Not looking Mexican enough: Arbitrary Detention of Mexican Citizens by Mexican Immigration Authorities

Amalia Campos-Delgado is Assistant Professor of Law & Society at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society, Leiden University. She holds a PhD in Politics from Queen’s University Belfast and is member of the Mexican National System of Researchers -SNI, Level 1. Her research interests include international migration, border securitisation, externalization of borders, and border bureaucracies. (Twitter: @amalia_cd). Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa is Researcher and Professor on International Migrations. Social Sciences Department, Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, Mexico. He received a PhD in sociology from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) with a certificate in demography. He is member of the Mexican National System of Researchers (SNI, Level I). Guillermo has conducted research on international migration in Mexico and the United States since 2006, with a focus on migration policies, irregular or unauthorized migration, subnational and local governments, and the human rights of Mexican and Central American families. (Twitter: @gyrizar).  This is the fourth post in the Border Criminologies 'Southern Perspectives on Border Criminology' themed series curated by Rimple Metha and Ana Aliverti. You can find their corresponding article in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy here: Arbitrary Detention of Mexican Citizens by Mexican Immigration Authorities.

Migration control in Mexico, as elsewhere in the world, is governed by assumptions and stereotypes of class, race, and gender. But what does this mean in practice for Mexican citizens who do not conform to the precepts and stereotypes of class and race held by immigration control officers? In our paper, based on archival and statistical information and interviews with Mexican citizens detained by Mexican immigration authorities, we investigate the detention of Mexican citizens and highlight how border control in the country re-produces practices of otherness that affect not only the foreign population, but also the Mexican population itself.

We were prompted by the case and the Mexican state’s response to the arbitrary detention of four Indigenous Mexican Tzeltal people on 3 September 2015. Despite identifying themselves as Mexican citizens, the migration authorities in charge of the migration verification operation considered their documents to be false, and they were transferred to a detention centre (euphemistically known all over the country as “migratory stations” [estaciones migratorias]) where they were held for nine days until their identity was certified. In 2019, the Mexican State, under the representation of the Director of the Mexican Migration Institute (Instituto Nacional de Migración [INM]), Francisco Garduño, offered an apology to these Mexican citizens for the arbitrary detention they suffered. However, in what was supposed to be a speech of apology, Garduño unveiled profound details of the logic used by the migration agents during the detention: “the reason for their detention was their phenotype, poor understanding of Spanish, and illiteracy”. In fact, the discriminatory logic that underpins and is reproduced in the immigration verification operations was highlighted by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, which declared them unconstitutional in May 2022.

These migration verification operations are the backbone of Mexico’s Transit Control Regime. They are carried out throughout the country on highways and railways and are aimed to target the irregular population transiting through the country. In practice, these operations are breeding grounds for discriminatory practices. The Mexican National Human Rights Commission (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, or CNDH) has highlighted how factors such as skin colour, physical features, clothing, appearance and accent are preponderant in the decisions of migration agents to request documentation and detain a person. Agents claim to mobilise their “intuition” to detect irregular migrants, the infamous “gut feeling”, an intuition that is shaped by skewed expectations of Mexicanidad, or Mexicanness. These skewed expectations result in agents requiring Mexican citizens to prove their citizenship because they consider that they “do not look Mexican”.

To explain the search for a phenotypical ideal of the Mexican citizen and the discriminatory practices at immigration checkpoints that end up targeting and excluding citizens, we delve into what has been called a “sui generis Mexican racism”. This type of racism is fuelled by social class stratification and particularly by using mestizaje as a nation-building ideology that claims that racial mixing, resulting from the colonial period, eventually created a kind of racial homogeneity among the population. While mestizaje could be a counter-hegemonic ideology to break down colonial and post-colonial racial categories, in Mexico it is the ideology behind a State-driven “assimilationist racism” which is deeply linked to the historical search for and valuation of European blanquitud (or whiteness). Indeed, despite the denial of the existence of racism in the country (because the entire population is assumed to be mestizo), research has shown that phenotypical characteristics are significant predictors of socioeconomic outcomes, and ‘pigmentocracy’ reigns the everyday practices of contemporary Mexican society. As is to be expected, the fabrication of the imaginary of a homogenous Mexican mestizo/a hits the country’s indigenous and Afro-descendant communities the hardest (but also historically erasing even Asian-origin groups), as they are perceived as outsiders or others. At the same time, mestizaje is used as an ideological resource to hide the reality of the discriminatory practices they experience.

The racist and classist nature of immigration verification operations exacerbates intrinsic racial discrimination and classist logics within Mexican society. In our statistical analysis of these operations, we found that from 2010 to 2020, 1,028 self-identified Mexicans were detained by migration authorities because, according to the officer in charge of the operation, they did not provide “reliable proof” of Mexican nationality. Yet, when assessing evidence of identity, Mexican migration officials rely on their own preconceived images of Mexicanness and often ignore the law. Furthermore, the testimonies we reconstructed show the arbitrariness of this notion and how people are detained despite having documents proving their Mexican nationality. Often, these documents are deemed false by officials who, in some cases, tear them up.

While the detainees gather documentation to prove that they are indeed Mexican nationals, they have had to endure the appalling conditions inside Mexican immigration detention centres, which, incidentally, have been identified as places of torture. Once they prove their nationality, they are released without much more than a “disculpe uste” [sorry for the inconvenience]. That is, even though their constitutional rights to non-discrimination and free transit in the territory were violated, the INM has no protocols or direct reparation mechanisms for the population affected by its racist and classist “detection” mechanisms.

There is opacity on how INM operates and the arbitrary detention of Mexicans is no exception. In fact, when consulting INM databases, it is impossible to know with certainty whether the population self-identified as Mexican during apprehension was able to certify their nationality. However, in our work we examined migration administrative resolutions between 2010 and 2020 and addressed the “non-deportability” of the population. We found that only 7% were removed directly by immigration authorities (through an “Assisted Return”) while in contrast 64% of self-identified Mexican detainees were released under a “Free Transit Agreement”. This is a resolution that, although not present in the Migration Law, is recurrently used in a discretionary manner in the country’s migration management, which suggests that these are indeed Mexicans who managed to accredit their nationality and were released. This inference is echoed in the testimonies we present of Mexicans detained and released through a “Free Transit Agreement”.

Overall, the key dilemma revealed in our paper is the ease with which nonconformity with the prototypical imaginary of Mexicanness translates into the revocation of the constitutional rights of any Mexican citizen. As the control for transit migration becomes more restrictive and violent, classist and racist logics become even more embedded in border practices, increasing the risk that any citizen who does not conform to the migration agent’s preconceived ideas about the skin colour, dress, and speech of a “real Mexican” will immediately be treated with suspicion and subjected to detention to certify their belonging. Furthermore, the arbitrary detention of this population is presented as a simple administrative procedure, there is no redress or protocols to prevent these arbitrary acts from being repeated and, in this way, the violation of constitutional rights becomes a collateral damage of the migration control strategy and its racist and classist logics.

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