Date of Award

Summer 8-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science & Geography

Program/Concentration

Graduate Program in International Studies

Committee Director

Regina Karp

Committee Member

Peter Schulman

Committee Member

Carina Marques

Abstract

This dissertation explores how migrant death and the handling of unidentified remains operate within U.S. border governance, focusing on caregivers, forensic anthropologists, and volunteer search-and-recovery teams who recover, document, and try to identify the dead along the U.S.–Mexico border. Using classic grounded theory and reflexive visual ethnography, the study includes interviews, field observations, and documentary photography conducted in South Texas, covering Brooks, Maverick, and Webb Counties.

Instead of viewing migrant deaths as accidental humanitarian tragedies, this dissertation situates caregivers’ daily work within a historical trajectory of deterrence-based border policies, from Prevention Through Deterrence to modern state-led enforcement regimes. It demonstrates how directing migrants into remote and hostile areas not only causes death but also creates fragmented systems of accounting where bodies, names, and responsibility are often separated. In this broken data environment, caregivers emerge as the primary actors who piece together what federal, state, and county systems fail to connect.

The study makes three key contributions. It shows that the custody, identification, and disposal of migrant remains are not just related to border security but are essential practices through which sovereignty, abandonment, and moral legitimacy are expressed. It also uncovers how Texas’s fragmented medicolegal system, particularly its dependence on justice-of-the-peace death investigations and limited medical examiner resources, causes systematic delays, underreporting, and long-term storage of unidentified remains. Additionally, it demonstrates how combining grounded qualitative analysis with documentary photography creates a form of epistemic repair by revealing the infrastructures of death, care, and bureaucratic neglect that official statistics often conceal.

A key finding reveals a striking contradiction in U.S. state discourse: while mass graves and unidentified bodies abroad are condemned using human-rights language, similar deaths at the border are framed administratively as issues of data management and program capacity. This discursive shift explains why oversight efforts focus on improving metrics while caregivers bear the emotional, ethical, and logistical burden of maintaining dignity and the right to truth. By documenting this paradox, the dissertation redefines migrant death as structurally produced and portrays caregivers as figures who both mitigate and reveal the limits of deterrence-driven border policy.

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DOI

10.25777/px0k-qe06

ISBN

9798193217435

ORCID

0009-0007-1497-0533

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