaneously open and obstructive” (Bissonnette and Vallet 2022, 680).

The widening, diversification, and complexity of borders bring us closer to new experiences and ways of relating to borders and technology. For example, the mobile border extends the border’s spatial instability and power dynamics while also being an embodiment of the border. In other words, as political geographer Gabriel Popoescu puts it, “Today, the body is at once the subject of bordering practices and their bordering agent” (2011, 104). Groups considered a threat are identified through racial profiling supported by the use of technology. “They take the border with them wherever they travel in that they are always subject to the risk of interception, detention or expulsion by legal stakeholders, but also by being dependent on smugglers or illegal crossings” (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015, 12).

As a result, borders produce hierarchical systems of differentiated and unequal access to mobility based on race, class, gender, and nationality. Mimi Sheller (2018) uses the term “uneven mobility” to focus on what she calls the sociotechnical infrastructure, which includes the design of the built environment and social practices of borders as central elements in the exclusion and disruption of mobility, and the reproduction of racism, sexism, and classism, among other forms of discrimination. Uneven mobility as a framework includes the analysis of “spatial patterns, forms of mobility management, and control architectures that govern relations of mobility and immobility, speed and slowness, comfort and discomfort across many scales, including gates, walls, exclusionary regulations, detention centers and prisons” (Sheller 2018, 23). It results from the geographical and social construction of borders that keep changing according to the intertwining of criminal and migration law in the interactions between state actors, extra-legal actors, criminal actors, and people on the move: “Border control strategies are not fixed, but rather shift and change in response to particular kinds of border flows and in response to particular kinds of border crossers” (Wonders 2006, 83). Usually, male bodies enforce borders, while female bodies are subject to border enforcement.

Racial profiling “refers to the use of discretionary authority by law enforcement officers in encounters with minority motorists, typically within the context of a traffic stop, that results in the disparate treatment of minorities” (Batton and Kadleck 2004, 31). It results in aggressive practices and stereotyping of people that can represent a threat, leading to a racial disparity in populations detained at checkpoints. In my fieldwork, I have identified the different stages and characteristics of racial profiling encounters in checkpoints that criminologists Candice Batton and Colleen Kadleck describe, including length of delay, type of searches, property damaged, extent to which officers explain or request information, restraints and use of force, inappropriate or irrelevant questions asked by officers, and disposition of stop. Depending on nationality, ethnicity, gender, and age, people are discriminated against and exposed to various risks. For example, male migrants tend to be detained for more extended periods and often suffer physical aggression and even torture during detentions that begin at a checkpoint. Migrant women and adolescent girls are more exposed to sexual harassment and sexual violence. In all cases, the risks are aggravated when people do not speak Spanish and are dark-skinned.

Racial profiling is accentuated by the coexistence of a criminal policy and a punitive immigration policy that generates forms of violence that end up being normalized. Technologies of border control with the participation of the armed forces and the proliferation of state and municipal authorities operating checkpoints further reinforce the blurring of criminal law and immigration law. The suffering produced by this blurring not only deprives migrants of their fundamental rights while crossing a checkpoint, even putting their lives at risk, but operates in a systematic and invisibilized way and is internalized and accepted as part of the experience (almost deservedly) by racialized undocumented irregular persons on the move.

I study checkpoints as places where violence and mobility are interconnected. Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O’Neill (2012) introduce the term “infrastructural violence” to explain that infrastructure, such as a checkpoint, a wall, or an airport, is not only a material form of violence but also an instrument for reinforcing social inequalities. They distinguish between active and passive forms of infrastructural violence. Active violence excludes and attacks certain vulnerable groups, such as the use of infrared security cameras. In contrast, passive violence refers to harms that derive from the omissions or limitations of the infrastructure, such as the lack of sanitation facilities for people with disabilities. The checkpoint is an active and mobile form of infrastructural violence, which, unlike a wall or an airport, operates in a less visible and accountable manner, and in some cases with a more significant margin of exceptionality. In addition, it serves various purposes related to mobility control, such as anti-drug operations and the detection of criminal activity. In this sense, the checkpoint operates simultaneous processes corresponding to administrative law, such as immigration checks, and to criminal law, to detect criminals, which significantly affects racialized migrants.

Science and technology studies (STS) aims to understand the relationship between knowledge and order (Trauttmansdorff 2022) and to question the relationship between technology and the subject. In this sense, checkpoints are problematized as surveillance infrastructures that make visible specific mobility patterns. An STS approach would prioritize the different purposes and effects of monitoring and data production in checkpoints as they are operated by different authorities and sometimes even criminal actors.

As “infrastructures embody the entanglements that connect the digital and the physical; they shape new relationships between authorities and technology, mobility and control, states and people” (Trauttmansdorff 2022, 144). In this research, I am not specifically addressing the use of technologies at checkpoints in Mexico. However, previous research on the militarization of border controls in Mexico has documented the extensive use of military technology to collect and make use of the biometric data of migrants by the INM and the system of control of transfers to immigration stations or detention centers (García Alanís 2024). My focus is on the infrastructural violence that represents a checkpoint as the point of contact between migrants and Mexican authorities—in particular, in militarized zones where organized crime operates, which increases the use of the checkpoint as a strategy of securitization and racial profiling.

Four Decades of Border Securitization in Mexico

In Mexico, irregular migration is a national security issue that has led to expanding and strengthening borders and surveillance. Border controls have been enforced over decades in parallel with the securitization of the US-Mexico border. The US created a legal basis for militarizing migration controls (Massey 2016) in the 1980s and ’90s, first with the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, and ten years later with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which authorized a significant increase of border patrol personnel, the construction of more walls, including the wall on the Tijuana-San Diego border, and the use of military technology to detect and detain migrants (Izcara Palacios 2009).

On Mexico’s southern border, the armed forces’ involvement began in the 1980s. Initially, it was a strategy for the control and surveillance of refugees from Guatemala, who were considered by the Mexican state as potential enemies of the regime (Barrera Hernández et al. 2024). Then, in 1994, in response to the uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) in Chiapas, the Mexican army significantly strengthened its presence and functions on the southern border, resulting in not only the presence of sixty thousand soldiers in Chiapas in 1999 but also the construction of military facilities (Araiza et al. 2019).

In 2001, shortly before 9/11, the Mexican government announced the creation of Plan Sur as part of a strategy of collaboration with the US government in the face of possible immigration reform. The objective was to improve the capacity to control migration flows along the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific coast. Plan Sur immediately modified migratory routes to more dangerous places and increased the costs of hiring human smugglers. In contrast to previous operations, which tended to be reactive, this plan institutionalized the army’s participation along with other authorities from the three levels of government in migration control tasks (Casillas 2002).

After the terrorist attacks of 2001, Operación Centinela was carried out, which generated the deployment of more than eighteen thousand individuals of the armed forces and twelve thousand of the Policía Federal Preventiva (Federal Preventive Police) at borders, airports, and strategic facilities, which included immigration control tasks (FJEED et al. 2021). Moreover, in 2006, President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) initiated the “war on drugs,” which, during the six years of his administration, led to the death of seventy thousand people along with the increased number of drug trafficking cartels along the Mexican territory (Rosen and Zepeda Martínez 2015). Subsequently, during Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year term (2012–2018), the Programa para la Seguridad Nacional 2012–2018 (National Security Program 2014–2018) openly contemplated borders, seas, and irregular migration as the principal risks and threats for the country (Presidencia de la República 2014).

Despite the implementation of actions since the late 1990s, it is the Plan Frontera Sur, which began in 2014, that mainly laid the groundwork both in terms of infrastructure and inter-institutional organization for the consolidation of the militarization of migration management in the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024). This process was achieved through two main actions: first, in 2019, with the approval and further implementation of legal reforms for the creation of the Guardia Nacional, including border control tasks and its subsequent integration into the armed forces; and second, the incorporation of military and ex-military personnel into the staff and command groups of the INM.

Within this context, for the first time, the Supreme Court of Justice attracted a case on immigration controls, and on May 18, 2022, the ruling Amparo en Revisión 275/2019 was approved. This case was brought to court regarding an immigration check carried out in 2015 on a passenger bus in transit through Querétaro. INM agents identified two women, one of whom was fifteen years old, and two men by their physical appearance, as, in their opinion, foreign nationals. They took them off the bus. The four Mexican nationals, originally from Chiapas, were indigenous Tzeltal people. The two women and the youngest man were brothers, did not speak Spanish, and had little experience communicating with state authorities. The older woman identified herself with an official ID retained and destroyed by the INM agents, who claimed—without following preestablished procedures—that it was false. Her two siblings were traveling with birth certificates issued in preparation for their trip, as they intended to be employed as seasonal agricultural laborers in Sonora (northern Mexico).

The INM agents did not recognize the authenticity of the birth certificates. The fourth person, who spoke more Spanish and did not share surnames with the others, also identified himself with an official ID and was released. The three siblings were taken to an immigration detention center in the city of Querétaro and deprived of their liberty for seven days. They were “identified” as Guatemalans and subjected to the administrative immigration procedure that was to conclude with their deportation. During detention, the young man was tortured by INM agents. The deportation was prevented by an Amparo suspension, in which family members and civil society provided further documentation to prove the complainants’ Mexican nationality. This concluded the administrative immigration procedure, and they were released a week later.

The ruling determined the unconstitutionality of immigration checks outside border zones for violating the right to free movement and the constitutional right to equality and non-discrimination. For the first time, the Supreme Court of Justice decided on the application of racial profiling as a means of oppression and indirect discrimination of Indigenous and Afro-descendant people. According to the 2021 Amparo reform, the rulings of the Supreme Court of Justice are binding precedents for all authorities in the country when they are taken by a majority of four votes, as was the case in this ruling. As I write this paper, Congress must still reform articles 87 and 98 of the Migration Law. Immigration checks continue to be carried out and sometimes are reported by the INM as humanitarian rescues.

Border Performativity, Actors, and Human Rights Violations in Checkpoints in Chiapas

Internal bordering is one of the main strategies of Mexico’s migration control apparatus (Campos-Delgado and Yrizar Barbosa 2023). For decades, the deployment of control operations has been a reactive mechanism of an immigration policy of simulation, waiting, and entrapment (Ceja Cárdenas and Miranda 2022), as well as a strategy to control the trafficking of drugs and organized crime in the border area (Instituto para la Economía y la Paz 2024). The following is a testimony from an NGO worker who explained to me how Mexico has adopted a culture of roadside checks, which can be confusing and intimidating, especially for migrants coming from countries with fewer internal mobility controls:

In Mexico, there is something in people’s mind that prepares them for the fact that at any moment they are going to be searched, but a migrant does not have that, they are not used to. Of course, they are at risk and know it; those who go on the journey know that they are exposed and always think that INM can stop them, but they do not distinguish between the police force of the municipality, the state, or the army. For them, it is all the same, and they do not have the clear concept that only INM can detain them for immigration control. People tolerate these practices because they have already internalized them. Even we, who already know and are against it, get down and allow it when they stop us because we know the great risk involved. If you don’t do it, you can make someone angry. (NGO staff interview, July 2023)

Civil society organizations in charge of monitoring the human rights of migrants report that, throughout the country, people on the move are mostly exposed to severe human rights violations during migration checks operated by the military, state, municipal police, and the INM (REDODEM 2023). In recent years, after the arrival of migrant caravans from Central America in 2018, organizations in Chiapas have reported an increase in checkpoints. For example, in 2022, nineteen checkpoints were set up within a 180-mile distance between Tapachula, Chiapas, and San Pedro Tapanatepec, Oaxaca (Colectivo 2022).

Figure 1: Map the location of the eleven checkpoints I encountered during fieldwork in January 2023 between Tapachula and Tuxtla Gutierrez.

Some of them are fixed, such as the Viva México at the exit of the city of Tapachula at the border with Guatemala, which not only impedes the mobility of migrants but also affects particularly vulnerable groups such as migrant women victims of violence. On a visit in March 2022 to the Centro de Justicia para las Mujeres (Justice Center for Women), a center specializing in the care and legal aid of women victims of violence operated by the state government, it was reported that, unfortunately, women on the move could not reach its facilities because they are located on the highway after passing through the Viva México checkpoint. The state authorities did not consider the existence of the checkpoint during their planning, and, apparently, they could not negotiate access with the INM and the Guardia Nacional.

Even though article 97 of the Migration Law stipulates that each immigration check must be reported to specify the personnel assigned—including its duration and geographical area—in practice, organizations report that it is difficult to monitor how the detention processes are carried out and to know what happens once the person is identified in a checkpoint and transferred to an INM office or an immigration station.⁵ The sometimes clandestine nature of the operations, coupled with the discretionary nature of the protocols that allow INM agents to identify migrants by their looks and smell (Duarte et al. 2020), and by asking arbitrary questions (INM 2021), reinforces racial profiling and generates enormous risks to the safety of people on the move. People may be transferred immediately without explanation or may wait for hours in undignified conditions (e.g., high or low temperatures, in uncovered spaces, without access to toilets) before being taken to an INM facility.

Moreover, Mexican migration law stipulates that if a person is a victim of crime in national territory, they are entitled to a visitor’s card for humanitarian reasons. However, migrants, especially the most vulnerable groups such as women victims of sexual violence hardly dare to report abuse or human rights violations suffered during transit or while detained (Seerlinger and Uyttewaal 2018). The following is a testimony by a lawyer working for an NGO: “People are afraid, and that weakens the structure; that is, it weakens the bit of discipline that the armed authority could maintain because it is an almost tacit acceptance that their illegal actions will be tolerated. People don’t report it, and many may even have suffered extortion or some illegal situation, apart from the illegality of the roadside inspection itself. Still, they don’t report it because they fear reprisals against them or their children” (NGO staff interview, August 2023).

The lack of accountability increases when the armed forces, such as the Guardia Nacional, participate in immigration checks because they have their own internal accountability mechanisms. In the interviews, I detected that it is common for unauthorized police agents, such as the municipal or state police, to conduct immigration checks. They collaborate with the Guardia Nacional or the INM to hand over migrants. These are often called rescue or humanitarian operations. In these cases, it is also challenging to know under what conditions the detentions are carried out and whether officials are complying with transparency and accountability regulations.

Checkpoints vary in their infrastructure. Some checkpoints, such as the Viva México or Centros de Atención Integral al Tránsito Fronterizo (Centers for Integral Attention to Border Transit), operate in a fixed way specifically for mobility control. The latter is an example of active infrastructural violence (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012). On a visit to the Centro de Atención Integral al Tránsito Fronterizo in Huixtla, Chiapas, in 2019, I entered the temporary immigration detention center, a vast, warehouse-like space with thick walls and bars, with no privacy whatsoever. The unusable toilets were exposed to the view of other people, which particularly affected women. It should be noted that this is a facility considered to have good conditions with technology for controlling vehicles and people. Initially, it was not built for immigration control but intentionally adapted. The space intimidates detained migrants, especially women who have to use open toilets and suffer mistreatment by INM personnel.

Other checkpoints are temporary and have different purposes, such as security checks and anti-drug operations. These checkpoints are usually riskier because they are less visible and involve the participation of various authorities and, in some cases, organized crime, as also documented by Red de Documentación de las Organizaciones Defensoras de Migrantes (REDODEM 2023). One NGO staff member described the makeshift character of some checkpoints: “Now, the roadblocks are on the road where there’s no facility; sometimes it’s just a room. It’s just on the roads where there is nothing and no construction, but they are putting up tents” (NGO staff interview, August 2023).

Since 2019, when the Guardia Nacional began to participate in immigration enforcement, the organizations have detected the increased presence of checkpoints and their eventual permanence in Chiapas. During an interview, an NGO staff member explained,

Before, at the temporary or provisional checkpoints, we saw a very simple tent, which was considered very easy to move around. It was a tent where only the immigration officers, the army, and the navy were placed underneath to carry out the checks, and maybe after a week, this tent would no longer be there. However, these points, even though they are provisional because we have identified that they do not have the structure to make them permanent, are now more elaborate. Now, there are bigger tents; they already have bunk beds inside for the authorities to spend the night; in other words, they will be there for the long term, unlike the others. They also have computer equipment, and we have counted up to six or eight bunk beds. (NGO staff interview, August 2023)

With the presence of organized crime in immigration control zones on the Mexico- Guatemala border, the checkpoint functions as a dispositif of immigration policy and criminal policy. As I explained earlier, border performativity (Wonders 2006), or the series of reactive practices, is carried out by different state and non-state actors (including criminal actors) to limit and facilitate mobility. Previous research shows the impact of policies that expand immigration control from the federal to the local level, including multiple authorities (Valdivia 2019). With this expansion of authority, racial profiling practices and discrimination increase, as do contradictions and confusion among various authorities on immigration enforcement procedures, which in turn increases the risks and vulnerability of migrants (Aranda and Vaquera 2015).

Monica Varsanyi and colleagues use the phrase “multilayered jurisdictional patchwork of enforcement authority” (2012, 138) to characterize immigration enforcement in the US; this concept is also helpful in this context to describe how multiple actors reinforce the contradictory geography of immigration enforcement through checkpoints. The participation of different authorities affects clarity and consistency in the detention protocols. In Mexico, sometimes local authorities create their own procedures or adopt unofficial standards. Checkpoints create a confusing system that threatens migrants and consolidates a culture of confusion and fear of deportation. This confusion and fear leads to a lack of confidence on the part of people on the move to ask for help from local police, generating disincentives to report a crime.

My analysis shows that the diversity of actors and lack of protocols not only hinder the possibility of reporting crimes but that crimes occur at checkpoints precisely because of the material conditions in which they operate, the places where they are located, the various authorities involved and the extra-legal actors and sometimes criminal actors who also control some checkpoints. The fact that a checkpoint is operated by authorities of different levels and profiles, for example, state or municipal police, federal agencies, INM agents, and the armed forces, increases criminalization and human rights violations of people on the move. As one NGO staff member explained,

We have identified two checkpoints of supposed officials from the Fiscalía General de la República and another from a state police force, which in the end is strange in the way they check both the vehicles and people because they do not identify themselves and they are in desolate and risky spaces. They tell us that they are carrying out antidrug operations or that they are identifying people because they have received a complaint about some situation that was occurring in the area. However, they first ask you for identification; they don't even ask you to prove your number plates or that you are the vehicle owner or your license. (NGO staff interview, August 2023)

In Chiapas, a state border police force carries out actions in eight border municipalities. Although its objectives refer only to “combating common crimes in all municipalities located along the border with Guatemala, implementing effective and efficient security strategies and models, within the framework of legality and absolute respect for human rights” (Secretaría de Seguridad y Protección Ciudadana 2024), organizations report that they also carry out immigration detention tasks. The participation of actors from various public security agencies and different levels of government in immigration checks makes it difficult to have transparency and monitoring mechanisms to identify how these operations are carried out under what conditions and in what places. Moreover, a characteristic feature of checkpoints is a lack of means to communicate, either because the authorities take away the detainees’ mobile phones or because there is no internet signal. An NGO staff member explained, “On the route from Palenque to Villahermosa, there is an immigration checkpoint where the Guardia Nacional is also present. They identify people, ask them to get off the bus and start immigration checks. They take away their mobile phones; in other words, they cut off people’s communications” (NGO staff interview, July 2023). Therefore, many NGOs report that transfers from checkpoints to an INM office or detention center might encourage forced disappearance and ill treatment because usually migrants are not allowed to notify detention to a family member or friend, and people are not told where they are going to be taken.

Moreover, transfer times to temporary holding centers or immigration detention centers vary. Organizations report that agents from the Guardia Nacional or the INM usually try to gather as many people as possible in their vehicles at checkpoints before transferring them. It is likely that when traveling in small INM vans, the waiting time in these spaces is shorter than when traveling in buses. The same staff member described the travel and transfer: “They are putting the migrants in the volantas, which are these closed vans that INM has, or in trucks, and then they let them spend the night there. Or then they wait for them to fill up. Sometimes, the trucks do not have any logo; they are generally white trucks, normally escorted by the Guardia Nacional” (NGO staff interview, July 2023). The main problems I identify are isolation, long waiting times for transfers, and the invisibility of transfers. In my fieldwork, I also detected people who were detained and, before being transferred, were released on the roadside late at night. The staff member continued, “It takes hours from what we have been told. In one case, people arrived as early as 9 a.m., and at around 3 p.m., they were moved to temporary holding facilities. Some people even told us that they were kept from about 6 p.m. when they were arrested, and then they were taken to the provisional detention center at about 10 p.m., or they started to offer to let them go if they paid” (NGO staff interview, July 2023).

Testimonies recovered through NGOs show that everyone is exposed to long waits, including women with children. There is a constant practice of racial profiling that affects mainly people with Indigenous appearance and people with dark skin, predominantly Haitian and Garifuna people from Honduras. Therefore, the right to mobility becomes a daily contested action in the regime of uneven mobility, as is especially the case for people who constantly have to cross checkpoints as part of their daily mobility, such as Mexican nationals and migrants residing in areas of extreme surveillance, especially on the highways. One interviewee described, “It is a Salvadoran woman with a Mexican son who lives in Chiapas, and the son is constantly stopped at checkpoints. They must pass through checkpoints that are run by municipal, state or INM police. Both she and the child are racialized, and especially he is constantly being detained” (NGO staff interview, July 2023).

I have documented how women and girls are exposed to sexual harassment and violence during detention (Fernández de la Reguera 2024). While there is a high risk of sexual violence during transit, there is also a high risk of sexual violence during contact with authorities. When the perpetrator of sexual violence is a state agent, it takes on new meanings and has more significant effects on the victims (Falcón 2001). It is an act of deterrence and a grave violation of human rights that dramatically affects the possibilities for reporting and receiving the protective services provided by law to all girls and women who have suffered sexual violence regardless of their immigration status. One staff member recalled a problematic encounter: “I remember a situation with the INM; it was an immigration check on the stretch from Palenque to Villahermosa. A Mexican woman was traveling with her daughter, who underwent an immigration check. However, the INM agent began to ask questions that had nothing to do with her immigration status. At first, they were exploratory questions to identify the person’s nationality and family ties because she was a sixteen-year-old. However, the INM officer asked the young woman questions like ‘How tall are you?’ and ‘How much do you weigh?’ These questions go beyond an immigration check” (NGO staff interview, July 2023).

Interviews with both NGOs and migrants show that people expect to be extorted at checkpoints, including by military personnel, before they are permitted to continue their journey. Organizations detect that those who manage to advance and are not returned to Tapachula usually were able to pay for the extortion to continue their transit: “People assume they must carry 4,000 or 5,000 pesos (US$200–$250) to get to Tuxtla Gutiérrez. People know that in order to cross checkpoints, even if they have an official document, they have to give money. They know that at each checkpoint they are going to be asked to pay for crossing” (NGO staff interview, August 2023).

In some cases, people are taken to vacant areas where they are exposed to threats, extortion, and torture. It is essential to point out that any intermediate destination or stop made between the moment of detention and the destination where the person is handed over to the INM office contravenes the law. An interviewee described one such case:

This case happened in Escárcega, Campeche. Our clients do not know when it happened because they traveled from Tabasco to Campeche. The INM and Guardia Nacional agents stopped the bus where they were traveling and took them off. They were held for about an hour with their heads upside down in the middle of the night at a roadside location. They said, “What is going to happen to us? Because the bus left and we only see boots and hear people talking, but they don’t even pay attention to us when we tell them we want to ask for asylum.” From there, they were taken back to Villahermosa. It was the Guardia Nacional because of the grey uniform. (NGO staff interview, July 2023)

Checkpoints as growing strategies of border encroachment and active infrastructural violence are an opportunity to abuse racialized migrants in many ways. Robbery, extortion, physical, psychological, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment have been widely documented (FJEDD et al. 2021; REDODEM 2023). Some conditions facilitate and invisibilize these human rights violations. The first is the expansion of checkpoints under the discourse of national security, the war on drugs, and human trafficking. The second is the participation of practically all federal, state, and municipal security authorities in the so-called humanitarian rescues. The third is the invisibility, lack of transparency and monitoring due to the material and isolation conditions of several checkpoints, and the armed forces’ participation.

Conclusion

Mexico’s southern border is the central receiving region for migrants who need international protection. It is a border through which people of diverse nationalities and with high levels of vulnerability arrive, many of them escaping from contexts of criminal violence. In response to this reality, the Mexican government, far from strengthening international protection mechanisms, has increased securitization through border militarization and the proliferation of checkpoints, which allows for the growing unaccountability and impunity of multiple authorities who participate in racial profiling and criminalization practices against migrants along the southern border.

These measures make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between immigration policy and criminal policy, and expose migrants to criminalization and defenselessness. Added to this is the context of the fight against organized crime, which facilitates the participation of various federal, state, and municipal authorities and the presence of criminal actors operating some of the checkpoints. The consequences are severe because it creates an environment of insecurity, lack of transparency, and exceptionality of the law, which exposes all persons, Mexican or foreign, to serious human rights violations when traveling by road on the southern border.

Despite a ruling by the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice declaring the unconstitutionality of the immigration checks, in Mexico, every day, the right to non-discrimination and free transit is violated at checkpoints; for some people, it is much more severe, especially if they are irregularly in Mexican territory, if they do not speak Spanish, or if they are Indigenous or Afro-descendants. As evidenced, the security strategy to combat organized crime and drugs has become intertwined with the approach to control and stop migration in the south of the country, strengthening a mobile and unaccountable detention system, creating forms of infrastructural violence that facilitate extortion, abuse, and human rights violations.

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