This piece appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
When NACLA’s Editorial Committee first began discussing this issue in late 2023, we could not have imagined that, less than two years later, federal agents would be openly killing and abducting people—citizens and migrants, children and adults, documented and undocumented alike—far from the southern border, all in the name of border enforcement. Yet perhaps we should have. The pieces gathered in this issue consistently demonstrate that the violence now unfolding inside the United States is border violence. It is not an aberration, but the predictable outcome of a hemispheric bordering regime with deep historical and geographic roots.
The public executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026; the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores on drug trafficking charges only days earlier; the use of immigration law in early 2025 to detain pro-Palestine activists and suppress dissent; the March 2025 extrajudicial deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans—many of them documented—to El Salvador’s legally unaccountable megaprison; and the detention of migrant children like Liam Cornejo Ramos are not isolated events. They are scenes from a script long rehearsed at the border, now normalized and brought to center stage.
This issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas takes that longer view. Rather than treating contemporary migration enforcement as a series of discrete crises, the contributions gathered here trace the historical processes, regional adaptations, and lived consequences of a hemispheric bordering regime that now extends far beyond any single boundary line. Borders today are not merely lines between states. They are infrastructures and bureaucracies; development projects and detention systems; transit zones, internal policing practices, and humanitarian apparatuses that operate both within and across national territories, reorganizing everyday life throughout the Americas.
Political technologies long familiar in Latin America—states of exception, counterinsurgency logics, militarized policing—are now redeployed for domestic governance in the United States.
Much of this dossier engages what activists and scholars have described as the “externalization of borders.” This framework powerfully situates contemporary bordering within longer histories of U.S. imperialism, showing how enforcement is displaced outward through bilateral agreements, security assistance, and economic coercion. Yet what emerges across these pages is not a simple outward expansion. Bordering practices are being externalized, in the service of imperial domination, and internalized as tools of domestic rule, at the same time. Political technologies long familiar in Latin America—states of exception, counterinsurgency logics, militarized policing—are now redeployed for domestic governance in the United States. At the same time, Latin American governments increasingly internalize bordering within their own territories, while acting as junior partners and independent brokers in a regional system of migration containment. This architecture did not begin with Trump’s return to office, but its consolidation has accelerated under Trump 2.0, amid the revival of gunboat diplomacy and spheres of influence, tariff threats, the erosion of international legal norms, electoral interference, intensifying xenophobic populism, and the normalization of authoritarian rule.
As terrifying as this moment is, it cannot be understood through repression alone. Across the region, grassroots movements are forging hemispheric, multiracial coalitions that confront shared structures of racial capitalism and imperial domination. In doing so, they reveal that struggles over mobility—and the practices of care, solidarity, and resistance that sustain them—are deeply intertwined with labor struggles, anti-imperialist movements, and other histories of collective struggle across the Americas.
This is what makes Felipe Baeza’s illustration—featured on the cover of this issue—so resonant. Rising from the remnants of a skull at the bottom of the frame, the figure evokes an extractive landscape in which lives are consumed and discarded, yet it refuses to remain bound to that violence. Composed of layered, vibrating lines, the figure appears in motion, suspended between dissolution and formation, while elongated arms reach outward in gestures that are at once vulnerable and defiant. As Baeza writes, his figures are “bodies in states of transformation and becoming,” shaped by displacement and power, yet refusing enclosure. They exist in the in-between—between past and future, here and there, visibility and opacity, and, we might add, between the border and what it fails to contain—inviting us to sit with uncertainty while imagining otherwise. In this sense, the image offers a counter-archive to border fascism: a reminder that even as borders harden, life continues to exceed them.
The Border, Everywhere
That excess—of movement, resistance, and repression alike—forms the backdrop against which the second Trump presidency unfolds. Rather than inaugurating a new phase, Trump’s return has intensified already existing practices, deepening border externalization abroad while dramatically expanding the reach of immigration enforcement within the United States. The bulk of this issue focuses on how externalization is playing out across the region, but it also attends to how these logics are being openly deployed domestically. An executive order declaring Antifa a domestic terror group and the National Security Presidential Memorandum Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, both published in September of last year, exemplify this turn. In her article for the Report, Dawn Marie Paley explores how these declarations lay the groundwork for the criminalization of anyone who protests harmful immigration policies and the violence of ICE.
Writing from Ecuador, Cristina Burneo explores the linkages between migration policy and Indigenous uprisings against the neoliberal program of Trump-aligned President Daniel Noboa. In a disturbing mirror of developments in the United States, the Ecuadorian government has deployed language that casts Indigenous people as internal enemies, unleashing sweeping repression against them while at the same time allowing Washington’s bordering regime to penetrate ever deeper into the fabric of the state. Similar discourses echoed throughout Chile’s presidential campaign, in which far-right candidate José Antonio Kast pushed the criminalization of migration and the hardening of the country’s border with Perú to the center of the electoral agenda. Journalist Yasna Mussa analyzes how Kast, who handily defeated leftist candidate Jeannete Jara in December, revived the language of dictatorship, newly rearticulated through anti-immigrant posturing.
Even in countries where the progressive left is firmly in power, there has been little positive news regarding the rights of migrants and returnees. Gustavo Dias and Julio D’Angelo Davies trace the origins of deportation flights from the United States to Brazil, looking at who profits from the business of deportation and how, even after returning to power in 2023, Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva has been unable—or unwilling—to break with the dictates of U.S. border externalization. Their analysis resonates with scholar Amarela Varela-Huerta’s critique of the paradoxical role played by Mexico’s Morena government, particularly under Claudia Sheinbaum, which she argues has done little to protect migrants, instead bending to U.S. pressure while advancing an increasingly militarized border regime. Even so, Varela-Huerta documents how people in movement use different strategies to organize, as do the migrant archivists who preserve and circulate accounts of what’s taking place.
From southern Mexico, writer Sergio Prieto Díaz invites us to rethink border externalization by examining how infrastructure projects like the Mayan Train and the Trans-Isthmus Corridor are integral to bordering. Both initiatives are run by the Armed Forces and represent physical infrastructures—often built on Indigenous communal land—that may serve to contain migrant flows in the future. The train tracks that connect the Isthmus to the Guatemalan border are currently being renovated and run alongside Tapachula, a city that has become a kind of “prison city” for third-country migrants. In their interview with human rights practitioner Mavi Cruz, P. S. D. and Julianne Chandler tease out how border externalization is lived in southwest Chiapas, and how political work and solidarity among people in movement persist against all odds.
Sanctuary, Documentation, and Return
Faced with the onslaught of security measures in the years leading up to and during Trump 2.0, historical forms of migrant resistance have intensified across the Americas. While all contributions to this dossier reflect on this process in different ways, three texts engage it most directly.
Focusing on Chicago, one of the cities hardest hit by brutal ICE raids, Bárbara Sostaita challenges us to rethink the concept of sanctuary not as a fixed place, but as a set of practices that accompany migrants wherever they go. What has unfolded in the Windy City—and can be extended to other cities such as Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and many others—reveals both the proliferation of grassroots forms of resistance and the reactivation of historical struggles embedded in the Latin American socio-political fabric since the 1980s.
In contexts of extreme violence, documentation becomes a tactic of resistance—not only against the violation of rights and state impunity, but also as a constitutive practice of struggle itself.
In a related vein, Phil Neff’s contribution, grounded in the experience of Salvadoran political prisoners collectively writing a report on the torture they endured, underscores the importance of documenting human rights violations. In contexts of extreme violence, documentation becomes a tactic of resistance—not only against the violation of rights and state impunity, but also as a constitutive practice of struggle itself. Neff connects this history to ongoing efforts to trace violations against migrants in Washington State, insisting on an uncompromising imperative: the labor of human rights must continue.
Reflecting on the local reverberations of Trump 2.0 in the Darién—until recently the largest migration corridor in the Americas—Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Jonathan Echeverri Zuluaga, and Henry Esquivel Babilonia invite us to consider migrant mobility as a form of resistance in its own right. Drawing on vivid ethnographic immersion between Necoclí and Metetí, the Colombian and Panamanian sides of the Darién, the authors show how returning to South America in fascist times is a form of survival and protection for migrant lives. This is particularly true for those who transit south in reverse. The essay documents the social, economic, and political transformations generated by this mobility, while compelling us to confront the responsibility of South American states to receive, protect, and support their own violated yet surviving populations in a context of intensifying border fascism.
Moving between a critical review of border externalization and the inexorable forms of migrant resistance that echo long genealogies of anticolonial, antiracist, anti-imperialist, feminist, Indigenous, and Black social struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean, this dossier makes a clear political gesture. It insists on the political importance of both recording and archiving, by whatever means possible, the present moment of fascist bordering, while recovering the lessons of struggle forged across the region. Becoming archivists of the present—of its violence and its multiple forms of insubordination—is one way of contributing to a collective fabric that, through whistles, community kitchens, know-your-rights workshops, rapid-response groups, live records of rights violations, mass protests, and countless other collective and transnational practices of care, never ceases to name and define the most brutal practices of power.
Soledad Álvarez Velasco is a social anthropologist and human geographer. For over a decade, she has accompanied migrants in transit, working to unravel the complex intersection of mobility, control, and spatial transformation in the Americas. She is a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Dawn Marie Paley is a journalist and the publisher of Ojala.mx. Her third book, Generals at the Gates: Military Power and Social Change in México, will be out in September 2026.
P.S.D. is a scholar studying transnational Black and Indigenous migration across the Americas.