The Mexican state also justifies its bordering role by portraying its southern border as a security risk while human rights advocates in and outside of Mexico have energetically documented and critiqued the treatment of Central Americans in Mexico (e.g., Knippen, Boggs, and Meyer, 2015). This has been part of a wider critical human rights movement in Mexico. Little has been written about the role of governments of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in the arrival and asylum process at the U.S.-Mexican border. Here, we do not refer to internal conditions and policies that cause flight (e.g., policing and militarism), but only to the process of contention over U.S. border and asylum policy and practices. It is notable how weak and subordinate these governments are in the face of U.S. programs to expend money and propaganda in Central America to deter the flight of refugees (explicit in official language), as well as a modest expansion of the small (3,000 person) direct-admission refugee program in the region (Bersin, 2015; Edwards and Mohammed, 2016). Participant observation with immigrant advocates in Dilley, Texas (February, 2016) reveals some patterns about consular involvement with Central American refugees, although it is difficult to generalize. The Guatemalan consulate has largely been absent from the facilities. On the other hand, the Salvadoran consulate has actively supported efforts from legal aid organizations, instructing women to seek out the legal services offered in the facility. This serves as a counter narrative to the pessimistic vision delivered by CBP and ICE agents, who often urge people to sign their deportation order and not follow through on asylum claims. However, several incidents have shown the Honduran consulate to reinforce this narrative. A group of irate women approached the legal assistants at Dilley and complained that the Honduran consulate had instructed them that they had no legal recourse and should immediately sign their removals, adding “it’s not that bad,” and “together we can make it better!” (Personal Communication, Slack 02/11/2016). It should be noted that,
advocates, the development of a strength in asylum law advocacy in particular, and a “humanitarian” specialization in issues of women, family groups, and unaccompanied minors. Receiving this legal contention is a complex array of federal judges of varied degrees of sympathy toward immigrant rights or central government prerogative, and the actual accumulated legal statutes and common law, so far leading generally to pro-immigrant decisions. While the broad tendency of the politics has been enforcement-oriented, the pro-Central American networks of advocates, service providers, and lawyers has had significant effects in lessening this; in some ways, with limits, resistance has worked. The central perspective of critics of Central Americans is that they are the latest wave of unauthorized American invaders of the imagined white national community. That they are acting on a legal opportunity (request for asylum) is largely ignored; the core is inherited moral and political ideas from opposition to unauthorized Mexican immigration, and relatedly, fear of harm coming from the United States through the threatened outer border, particularly the one with Latin America (Mora and Christianakis, 2015). The opposition to Central Americans revitalized the anti-immigrant activist movement residing near or (more often) traveling to the border region, who had been in decline because of bad, often bizarre behavior by key “Minutemen” activists from 2008 onward (murder, murder-suicide, child molestation [Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d., Neiwert, 2014, Lemon, 2016]). The Central American influx gave them a new “folk devil” to mobilize against (Cohen, 1972). As described earlier, the key opponents have been demonstrators mobilized at attempted transfer and release sites in the early summer 2014 (more needs to be learned about the particular actors in these mobilizations), Republican politicians (above all in Arizona and Texas [Mora and Christianakis, 2015]), and the alliance between officers of the National Border Patrol Union and
active struggles of distinct groups of people, in some cases shaped also by the presence of infrastructure, laws, and other “objects.” This unfolding current history the value of attending to the productive role of contention, a point well established in some traditions in the social sciences. Here, we have aimed to encompass a wide and often disparate set of contending elements, which allows for complex formations and sometimes unexpected outcomes (e.g., the recourse of government agencies to their strong opponents to provide services to released migrants). Although we approach contention as an open-ended process, it must be emphasized that it is highly unequal; the executive and major agencies of the U.S. state, the main patterns of border and immigration law, and the current relatively anti-immigrant and racist balance of politics certainly makes the aims of Central Americans and their supporters difficult to achieve. We also have taken note of the moral ideas and actions on a variety of sides in this contentious process. Moral justice is not unitary and obvious to all, as the struggle shows, but from our perspective, we share humanity across borders, including migration and refuge as protection from harm.