Manufacturing Desolation: Unauthorized Border Crosser Mortality, Disappearance, and the Sociopolitical Construction of Remoteness in U.S. Boundary Enforcement

U.S. boundary enforcement has long been organized around an effort to redirect unauthorized border crossing into remote and inhospitable expanses of desert terrain. Using southern Arizona’s West Desert corridor as a case study, this article explores how these two conditions have been actively cultivated over time. First, we describe the twentieth-century use of military and conservation rationales to remove indigenous O’odham, Mexican-American, and Anglo-American residents from their villages and ranchlands. Then, we examine the contemporary evolution of what we call the U.S. selective access regime, one that restricts public access and criminalizes humanitarian intervention even as the government aggressively expands its own ability to circulate across previously difficult-to-access areas of federally managed land. To understand the implications for unauthorized border crossers, we apply a model of human water loss from temperature and locomotion-induced perspiration associated with pedestrian movement across these desert lands. Our findings reveal, first, how remoteness is a relational phenomenon that must be continuously reproduced and defended; and second, how governmental efforts to do so measurably increase the risk of human mortality. Selective access also obscures the scale of this phenomenon, however, contributing to the disappearance of thousands of unauthorized border crossers over time.