The ‘Necropolitics’ of the American Borderlands

Sitting in the activity room of a small community center in El Paso, Texas, Juan Ortiz explains that, to his eye, none of what is happening on the United States-Mexico border is new. El Paso, the city at the far southwestern tip of Texas, isn’t just his birthplace. It’s also the staging ground for a form of “Necropolitics,” as he and other activists in the borderlands have come to term it. On a clear winter morning, Ortiz and a group of humanitarian volunteers are preparing to embark to one of its most dangerous areas, just minutes away from this sleepy commercial strip.

A PhD candidate in Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona and a longtime observer of the borderlands, Ortiz grew up in the city before the international frontier tightened to its current, militarized form. At the moment, he is watching border enforcement become even more severe, but as he says, “It all started here.”

Shortly after taking office in January, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending the right to claim asylum on the border with Mexico. According to its wording, it will remain in effect until the “invasion at the southern border has ceased,” though it doesn’t define what that would look like. What is clear, though, is that the response will be military. Trump has deployed active duty troops to the southern border and pledged to devote the full force of the Armed Forces to counter it. Between El Paso and its Mexican sister city Juárez, this is escalating a process of militarization that has been going on for decades.

“The criminalization and enforcement along the southern border is what started the domino effect,” Ortiz says of its beginnings in El Paso. 

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For decades, individuals passed back and forth across the international boundary freely. People lived in Juárez and worked in El Paso, visited family or did their shopping without ever passing a checkpoint. This interchange came to an abrupt halt in 1993, when a human chain of Border Patrol agents interrupted it. Silvestre Reyes, at that time chief of the El Paso Sector for the agency, initiated an operation he dubbed “Hold the Line,” which dispatched some 400 Border Patrol agents to physically guard the entire border between the two cities.

To Juan Ortiz, “Hold the Line” was the first domino in a chain that led to the present day. “Having zero tolerance for crossing without a permit led to families being incarcerated, that led to family separation, which then led to the children’s detention centers.” Ortiz and many other activists on the border believe that the deaths of migrants are not just a consequence of “Deterrence,” but a desired outcome — Necropolitics.

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The Border Patrol’s “El Paso Sector” stretches from West Texas to the state line between Arizona and New Mexico, and recorded 176 migrant deaths over the last fiscal year, making it the deadliest stretch of the US-Mexican border even by the count of the Border Patrol. 

When the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths took a closer look at these mortalities in a report published last year, it showed that the majority take place within a 50-mile radius of El Paso and Juárez. On a map published by the organization in which every death is marked by a red dot, the area around the cities is a single crimson mass — the report calls it an “urban graveyard.”

“When first researching locations for this data, we found a body just feet from a paved road in Sunland Park, within eyesight of the extremely busy main road of the town,” said Bryce Peterson, one of the report’s authors. 

Organizations like No More Deaths contend that the true number of deaths along the border is much higher. The death tolls the group has documented have “diverged significantly from [Customs and Border Patrol] (CBP’s) count throughout the years, at times showing four times the amount of deaths as CBP,” Peterson explained. 

While there is no “consistent logic” behind which deaths the agency does or doesn’t record, he said that CBP counts “very few cases of someone dying in the hospital.” That fact, in his telling, is “especially significant because these are often CBP-related cases, such as vehicle pursuits or falls from the border wall. CBP has stated that they don’t count cases where they aren’t involved, but the data does not show this to be true, and, in fact, it seems that the miscount is at worst malicious and at best entirely incompetent.”

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One of the most prolific of these dying grounds is Mount Cristo Rey, a prominent mountain that juts out from the landscape in Sunland Park, a suburb of El Paso across the state border in New Mexico. A popular hiking destination that also hosts multiple Catholic shrines, its terrain is bisected by the border in a straight, unerring line across its slopes. Cristo Rey’s craggy terrain frustrates efforts to seal off the border with walls or fences, creating a pass for migrants traveling north. Nine migrants turned up dead on Cristo Rey in 2023 alone, and dozens more have perished in the immediate surroundings.

On a bright Sunday morning, Juan Ortiz walks carefully up one of the hiking trails that head south towards Mexico, joined by a group of volunteers carrying sturdy backpacks. The group passes a couple of cheerful hikers and then veers off the path, to climb towards a line of hills. The terrain is rocky and exposed to the open sky, with sparse vegetation clinging close to the ground. 

As they travel further from the trail, empty plastic water bottles start appearing in the brush, caught under clusters of creosote and piled into the deep washes that run down towards the valley. The group unfurls contractor bags from their backpacks and starts picking up what they can, stopping at a few points to leave out new water bottles, medical supplies, and canned food. 

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Juan Ortiz hovers his hand over a dirty sweater and then leaves it in place. “I try to leave any clothing I find, someone might need it,” he says. 

At the top of a crest, a dirt road becomes visible, an unofficial dividing line that the humanitarians do not cross to avoid straying into Mexico. The Juárez and its sprawling suburbs are clearly visible between two hilltops, the way there marked clearly with an irregular line of glinting water bottles. Although only a few miles separate the cities, these are often deadly stretches of land for migrants who become disoriented or have to spend long stretches of time waiting for patrols to pass before moving onward.

The border wall, fencing, razor wire, and the desert all play their part in tightening the border, but personnel, regular and irregular alike, do the work. On the day that Ortiz hikes up the mountain, two young infantry soldiers are in a Border Patrol vehicle. Some several thousand regular army troops have deployed to the southern border, where they join officials from the Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, and local police forces, as well as the Texas National Guard, which has been deployed along the Texas-Mexico border as part of what Governor Greg Abbott has dubbed “Operation Lone Star.” 

A few miles west, another Border Patrol truck guards the place where the border wall meets the mountain’s slopes. A row of “Normandy-Style” vehicle barriers have recently been parked in the gaps. Again, it is not Border Patrol agents manning the vehicle but two soldiers, who initially refuse to admit that they are regular Army until asked about the visible insignia on their uniforms.

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If the borderland between El Paso and Juárez is a vise, the American side is only one of its jaws. Across the river in Juárez, the array of armed organizations on the border is even more chaotic. In early February, newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum deployed some 10,000 Mexican Army and National Guard troops to the border as part of “Operation Frontera Norte.” 

Both already heavily patrol the city, along with the Juárez police and the less-visible members of drug cartels who maintain deep relationships with local law enforcement. Both the Mexican state as well as criminal organizations pose a threat to migrants, either through the Mexican government’s mandate to relocate them away from the border, or via the risk of kidnapping and exploitation. The smuggling and exploitation of migrants is a multi-billion-dollar business, and can be more lucrative than the drug trade. With all legal avenues blocked for asylees and refugees, people on the move now must depend even more on the cartels to take them into the US.

Leobardo Alvarado is an independent researcher who has spent decades observing issues surrounding migration and labor between Mexico and the United States. In the backyard of his house in a quiet residential neighborhood of Juárez, he shares his worries about not just the escalation of bellicose rhetoric in the United States, but in his own country. “Trump has declared the drug cartels as terror organizations,” he says, “but Sheinbaum countered immediately by invoking national sovereignty and a proposal to change the constitution to strengthen it.”

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Alvarado worries these tensions could escalate quickly. “We could have some kind of event happen that could serve as a justification for an intervention,” he says. 

The most dire scenario that Alvarado can think of is the US replicating strategies learned in the War on Terror in a conflict against cartels. The prospect of the United States fighting organized crime in Mexico through the same military means it used in Afghanistan and elsewhere may seem remote, but much of the infrastructure is already in place. 

Predator drones already patrol the borderland skies, and in February, a small group of US Army Special Forces trainers traveled to Campeche to train members of the Mexican Marine Corps. The first flights transporting detained migrants to Guantanamo Bay departed from Fort Bliss, a sprawling Army post on the outskirts of El Paso, and a contingent of Stryker combat vehicles was recently ordered to join the Army personnel already deployed along the border.

“The charge that the president has given us is 100% operational control of the border,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a speech he gave on his inaugural visit to the border. Standing on a barren hilltop, protected by a mixture of Border Patrol agents and Army personnel, Hegseth lauded the deployment of more “assets” on the border. Hegseth had arrived in a line of Black Hawk helicopters that had brought him to an overlook close to Mexico. From where he spoke, he likely had a perfect view of the peak that lies across a jagged valley just a few hundred yards away: Mount Cristo Rey.