Intimate attachments and migrant deportability: lessons from undocumented mothers seeking benefits for citizen children

Nicholas De Genova (2002) suggests that undocumented status is primarily experienced through consciousness of being deportable. Interviews with undocumented Mexican migrant women living in Arizona show that they experience deportability not just in workplaces, which have been the focus of much scholarship, but also when seeking healthcare benefits for their U.S. citizen children. This article therefore expands the scholarship on deportability by exploring how state strategies for constituting migrants as deportable work through, and reconfigure, intimate ties, in this case, ties to children. Furthermore, it shows that migrant mothers draw on diverse intimate ties, beyond those that are recognized by the state, to manage the impact of their deportability. The article concludes by calling for expanded scholarly engagement with the complex relationship between state regulation, intimate ties, migrant lives, and political possibilities.