From 2009-20, the United States deported more than five million people. Over 90% of those people were men, and most spent time in prison and/or detention before the U.S. removed them. What becomes of men the United States locks up and casts off as criminals? How do incarceration and exile shape their families,
their struggles for rights and resources, and, more fundamentally, their sense of themselves as men? And how does U.S. incarceration interact with urban spaces in Mexico to produce a new geography of migrant displacement? Nearly 30 Latinx undergraduate and graduate students helped me examine these questions.Some of them had parents or siblings deported during the work. Their voices shaped the project and brought deep attention to the emotional lives of men. Our work — forthcoming in a book by the same title — reveals that deportation is now fundamentally carceral. It targets men; it undermines families, and its effects funnel men into spaces of limbo in Mexico. This carceral deportation is forging a new migration system, not of apartheid but of banishment. I conclude by considering the gendered implications of banishment and the creative pathways by which some deportees may find their way out.

Abigail Andrews is director of the Mexican Migration Field Research Program, Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, and affiliated faculty in sociology at the University of California San Diego. Her scholarly research focuses on state violence, gender, and grassroots advocacy among migrants from Mexico and Central America. She is also a leader in collaborative, community-led research at the U.S.-Mexico border. Her publications include Undocumented Politics (UC Press, 2018) and the forthcoming book Banished Men.