Fleeting civilities: Narrative accounts from agents and migrants at the US-Mexico border

This paper draws on interviews with Border Patrol agents and Mexican migrants to examine narrative accounts of humanitarian governance—instances where expected control and restriction are replaced with courtesy, humor, or kindness. Our respondents’ narratives cluster around three types of moments of fleeting civility: (a) those where agents and migrants acknowledge the respective roles they play in the US immigration system, often by conceding that agents will continue trying to arrest migrants and that migrants will attempt re-entry until they succeed; (b) interactions that feature agents attending to migrants’ physical comfort and needs; and (c) interactions that feature humor or light banter, mostly initiated by agents but appreciated by migrants. These accounts are gendered, as they almost always feature agents being courteous toward women, but only after agents feel they have control of the detention or arrest situation. We argue that agents and migrants highlight these encounters in research interviews to craft moral identities, but the encounters themselves do not alter the dehumanizing character of border control.