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Jeremy Slack, 2019, Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing MigraBon on the U.S.-
Mexico Border.  Oakland: University of California Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978-0520297333  
 
The militarizaBon of the U.S. border over the past thirty years coincides with an escalaBon of 
“security” measures undertaken by governments to deny people the basic human right to 
freedom of movement while at the same Bme affording properBed elites the opportunity to 
claim land and resources for their own benefit.   
 
U.S. government aWempts to control mobility is today undertaken through the deployment of 
aggressive border patrols and exclusionary policy, the building of walls, the use of high-tech 
surveillance and, ulBmately, the threat of violence. For those on the “other side of the fence,” 
inBmidaBon, bureaucraBzaBon, criminalizaBon, and punishment lay at the core of 
contemporary immigraBon pracBce.  
 
As Jeremy Slack’s Deported to Death makes abundantly clear, undocumented migrants 
unfortunate enough to be caught by U.S. immigraBon and deported to Mexico o[en fall vicBm 
to predatory officials and criminal groups. Many individuals are kidnapped, pressed into service 
for drug cartels, tortured and le[ for dead. Thus, when the Obama administraBon deported an 
unprecedented 3 million persons between 2008 and 2016, countless disappearances and deaths 
resulted. This same inhumane pracBce has conBnued more recently during both the Trump and 
Biden administraBons.  
 
Slack’s penetraBng ethnographic study uniquely focuses on deportees and the way the 
“repressive, anB-immigrant [U.S.] machine” has “forcibly returned [these people] in chains” to 
o[en unfamiliar places. Such uprooted individuals, he writes, are then “uniquely exposed to 
violence” as recent U.S. immigraBon policy has le[ thousands outcast in dangerous 
environments with “no one will speak for them, no one [to] look for them,” no one to tell their 
story (20).  
 
Situated at various sites along the U.S.-Mexico divide, Slack sees the development of the U.S. 
Border Patrol’s Consequence Delivery System (formalized in 2011) as a watershed moment in 
immigraBon policy as “the full brunt of the U.S. jusBce system” was now deployed “to prosecute 
and punish undocumented immigrants” (13).   
 
In accord with other scholars wriBng on the realiBes of deportaBon policy such as Daniel 
Kanstroom, Slack affirms the creaBon of a “parallel judiciary system that does not provide the 



right to an aWorney, does not place the burden of proof on the state, and is almost enBrely 
based on the assumpBon that deportaBon—formal removal—is not a punishment” (25).   
 
Rather, these barbaric, state sponsored procedures are “enacted through a labyrinthine, 
Kahaesque bureaucracy [that] give[s] the appearance of legiBmacy and jusBce to people on the 
outside [and] which serves to normalize the severe harm done by removal” (33).   
 
Slack’s work details how “drug trafficking, undocumented migraBon, and human smuggling 
interact in the shared clandesBne zone of the border” (37). His intrepid research explores how it 
is that “processes of disappearance, loss, and suffering related to migraBon [have] become 
intertwined with the death toll from Mexico’s so-called “drug war” (38).   
 
Slack interrogates the high stakes migrant experience and idenBfies the profound way in which 
organized crime now unfortunately plays a leading role in this transnaBonal process.  His 
ethnography details highly restricted mobility for undocumented persons living in the U.S. and 
the corresponding dark realty by which unfortunate souls are apprehended and then 
mercilessly deported to o[en unfamiliar places in Mexico. Frequently alone and vulnerable, 
these individuals are o[en preyed upon by organized crime.   
 
Amazingly, some eventually reach their goal—o[en in solidarity with other kindred spirits.   
Slack notes here how it is that certain people even manage to free themselves from state 
authority and try again. Typically, however, those returned to Mexico without support and 
sufficient social contact soon find themselves in especially difficult circumstances.  
 
Building walls and constantly amplifying border security does not stop migraBon but only makes 
the process more perilous. O[en to survive, people will conBnue to move, generally weighing 
the risks with the possible benefits of a successful journey.  Today, a wide array of migrants are 
drawn to the U.S.-Mexico border, not just from neighboring Mexico, Central America, and the 
Caribbean, but from all over the world. In the process, countless individuals, families, and 
groups are terrorized, traumaBzed, and turned back. Many die.   
 
At the conclusion of this sympatheBc and deeply human study, Slack urges us to think 
differently about deportaBon now realizing that at the heart of this process is a profoundly 
violent and deadly reality. 
 
Andrew Grant Wood is the Rutland Professor of History at the University of Tulsa. He was born 
in Montreal, Canada, and his research focuses on the history of Mexico. Wood has published on 
a variety of social and cultural topics: urbanization, immigration, grassroots collective action, 
housing, regional politics, civic ritual and celebration, tourism, film, and popular music.  He is 
author of Agustín Lara: A Cultural Biography (Oxford, 2014) and is editor and contributor to The 
Business of Leisure: Tourism History in Latin America and the Caribbean (Nebraska U Press, 
2021).  Wood is currently writing a history of the port of Veracruz, Mexico.   

© 2023 Andrew Grant Wood 


