“Turning Myself In”: How Pastoral Governance Shapes Access to Asylum at the US-Mexico Border

• In Event: Beyond Asylum and Resettlement: Diverse Modes of Refugee Migration

Abstract

This paper provides an ethnographic account of how Christian churches in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, interpret and morally frame migrants’ decisions to pursue self-surrender to U.S. authorities (i.e., “turning oneself in”). An understudied phenomenon in the literature, self-surrender allows migrants to claim asylum in the United States immediately after entering this country irregularly. In contrast to clandestine border crossings, which render migrants undetectable, self-surrender amplifies migrants’ hypervisibility by intentionally triggering enforcement.

This study shifts the attention from the state–migrant dyad toward faith-based organizations (FBOs) as key intermediaries in pre-entry asylum governance. Rather than treating self-surrender as a direct outcome of enforcement policy or individual calculation, the article situates this practice within migrants’ daily interactions in FBO-run shelters under conditions of enforced immobility and prolonged periods of uncertainty. The notion of “pastoral double-binding” illuminates how FBOs simultaneously discourage self-surrender and validate it as an intelligible response to migrants’ acute vulnerability. From FBOs’ perspective, self-surrender is tacitly accepted as a last-resort survival strategy, particularly when lawful pathways—such as digital appointment systems—become unattainable.

Through pastoral counseling, disciplinary practices, and selective exemptions, churches manage the contradictions produced by the externalization of asylum governance before migrants encounter U.S. authorities. These findings demonstrate how migrant agency is relationally produced within humanitarian–religious spaces that blur the binary between legal compliance and defiance, thereby complicating models of “constrained choice.” Ultimately, this study shows how faith-based actors become constitutive, rather than peripheral, to asylum access amid contemporary border regimes.

Author

• Anahi Viladrich, CUNY-Queens College