Panic! at the Border: Anxiety, Intervention, and Violence at the Border and Its Roots in Indigenous Genocide

• In Event: The Deportation Regime in the Trump 2.0 Presidency

Abstract

During the 2024 presidential election, the U.S.-Mexico border became a site of electoral fodder between the Democratic and Republican parties, with presidential nominee Donald Trump blaming the perceived porous border policy of the Biden administration for rising crime rates. Numerous GOP campaign materials converged with media narratives to frame the U.S.-Mexico border as a conduit for drug importation and existing asylum policies as opportunities for bogus claims by transnational criminals. With the election of Donald Trump in November, this moral panic around the border entered its next stage: therapeutic intervention by the security state.
A racialized moral panic centering on nefarious entities inundating the border—whipped up by local, state, and national media, and subsequently prompting state intervention—is a recurring cycle in the history of the U.S.-Mexico border. But where is its genesis? This presentation investigates the original moral panics at the emerging U.S.-Mexico border in the state of Texas, specifically how Indigenous groups were framed as criminal entities by local and national media. This narrative was seized upon by local politicians to justify law enforcement interventions that facilitated an ongoing genocide in the state. By locating these early borderland moral panics, this paper will trace both the continuities and ruptures present in contemporary moral panics surrounding the border.

Author

• Nicholas Rodrigo, The Graduate Center, City University of New York