With child migration on the rise, there is a critical need to understand how migrant children express their agency. To date, popular narratives cast migrant children as either victims or criminals, an unhelpful binary that does little to further efforts to develop effective interventions to help migrant youth. Drawing from 32 in-depth interviews and participatory activities with Mexican and Central American children in Mexican youth immigration detention centres, this paper seeks to reconceptualise current understandings of migrant children’s agency. In this paper, we explore how youth express their motivations, assert their will, develop pragmatic dependencies, employ strategic parroting and guard information to achieve their goals. We also examine how state and non-state actors both support and suppress young people’s agency as they try to navigate their way to the U.S./Mexico border. In doing so, we argue for a more nuanced approach to child migrants’ agency. A non-binary approach recognises the development of agency as a process, embracing children and young people’s rights and vulnerabilities, while acknowledging their resiliencies, competencies, goals and strengths. We conclude by proposing a transdisciplinary research agenda to promote this non-binary approach.

In March 2020, the United States government began a series of measures designed to dramatically restrict immigration as part of its response to the global health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This included Title 42, which deported asylum seekers immediately and prevented them from applying for asylum. These measures worsened an already precarious situation at the US–Mexico border for an estimated 60,000 asylum seekers who were prevented, by the Trump administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ (aka MPP) policy enacted in January 2019, from remaining in the United States while they awaited their asylum hearings. In-depth interviews, participant observation, and social media analysis with humanitarian and legal advocates for asylum seekers living in a camp at the border in Matamoros, Mexico reveal that COVID-19’s impacts are not limited to public health concerns. Rather, COVID-19’s impacts center on how the Trump administration weaponized the virus to indefinitely suspend the asylum system. We argue that the Matamoros refugee camp provides a strategic vantage point to understand the repercussions of state policies of exclusion on im/mobility and survival strategies for asylum seekers. Specifically, we use the analytical lenses of the politics of im/mobility, geographies of exclusion, and asylum seeker resilience to identify how COVID-19 has shaped the im/mobility and security of the camp and its residents in unexpected ways. At the same time, our research illustrates that camp residents exercise im/mobility as a form of political visibility to contest and ameliorate their precarity as they find themselves in conditions not of their choosing.

Since 2003, Cuba has dramatically expanded its decades-long program of international humanitarian missions. This article explores the political, economic, gender and racial equality dimensions of Cuba's international missions at various scales of analysis. At the macro-level, medical export services have in recent years replaced tourism as a source of hard currency in Cuba, with positive political and economic results. Their impacts on the domestic front are complex. In Cuba, health workers' devalued salaries in a dual economy are a substantive incentive to volunteer for missions abroad. The expansion of international medical missions is thus a means for health professionals—a large part of whom are female, black or mulato—who are otherwise disadvantaged in the dual economy, to improve their livelihoods. It is also re-structuring the delivery of health care in Cuban neighborhoods. Desde 2003, Cuba ha expandido dramáticamente su programa, con décadas de historia, de misiones humanitarias internacionales. Este artículo explora las dimensiones políticas, económicas y de género y raza de las misiones internacionalistas cubanas en varias escalas de análisis. A macro-nivel, los servicios médicos de exportación han reemplazado al turismo en los últimos años como fuente de moneda fuerte en Cuba con resultados positivos, tanto en lo político como en lo económico. Sus impactos en la vida doméstica son complejos. En Cuba, debido a la economía dual, los salarios de los trabajadores de la salud se han visto devaluados y esto incentiva a dichos trabajadores a brindarse voluntariamente para las misiones en el exterior. La expansión de las misiones médicas internacionales es una manera de mejorar el estandar de vida de los trabajadores de la salud, de los cuales una gran parte son mujeres, negros o mulatos. La mencionada expansión también trae como resultado una restructuración de los servicios médicos para la población cubana.