Appearing ‘out of place’: Automobility and the everyday policing of threat and suspicion on the US/Canada frontier

Abstract

Since 2001 the United States Border Patrol's Detroit Sector has grown from 38 agents to 411–the fastest rate of growth of any Border Patrol jurisdiction in the United States (CBP, 2016). Through ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews and the examination of a growing archive of internal US Border Patrol data obtained via the US Freedom of Information Act, this paper examines the everyday discourses of ‘threat’ and ‘suspicion’ that inform routine enforcement practices by Detroit Sector personnel as they police the US/Canada frontier. It finds that both ‘threat’ and ‘suspicion’ are narrated expressly according to geographic factors of origin, location and direction of travel, scrutinizing bodies and persons that, as an outcome, are said to appear “out of place.” At the same time, according to the Border Patrol's daily apprehension logs, enforcement activity disproportionately concentrates on Latinx residents across divisions of citizenship and immigration status, affecting peoples' everyday ability to circulate through urban and suburban space free from scrutiny, surveillance and the possibility of state violence. To theorize the site and stakes of these outcomes, the paper borrows Stuesse and Coleman’s (2014) concept of “automobility” and develops this as an explicitly racial and racializing concept, one that affords an intersectional reading of state violence based on its distributional impacts on peoples' autonomy and control over their conditions of everyday social reproduction. This, then, suggests a need for greater dialogue between literature on immigration enforcement and those concerned expressly with geographies of racial confinement, policing, dispossession and control.