Jeremy Slack

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at The University of Texas at El Paso

Executive Summary Immigration at the US-México border has drastically changed since the mid-2010s. Instead of adult undocumented Mexican men, generally migrating for economic purposes, there are now large numbers of men, women, unaccompanied minors, and families from diverse countries seeking asylum in the United States, as they are allowed to do u...

The Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME), in Tucson, Arizona, is among the leading forensic authorities when it comes to investigating undocumented border-crosser (UBC) fatalities along the US-Mexico border. PCOME has investigated more than 4,000 UBC fatalities in southern Arizona to date, working closely with foreign consulates and n...

The shelter fire that killed 40 people on March 27 is the foreseeable consequence of binational immigration enforcement measures by the United States and Mexico.

How can higher education advance knowledge of the harmful conditions faced by migrants fleeing violence and poverty in ways that support ongoing efforts to achieve change in how they are perceived and treated in the U.S.? This chapter seeks to address this question through discussion of the National Science Foundation-Research Experience for Underg...

Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on the border. Quotas on applications at ports of entry (known as "metering"), the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and the deployment of the pandemic era “lockdown” through Title 42, each severely limited asylum opportunities. In response, a host of informal wa...

2010 was a significant year for immigration issues along the United States-Mexico border. In April, Arizona signed the most extreme law against undocumented immigrants. In August, 72 hopeful migrants were massacred in Tamaulipas by alleged drug traffickers, and the Arizona desert claimed a record 252 lives in fiscal year 2010. These events were par...

What happens after deportation? What contexts must Mexican deportees navigate and contend with after removal from the United States? This article explores the challenges for people postremoval in Mexico, particularly by drawing on fieldwork conducted in Tamaulipas, which is home to the Zetas drug trafficking organization and the infamous massacre o...

El reporte compila ensayos que reflexionan sobre el asesinato de los 72 migrantes en San Fernando, Tamaulipas, en agosto del año 2010. Se analiza cómo la masacre de los migrantes constituye un crimen de lesa humanidad, las repercusiones en la prensa mexicana, en la vida cotidiana de sanfernandenses, en el tránsito migratorio brasileño y en las polí...

Enforcement along the US-Mexico border has intensified significantly since the early 1990s. Social scientists have documented several consequences of border militarization, including increased border-crosser deaths, the killing of more than 110 people by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents over the past decade, and expanded ethno-racial prof...

The Trump administration has used the COVID-19 crisis to achieve many long held goals on the U.S.-Mexico border. This has created a volatile and potentially lethal situation for asylum seekers, migrants, and border residents alike.

Executive Summary The routine human rights abuses and due process violations of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have contributed to a mounting humanitarian and legal crisis along the US–Mexico border. In the United States, the treatment of UAC is governed by laws, policies, and standards drawn from the F...

The Trump administration has used the COVID-19 crisis to achieve many long held goals on the U.S.-Mexico border. This has created a volatile and potentially lethal situation for asylum seekers, migrants, and border residents alike.

On June 5, 2014, the right-wing website Breitbart News released photos of South Texas detention facilities overflowing with women and children. The headline, “Leaked Photos Reveal Children Warehoused in Crowded U.S. Cells, Border Patrol Overwhelmed,” demonstrates the role of contestation in shaping border policies. This publicity sparked an importa...

The death of seven year­old Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin in December of 2018 while in US Border Patrol custody has led to outrage, frustration, and a host of unanswered questions. We know that she and her father were apprehended at 9:51 p.m., but Jakelin was not admitted to Providence Children's Hospital in El Paso until 8:51 a.m. the following...

The death of seven year-old Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin in December of 2018 while in US Border Patrol custody has led to outrage, frustration, and a host of unanswered questions. We know that she and her father were apprehended at 9:51 p.m., but Jakelin was not admitted to Providence Children's Hospital in El Paso until 8:51 a.m. the following...

Drawing on postdeportation surveys (N = 1,109) with Mexican migrants, we examine the impact of immigration enforcement programs and various social factors on repeat migration intentions. Our multivariate analyses suggest immigrants with strong personal ties to the United States have higher relative odds of intending to cross the border again, even...

Mass deportation is at the forefront of political discourse in the United States. The Shadow of the Wall shows in tangible ways the migration experiences of hundreds of people, including their encounters with U.S. Border Patrol, cartels , detention facilities, and the deportation process. Deportees reveal in their heartwrenching stories the power o...

This article draws on a unique dataset of more than eleven hundred postdeportation surveys to examine migrants’ experiences with coyotes (human smugglers) along the U.S.-Mexico border. Our focus is on migrants’ satisfaction with the services provided by their most recent smuggler and whether they would be willing to put family or friends in contact...

This article examines the use of anthropological research by expert witnesses in legal cases involving Mexican immigrants and the intellectual strategies employed to defend them as well as the obstacles such efforts confront. Expert witness research and writing in more than one hundred immigration and criminal cases is the basis for a discussion of...

During a post-election TV interview that aired mid-November 2016, then President-Elect Donald Trump claimed that there are millions of so-called “criminal aliens” living in the United States: “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably tw...

During a post-election TV interview that aired mid-November 2016, then President-Elect Donald Trump claimed that there are millions of so-called “criminal aliens” living in the United States: “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably tw...

Increased border enforcement efforts have redistributed unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States (US) away from traditional points of crossing, such as San Diego and El Paso, and into more remote areas along the US–Mexico border, including southern Arizona. Yet relatively little quantitative scholarly work exists examining Mexican migran...

We examine the 2013-2016 spike in Central American asylum seekers, especially family groups and unaccompanied children, arriving at the U.S. land border with Mexico. Specifically, we focus on the contentious politics concerning this migratory flow, exploring the network of contenders around this issue, including state actors at different scales, pr...

Many have debated whether or not human smugglers, known as coyotes, are involved with drug trafficking organizations. Scholars have largely rejected so-called “narcocoyotaje”, however; we hope to problematize this narrative by adding a new theoretical layer to the discussion. Namely, we explore the ways in which different criminal activities produc...

For several decades, pundits and critics have predicted the end of borders, envisioning a globalized world that ushers in a new era of collaboration and cooperation (Friedman 2005). Yet despite these proclamations and significant advancements in communication technology, as well as the explosion of social media, we have not seen significantly great...

A pesar de las propuestas para aumentar los gastos en agentes y equipo para la seguridad fronteriza, la geografía compleja de la militarización de la frontera y la violencia que produce son muy pocos entendidos. Tomamos una perspectiva geográfica para entender el papel de la violencia tanto en sus formas oficiales como el encarcelamiento y castigos...

This report focuses on the issue of repatriated migrants’ belongings being taken and not returned by U.S. authorities. Overall, we find that the taking of belongings and the failure to return them is not a random, sporadic occurrence, but a systematic practice. One indication of this is that just over one-third of deportees report having belongings...

In late 2010, WikiLeaks made public hundreds of private communications between US State Department facilities in Mexico and Washington, DC. The documents contain frank observations made by US bureaucrats and officials about Mexican politics and government, but are especially pointed in their treatment of Mexico’s declared ‘War on Drugs’, which, sin...

The Consequence Delivery System (CDS) is a suite of border and immigration enforcement programs designed to increase the penalties associated with unauthorized migration in order to convince people not to return (Rosenblum 2013). Despite its inauguration in 2011, many aspects of the CDS are not new. CDS does however, mark a shift from the deterrent...

Kidnapping, originally considered a problem for the super wealthy, has quickly spread to epidemic proportions among the relative poor, especially among clandestine international migrants. This article examines how people's relationship to the US–Mexico border shapes their vulnerability to kidnapping. Moreover, through one long ethnographic vignette...

The Consequence Delivery System (CDS) is a suite of border and immigration enforcement programs designed to increase the penalties associated with unauthorized migration in order to convince people not to return (Rosenblum 2013). Despite its inauguration in 2011, many aspects of the CDS are not new. CDS does however, mark a shift from the deterrent...

In this article, we examine the social repercussions of criminally prosecuting individuals that cross into the United States without official documentation. The "criminalization of immigration law" (Coleman, 2007), federal- and state-level anti-immigrant initiatives, and an incarceration-oriented approach to dealing with unauthorized migration have...

Link: http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/docs/ipc/Border%20-%20Abuses%20FINAL.pdf This report focuses on the mistreatment of unauthorized migrants while in U.S. custody. Overall, we find that the physical and verbal mistreatment of migrants is not a random, sporadic occurrence but, rather, a systematic practice. One indication of...

2010 was a significant year for immigration issues along the United States-Mexico border. In April, Arizona signed the most extreme law against undocumented immigrants. In August, 72 hopeful migrants were massacred in Tamaulipas by alleged drug traffickers, and the Arizona desert claimed a record 252 lives in fiscal year 2010. These events were par...

During a research project on the experiences of undocumented migrants that had been apprehended and returned to Mexico, we were faced with the difficult decision regarding continuation of research following several high-profile incidents of violence near our research site. There were a variety of opinions among the researchers involved. In this art...

In 2010, we witnessed a series of events showing the shifting state of clandestine migration all along the border between Mexico and the United States. This article, based on interviews with people deported by U.S. authorities, reviews several themes rarely looked at in the literature, and brings new perspectives to better known topics. These are a...

As undergraduate students in a public research university, the large classes and emphasis on lecture formats often eclipse the benefits such an institution can and should bring to the formation of young scholars. However, the Nogales intern program was a marked contrast. It brought us in contact with the realities of conducting research. We were in...