The border as biography: everyday bordering and trafficking survivors at the India–Bangladesh frontier

The cross-border trafficking of Bangladeshi women into India is often framed as a border-security problem, locating vulnerability at the moment of crossing. This article asks how Bangladesh’s Prevention and Suppression of Human Trafficking Act 2012, enacted within the Palermo Protocol framework, can nonetheless leave the women it is designed to protect administratively suspended and socially exposed after identification. Drawing on clause-level analysis of the Act’s cross-border provisions and reflexive thematic analysis of 30 interviews with Bangladeshi government officials, NGO practitioners, and elected local councillors, the article locates this problem within border criminology. It shows that bordering functions are distributed across four sites: the territorial line, kinship networks, the documentary apparatus of repatriation, and home communities. The article’s empirical contribution is to specify how statutory duties of return operate without enforceable timelines, evidentiary standards, or default rules. Its conceptual contribution is the bilateral interstice, the interval in which return depends on two misaligned verification regimes, while neither state is answerable for the delay. The article treats biographical bordering cautiously, as an implication for future longitudinal research rather than as a demonstrated life-course finding.