Jeremy Slack argues that poor migrants and deportees are exploited by drug traffickers because they are politically and socially invisible. For deportees especially, this castigation is supercharged by the fact that they are rejects—legally, socially, nationally, politically—of the US immigration system. Once expunged from the United States, deportees are untraced, isolated, and vulnerable; they become anonymous unquantifiable victims of drug cartels, human smugglers, and sex traffickers in the border area.

Most of the book's chapters offer novel arguments and incisive insights into the ironies of immigration law and the consequences of violence against deportees. Chapter 3 analyzes how migrants and deportees have to carefully negotiate violent border areas as they attempt to enter the United States or as they orient themselves to new surroundings after being deported by US immigration authorities. For drug cartels that suffer high attrition rates as they war against each another, the coercive recruitment of migrants and deportees is crucial for replenishing their ranks. Chapter 4 describes how cartels such as the Zetas groom new recruits through kidnapping and torture. Dehumanizing abductees not only desensitizes them to the abuses they are suffering, but also prepares them to perpetrate suffering on others (94).

Chapter 5 continues this theme of coercive recruitment to discuss how drug cartels seek out certain types of deportees both to replenish their ranks and to obviate risks to their operations. Deportees with criminal or military backgrounds are considered ideal recruits, not only because of their illicit and martial pasts but also to prevent their recruitment by rival gangs. For deportees, not joining the drug cartels carries serious risk, as for the former US Marine who had to move constantly because he refused to join the Sinaloa Cartel (115). Chapter 7 shows how human and sex trafficking networks can play an important role in keeping migrants and deportees safe within violent border areas. Paradoxically, law-enforcement efforts to curtail illegal networks have eroded the degree of security offered by these negotiated informal relationships. An example is the Operation Against Smugglers, Initiative on Safety and Security (OASISS). This US regulatory agency, created to arrest and prosecute human smugglers, has actually made it more difficult for migrants and coyotes (human smugglers) to trust one another. Eroding trust equals increasing danger (159-61). Chapter 8 reveals the difficulty asylum seekers face as they search for safety in the United States. Perversely, by placing the burden of proof on the individual and not on the state, US deportation policies—especially under the Trump administration—make migrants and deportees more vulnerable by prioritizing the removal of asylum seekers (174). This serves to reinforce the vulnerability of deportees that criminal organizations brutally exploit in the US-Mexico border regions.

Slack's book is as much a personal account of his experiences embedded with deportees in northern Mexico as it is an objective, ethnographic study. This work is also a call to arms for scholars to lend their expertise to advocate for asylum seekers. Some readers will find this appeal to activism inspirational; others will find it off-putting (200-01). On a practical level, Slack could have done more to consider larger scholarly literatures on the combination of stricter immigration restriction measures and militarization of the US Border Patrol since the 1980s (13, 25), as well as the political and legal origins of migrant “illegality” (22).

Slack gives legitimacy to the thousands of anonymous and invisible deportees in northern Mexico. Here we get a sense of their voices, their choices, their stories, their fears, and their traumatic experiences. He re-humanizes those who have been dehumanized. These individuals are not all saints, nor are they all criminals, stereotypes of migrants and deportees that the author is quick to dispel. Rather, they are the desperate, the hopeful seeking escape from a culture of poverty … and getting caught in the crosshairs of punitive immigration policies, negligent governance, and violent opportunism (18-19, 202).