‘[The U.S.] sent us to Mexico until the next court hearing.’ Central American mothers’ expulsion and third-country liminality

This paper introduces the concept of third-country liminality to capture the intensifying layers of uncertainty experienced by mothers from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala sent to Mexico during their U.S. asylum process. Unlike migrants in other precarious legal situations, these women face multiple possible outcomes: deportation from the U.S., deportation from Mexico, release into the U.S., or asylum in Mexico. Drawing on 125 interviews, I examine how mothers seeking asylum navigate life amid restrictive U.S. immigration laws and border policies involving a third country. I demonstrate that mothers experience this context as multiple forms of liminality. Rather than occurring in distinct or sequential stages, these sociolegal, temporal, and spatial liminalities are deeply entangled, compounding a sense of precarity, ambiguity, and tenuousness. Third-country liminality becomes evident as mothers seeking asylum navigate cycles of detention in the U.S., forced relocation to Mexico, court appearances in the U.S., and subsequent returns to Mexico, all while continuing to care for their children whom they brought with them and those in their country of origin.