After Andrea and her children crossed the border, officials put them in the hielera, a cold, crowded room filled with adults and children sleeping on the floor. 'My daughter was trembling throughout the night because she had wet clothes from crossing the river. She is only four years old', recounts Andrea in her testimony (Cantor 2015, 17). Officials had thrown away all their warm clothes and refused to give them blankets.Andrea's story is just one example of the experiences of many women seeking asylum who are confined in temporary holding cells upon arrival to the United States. This article's central aim is to scrutinize the temporary holding cells, or hieleras, at the U.S. Southern border and the punitive practices that they encapsulate 1 . Using Foucauldian and transnational feminist frameworks I analyze the detention of asylum-seeking mothers and children from Central America and argue that the temporary holding cells become a site where the numerous narratives around immigrant women of color become attached to the bodies of the women seeking asylum. Foucauldian notions about sovereign and disciplinary power offer a useful starting point for understanding the punitive practices of the hieleras. However, as I argue in this essay, in order to understand how these punitive practices are gendered, racialized, and sexualized, Foucauldian frameworks alone are inadequate. I complement this approach with a transnational feminist framework to expand theorizations of confinement and the specific practices of punishment that take place at the border.As a feminist researcher who has met some of the women who have experienced the violence of the asylum-seeking process at the border, my aim is to center this article on the practices that affect them without exposing them to more scrutiny 2 . I therefore rely on testimonies that some of the women have already given to journalists and researchers and are documented through news accounts and reports.Agents from the Border Patrol apprehend individuals once they enter the U.S. and sometimes place them in the temporary holding cells-known as hieleras (freezer/icebox) by officers and immigrants due to their low temperatures-for processing before they are transferred or repatriated. Although most asylum-seekers turn themselves in to the authorities after entering the U.S., they are placed in the same facilities as other people crossing the border. These cells were not designed for overnight stays and therefore contain no beds, although the guidelines now dictate that 'detainees should generally not be held for longer than 72 hours 3 in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) hold rooms or holding facilities' (U.S. Border Patrol Policy 2008) 4 . The 2008 U.S. Border Patrol Policy Detention Standards require detainees to be granted constant access to drinking water, access to snacks and meals, access to bathrooms with toilet items-such as soap or toilet paper-and access to medication and health services.These standards however, differ from the reality that investigative and journalist...

In the United States, Central American Indigenous women who seek asylum are officially classified as Latinas or Hispanic. The erasure and consequent invisibility of Indigenous identity not only causes assimilation but also jeopardizes Central American Indigenous women's procedural rights. Using a transnational feminist lens combined with a Critical Latinx Indigeneities framework, and drawing on fieldwork research, I address the complex relationships of migrants whose identities are intertwined with geography, different states, and racial representations, while I claim that the invisibility of Indigenous women from Abya Yala who cross borders responds to the white settler colonial project.In answering the question "When is an Indian not an Indian?" María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2017) claims "in the United States an Indian is not an Indian when s/he is also African American or Latinx" (139). Indigenous women from Abya Yala 1 who cross the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum are officially non-existent-if they are classified 2 at all, they are considered "Hispanic" or "Latina". This paper analyzes the ways in which official regulations and on-the-ground practices enacted on Indigenous women from Abya Yala at the border contribute to their invisibilization. Practices of invisibilization of Indigenous Peoples take place all around the world. The fact that global disaggregated data on how these populations are affected by conflict and displacement does not exist, or how these are left out of global discussions on humanitarian crisis attests to those invisibility practices (Minority Rights Group International, 2017, 12). In addition to the effects of poverty, gang violence, corruption and insecurity, Indigenous communities are made more vulnerable to issues such as climate change, lack of land rights, and resource extraction projects. For these reasons, these populations feature in disproportionally high numbers among refugees and internally displaced persons (Minority Rights Group International, 2017, 11). Indigenous Peoples threaten the stability of the nation-state by disrupting and questioning its legitimacy, borders, laws, language, and so on. In particular, in the United States, Indigenous Peoples sabotage the myth of its construction as a nation-state was based on an empty land, or a "nation of immigrants". It was through genocide, land dispossession, disease and enslavement that the U.S. became the nation that currently is (Rifkin, 2014). Today, international and national treaties, agreements, and conventions, protect Indigenous Peoples all over the world from the violence inflicted in them in the past. However, their invisibilization has not been left in the past, as Patrick Wolfe ( 2006) rightly points out white settler colonialism is "a structure not an event". Indigenous Peoples today continue to endure violence and exclusion worldwide and are more likely to be displaced by free-trade agreements, the environmental crisis, neocolonial

This article explores the mechanisms in which, through the US family detention asylum process, neoliberal ideas of citizenship are reinforced and contested. Through ethnographic research, and using a Foucauldian lens, we take a closer look at the neoliberal processes involved within so-called family detention. Specifically, we focus on legal advocates who are helping detained women prepare for their legal interviews. This paper argues that humanitarian aid work becomes knowable through attention to microlevel details and forms of practice—on the ground and at the margins. This affords a recognition of not only areas of functional solidarity or symbiosis with the state, but also those less visible forms of contestation. We claim that while legal advocates play a role within the neoliberal regimes at work inside these centres, they also contest this system in various critical ways, ensuring both access to legal representation for all detainees and their eventual release.

Many refugees fleeing from persecution across borders, find navigating the refugee registration system extremely complicated. In many border spaces, destination or transit countries, the difficult registration processes and the lack of support services requires the intervention and support of many non-state actors. Over the past decades, neoliberal policies have increasingly relegated public responsibilities to the private sphere. In this vein, a range of organisations have been working with refugees to assist them access to their legal status. This paper seeks to critically examine on-the-ground practices of these individuals, international and local non-profit organisations—or brokers—in Malaysia and the United States of America. Using ethnographic fieldwork data from these two very disparate fieldsites—one a signatory of the Protocol to the Convention, the other a non-signatory country—we document shared difficulties, frustrations, opportunities and specific obstacles, strategies and tactics refugees and organisations deploy. Building on Hannah Arendt’s insights of an internal contradiction in the human rights framework, we point to a new aporia: Whilst there now exist international instruments to protect refugees, access to this framework and its protections is becoming ever more challenging. This means that those seeking asylum need the assistance and mediation of third-party organisations in order to access their rights. The struggle for recognition and protection thus is no longer about achieving universal rights, but rather on how vulnerable populations can access them.

Migration deterrence campaigns are part of a set of border externalisation strategies that extend one nation's border into other territories. Building on the literature of border externalisation, migration deterrence, and feminist media studies, we address these campaigns as critical performative strategies that enact neoliberal ideologies and depoliticise migration. We analyse three cases -two from the US and one from Europe -in which nations target would-be migrants with multimedia messaging to persuade them to stay home and become productive citizens in their countries of origin. We argue that these campaigns reify neoliberal notions of the moral, responsible citizen, and the criminal or bound-to-falter migrant. In particular, deterrence media embrace the paradoxical notion that migrants are responsible for making the right choice yet possess no agency. As our discussion demonstrates, strategies that discourage people from moving enact neoliberal ideologies that treat migration as a purely individual decision, decontextualised from issues of structural inequality.