How do borders — both the physical barriers and the political realities — shape our society?

These questions have long driven the work of Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist at the Watson School and director of Watson’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies.

In the last nine months, Ieva won both a MacArthur Genius grant and a Guggenheim fellowship for her path-breaking work exploring how political borders shape individuals and communities. On this episode, Dan Richards talks with Ieva about her research, how it feels to have her work receive so much recognition, and what we can all learn from border communities as immigration enforcement comes to our collective doorstep.

Watch the conversation on our YouTube channel

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. Ieva Jusionyte is an anthropologist at the Watson School and director of Watson's Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies.

Her work explores the wide-ranging effect of political borders on individuals, on communities, and on our society, more broadly. In her most recent book, Exit Wounds, she followed how firearms make their way from the US to Mexico and how this illicit economy shapes communities on both sides of the border.

This past October, Ieva won a MacArthur Fellowship, also known commonly as a Genius Grant. In April, it was announced that she had won a Guggenheim Fellowship. In other words, it has been quite a year for Ieva Jusionyte. And while the awards are a welcome recognition, they have not distracted Ieva from her current projects, which, as you'll hear, could not be more timely.

Ieva's next book will be about extraditions and expulsions of individuals from Mexico and Latin America into the United States for criminal prosecution, a phenomenon which has come under intense scrutiny in the Trump era amidst an unprecedented rise in such actions.

On this episode, we're going to talk about her work and what it can teach us about national borders, both the physical boundary and the political idea, and what role they play in our society. Ieva Jusionyte thank you so much for coming back on to Trending Globally.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Thank you for having me, Dan.

DAN RICHARDS: So national borders are a major focus of research in many fields-- politics, international relations, economics. They play a huge role. But I wonder, what drew you to the study of borders as an anthropologist?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: I think I became interested in borders more or first through history, having grown up in Lithuania, in Eastern Europe, and seeing how borders change through centuries, even decades, that they're not taken for granted, that the shapes of the countries change drew my attention to them.

As an anthropologist or as an ethnographer, I care about people's lived experience. So we often talk about borders from the center of political power, be it Washington, DC, or any state's capital.

But very rarely do we stay for a long period of time and learn from the experiences of people for whom borderlines are homes, whose hometowns the borders might have crossed, who crossed the border every day to go to school, to go to work, who risk their lives to cross the border because of their seeking safety for themselves and for their families.

Anthropologists are also not taking any category for granted, how we understand the social reality. So yes, maybe political scientists, it's a given. The border is a given. For an anthropologist, it is not. What it does is it reveals how relative our maybe norms of political life are because on one side of the border, for example, in Texas you can buy 100 AK-47s when you are I don't 18 years old, but you can't drink beer.

When you cross to Mexico, you can drink all the beer you want when you're 18, but you cannot buy even one AR-15 or AK-47. So borders expose these things about societies, about cultures, political communities that we don't question when we are far away from them.

So there are so many layers that attracted me to borders or fascinated me about borders. They're just good places to ask these questions, good places to question everything we think we know about societies and also see how they change.

DAN RICHARDS: And prior to your book, Exit Wounds, you wrote a book exploring the work of emergency responders on the US-Mexico border. What drew you to that particular profession, that particular community of people and their experience of the US-Mexico border?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: I was already a firefighter and paramedic before I began that project, and what made me interested in approaching such a polarizing and politicized subject as US-Mexico border through the perspective of people who couldn't care, is it right or left, Republican or Democrat, Mexican or American.

As paramedics, firefighters, they care about saving lives. So I thought, how can we also begin to understand what this political construction wrapped in nation-state ideologies, very potent ingredient in political campaigns, but also a wall of cement and metal what it does to these communities that are split by the border and emergency responders who work on both sides. So I was--

DAN RICHARDS: Literally, they'll travel-- a lot of emergency response will cross that national border?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Yes, and historically,more, and it started primarily with firefighters because if there was fire on one side, it's easy for them to cross to the other side or to deliver water and even hook fire hoses to the US side where the water pressure is better to help extinguish fires on the Mexican side.

Mexico has more firepower or manpower. So they would send people, volunteer firefighters to the US. It has become a little more complicated with the militarization and the security buildup on the border since 9/11, but they still do cross, especially for training but also for mutual aid. And it was very interesting to see it from their perspective.

DAN RICHARDS: It's such an original lens on this issue that we all hear about all the time, which is the border. I think it can help illustrate to why your work has received so much attention. And I mentioned this in the intro. This year, you won two major awards for scholars and public intellectuals. And first off, congrats. I didn't say that in the intro.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Thank you, thank you.

DAN RICHARDS: How has it been receiving these awards and all the public recognition that comes with them? And how has that been this year?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Oof, I mean, it was shocking and overwhelming. I think the shock is wearing off, which is a good thing. But I don't want to ever accept this as something normal that happened to me. It's not normal. It's an enormous validation of what I have been doing until now.

And also, it allowed me to trust myself more, that all these projects that I'm doing, yeah, maybe they are meaningful just beyond the small group of colleagues and students who engage with my work.

So I am extremely grateful and humbled and honored and also really happy now that I can move on maybe because there was a lot of public attention just being a lot in the public eye, and I think I am really antsy and anxious to get back to research, to get back to fieldwork. So that's what I'm looking forward to doing.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, we're all looking forward for you to get back to doing research too. And you're currently working on a book about the extradition of criminal leaders from Mexico and Latin America into the United States.

And this topic has been making headlines in the US recently, as the Trump administration has increased pressure on the Mexican government to send alleged criminals across the border from Mexico to the United States for prosecution and imprisonment.

And I want to talk more with you about some of these current events that have been really making headlines. But first, what got you interested in studying extradition between Mexico and the US?

As I understand it, it might be a topic that's a little less focused on the physical border itself compared to some of your previous research and is expanded in scope. So what got you interested in that?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: For me, it's always been like one project leads to another. So when I did the work on the border wall injuries and emergency responders, that's when I noticed, the guns going south in the opposite direction. I decided to follow them.

When I finished that project, I began asking questions, so what happens to all these organized crime members or leaders after? And it's easy to see it. But people maybe don't wonder about that. They are either dead, or they are imprisoned awaiting extradition, or they have been extradited to the United States.

So I had never like-- yes, you're right. My previous work focused maybe more on the materiality of violence, but I was also always very interested in legal questions because it's the law that determines how and where violence happens.

So I began to look into extraditions. And extraditions are so interesting because it raises the question of justice. But can justice happen on both sides of the border if there are-- different countries have different priorities, and there are different crimes that matter to different countries.

DAN RICHARDS: How so?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: So in the United States, the war on drugs and our preference that we are giving the priority we are giving to stop drug trafficking means that most charges for these organized crime members and leaders in Mexico are for conspiracies to traffic drugs-related money laundering back to Mexico.

But then what happens to the violent crime in Mexico, homicides, kidnappings, disappearances, extortion, those crimes are never investigated because the main suspects are in the US. And here, they are prosecuted only for what matters to the US.

So it becomes this asymmetry, the same kind of asymmetry that I was interested in when I was looking at gun trafficking or other things. So it's a continuation of that.

DAN RICHARDS: And would you say in both cases, in the example of arms moving to Mexico and criminals moving into the US legal system-- it sounds like they both reveal this power imbalance, where the US's priorities are put ahead of the Mexican states in some ways in terms of who gets prosecuted as well as what laws are obeyed, where when it comes to firearms. Is that a fair assessment?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Yes, and I think it's not surprising. I mean, United States is a global power and Mexico is its closest neighbor. So yes, but it's a little more complicated than that because Mexico also has very weak criminal justice system. So it is true that a lot of crimes in Mexico are not investigated because there are no investigations even without the involvement of the United States.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, speaking of this asymmetry, and maybe it'll help us to think about it, to look at some more specific examples. Since President Trump took office, over 90 individuals have been brought from Mexico to the United States.

And as you have written about, getting accurate numbers of all of this movement of people is really difficult. So how should we think about these individuals and how they're moved across borders if it's not all as simple as they've been extradited? What's going on there.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: So I don't want to sound like a boring, scholar that only cares about legalese in the documents. But there is a big difference between extradition and what happened with these recent people who were simply expelled from Mexico.

So extradition is governed by extradition treaties. There are certain guarantees that people like-- double jeopardy. People cannot be charged twice for the same crime, or they can only be charged for the crime that was in the indictment and so on and so forth. No death penalty.

When people are expelled, like happened with these, there were three batches of expulsions, two in Twenty Twenty-Five and one earlier this year, it means that the Mexican government simply hands them over, bypassing the legal process.

So it is an executive government decision. It's not governed by any rules except whatever agreement the executive made with the US government, which is not public. And we don't know.

For the United States courts, though, it doesn't matter. Once the person is in the US, they can be extradited. They can be expelled. They can self-surrender and volunteer information in exchange for a better deal. They can be kidnapped from Mexico or elsewhere. Once they are here, US courts have jurisdiction. We can prosecute them. So it doesn't really matter for us.

DAN RICHARDS: Have these types of expulsions happened before? Is there precedent for this?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Oh, definitely not to this level. So it is true that obtaining information about each of these cases is very difficult, because these are-- it's a mixture of both legal and political negotiations and private information. So we don't really know.

It has never been that 26 or 29 individuals are handed over, expelled at one go. But it's possible that some people in the past were handed over by passing extradition process or violating certain norms of it. Definitely nothing on the scale that we are seeing now, and that really shocked a lot of Mexicans.

DAN RICHARDS: What do you make of these instances? How do you make sense of them? Is it all just part of the Trump administration's intensifying efforts on dealing with immigration or crime at the border? Like, how do you think about this increase?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Well, Mexican government is in a very difficult position this year. They are renegotiating the free trade agreement. The first batch of these expulsions happened just after President Trump introduced high tariffs, which were later deemed illegal.

There was a lot of talk from various government officials of intervention in Mexico. So Mexico had to show that they are serious about organized crime and basically delivered the people that were on the list that the United States wanted. So it's a demonstration of goodwill and cooperation maybe at the expense of some domestic political promises.

DAN RICHARDS: What sort of political promises?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Well, in Mexico if you're alleged of having committed a crime have certain legal guarantees. You can defend yourself if you are expelled from Mexico. Your family can't visit you.

Maybe you don't have access to your lawyers or anything else. So it is a violation of those people's rights. It's also a question, obviously of this intricate relationship between organized crime and various levels of Mexican government, state, municipal, even federal officials involved in organized crime.

And I think especially now with the more recent events we're seeing, we're seeing questions about that arising of what will be the limit of what the president, Sheinbaum, will do, how far will she support her political party and members of her political party, and how much she will satisfy US requests.

DAN RICHARDS: Are you talking about also how just the other day, the US charged the governor of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, along with nine other current or former Mexican officials with drug trafficking and weapons offenses?

These were current or former members of government. And so how is that being thought about and processed in Mexico, as far as you can understand? Do you get the sense that Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, might go along, continue to appease Trump, or might this be a line that she won't cross?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Well, that's the million dollar question.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, of course.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: I mean, there is a lot there. So it's not surprise. These names of the people, so it's the governor of Sinaloa. It's the mayor of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa.

There are, state police chiefs, the vice secretary of public security of the state, so people who are very high up in the government and locals in Sinaloa and elsewhere in Mexico knew about this. There have been rumors about this, a lot of people.

This is not the first time it happens that police and local governments and governors and even higher up, like general Cienfuegos or Genaro Garcia Luna, they belong to other parties and previous Mexican administrations. Genaro Garcia Luna has been sentenced in the United States. He's in the US prison. General Cienfuegos was arrested when he was in the United States. Then he was released. So these kind of things everyone knows in Mexico.

DAN RICHARDS: Right, not unprecedented.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Not unprecedented. The bigger question, unfortunately, is that in the indictments you can see that they yes, they informed on political opponents. There were threats. They were kind of installation of officials who supported this fraction of the Sinaloa cartel in the police departments and so on and so forth.

But those crimes will not be investigated in the United States. And the United States, they only-- if they are sent here, if these government officials are sent to the United States, it's only about drugs and guns because those are the charges.

The other thing is that these previous officials that I mentioned, like general Cienfuegos, who was the Secretary of national defense, or Genaro Garcia Luna, who was the secretary of public security, they were apprehended while they were in the United States.

So Mexico never had to make a decision to send them away. So it will be very interesting to see what the president does. I don't think it will be easy.

That's why, usually, in these indictments or when we followed in the study that we did with the students over this past year about extraditions and expulsions, most of those people are members of organized crime. They're not politicians because although US government and prosecutors, they know very well that these higher individuals, people in power are involved.

Usually, it's a question of diplomacy and foreign relations. It's not a question of criminal prosecution. And this it appears that current US administration is using everything they can to pressure Mexico to submit to their will-- our will.

DAN RICHARDS: And a little less interested on maybe the longer term diplomatic ramifications of charging government officials or something like that.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Yeah.

DAN RICHARDS: How do you think about the tension that you mentioned that on the one hand, these types of expulsions deny the Mexican state of its right to charge its own citizens or criminals in its country, and there's a real loss to justice there with the fact that, as you mentioned, the criminal justice system may not have as much capacity in Mexico to charge lots of these people? And some justice might be better than no justice. How do you think about that balance and that tension?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: That's exactly what I'm interested in because, yes, even in Mexico, there is no consensus. A lot of families of people who were killed or disappeared, they are happy that at least there is some justice done on the US side of the border, because they don't believe the local system.

At the same time, if there are no strong prosecution cases built in Mexico, that criminal justice system will never become more efficient, become stronger. It's like a muscle. You need to build it, and you need to build it locally. You can't export justice.

Well, at least, that's what motivated me to pursue this project as an open question. Does extradition aid or impede justice? And justice for whom? For Mexicans or for Americans?

And can there be justice to people on both sides of the border when we care about things that are so different? And how to strengthen criminal justice system in Mexico, considering this practice of exporting suspects?

DAN RICHARDS: In the last few years, police and security actions at the border having to do with illegal border crossings have gone down in the United States from their peak prior to that, while deportations of undocumented citizens and people in the United States in American cities and towns has gone up.

In other words, it can seem that immigration enforcement in the last few years has maybe moved a little bit away in focus from the border itself into the interior of American territory.

And likewise with these extraditions and expulsions, it feels like American power is more aggressively reaching into the state of Mexico. And I wonder, how do you think about that shift?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Yeah, I mean, for the border, so the number of people at our border really begin began to drop drastically like last January on the day--

DAN RICHARDS: Inauguration

IEVA JUSIONYTE: --of the new administration. Yes, one of the first. Basically, immediately asylum was shut off. So people who were waiting in line there was this system, CBP One app. People had appointments. They were all canceled.

And then so precipitous drop at the end of January and then February, and so on and so forth, all last year. And we are-- we're talking about at least five times. So some months, we would see 30,000 Border Patrol encounters back two years ago.

And now, we don't even see 10,000, although it oscillates year by year-- or month by month, and a lot of people are just waiting the risk. Border crossing continues. The asylum, not so much.

A lot of those Border Patrol agents within, yes, sent to communities where there was internal enforcement, were trying to detain enough people to reach these quotas that the administration said for how many have to be captured and how many have to be deported.

This is a scare tactic as well. So one of the reasons fewer people are even trying to cross the border is because everyone is waiting to see what will happen. So yes, I don't know. I think it's-- like, looking historically, this is temporary. It will change with the US elections.

It will also change because people come to the United States, or they cross the border without authorization for reasons that are both structural and personal, and those sometimes they can wait a few years, but that decision is already made.

It has to do with climate change. It has to do with safety in the home communities. It has to do with economic opportunities. I think a lot of it is on hold, and we'll probably see the numbers rising again, including now that the court said that shutting down the asylum has not been really a legal thing to do. So those pathways will reopen at some point.

DAN RICHARDS: I wonder, as US immigration enforcement has moved somewhat in focus away from the physical border region and into American cities and towns, sometimes thousands of miles away from the border, how do you think those types of communities might be shaped by this type of government presence? And really, is there anything we can learn from border communities in that respect?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: That's such a good question. Actually, now, border communities are much quieter compared to-- or there's less fear of immigrant policing in border communities because they are basically empty. The shelters on the Mexican side are basically empty.

What really surprised me is that, yes, when you-- so I lived in Nogales, Arizona, Nogales, Sonora, for a long time. I've been in other border cities for shorter periods of time.

But you are used to the fact that you can be stopped and questioned anytime by the Border Patrol. You have to pass these checkpoints that are installed on all roads leading away from the border.

So in Southern Arizona communities, you might never cross into Mexico, but you have to, if you are a foreigner, you have to carry a passport. And now, we see a lot of that happening here.

I have my students in Providence who have their passports in their pockets. I have colleagues who have the documents of their children just in case something happens, just in case they are stopped.

There is this sense of insecurity that's very familiar for border communities has been for decades, and now, we are seeing it very far away. But there is also organizing. I remember 10 years ago, five years ago, so many students went to spend summers volunteering, helping migrants and asylum seekers.

And now, these same students are volunteering here, watching for ICE agents in courts or providing mutual aid to people who are afraid to go and buy groceries, for example, or walk their children to school. So there is also-- it's always these two sides, right?

There is a lot of fear, but there is also almost the best of humanity, the community and solidarity and these networks of assistance and aid that form that I'm now seeing here as well.

DAN RICHARDS: Right, a raised consciousness of sorts of what's at stake for so many people in this country.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Yeah, it came to our doorstep.

DAN RICHARDS: Looking ahead, both of the awards you won this year, they come with prizes, and you've mentioned how they've kind of opened up possibilities for you to expand your research or hopefully do other things as well. But I wonder, do you have any plans for how you're going to use some of this new time and space and money to continue this research or new research?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Well, it's really a privilege to have these fellowships because now I don't have to apply for funding, and I don't have to convince anyone that what I want to do matters. I can just go ahead and do it, and I will-- the plan is to continue this project on extraditions and justice and write the book, and it will really enable me to go where I need to go because this research is very multi-sited and unpredictable.

I go to these court hearings in DC, and other day, it's like I need to go to a prison in California. The hearings got postponed, so I have a lot of this last-minute travel that now the fellowship will hopefully allow me, allow me to do. And that's the plan.

I really can't think beyond what I will do after I finish the extraditions project because as I mentioned before, for me, there's always like a question left hanging at the end of my research, and I have no idea what that question will be once I reach that end.

DAN RICHARDS: You mentioned that there are so many different geographic sites involved in this current research project. How does it change your approach as an anthropologist from the lens of doing an ethnography, or-- in other research, you've spent so much time of embedded in one place, in one community. How has that process felt different this time around?

IEVA JUSIONYTE: It's so different. I don't even know whether everything that I'm doing can still be called ethnography because I don't hang out enough of time in the community.

But then again, like the gun trafficking project was also a little bit multi-sided. It's not like gun traffickers all go to one bar and spend eight hours there. It's working with individuals and following individuals and being with them.

In this case, for me, it means yes, going to meet with these incarcerated, extradited individuals in US prisons and then spending hours and hours with them there, drinking Coke and talking about their memories, writing letters to them.

Or, it involves going to these court hearings and just going back and back, if there was a trial, if there was a plea agreement talking to lawyers and politicians who sign off on these extraditions and then going to Mexico, to the communities that are demanding justice, that want these people who were sent to the US to be brought back to Mexico so they can face criminal charges for murder and disappearance. So talking to activists.

The research method has to adapt to the research question. And if the question is, what do extraditions do to justice? There is no one place or even one group of people that can help me answer that.

So I have to stretch ethnography to maybe its limits, prioritizing the experience of people directly involved rather than people from the outside or rather than thinking just about Excel sheets of all these extradited individuals and the charges they have. It really helps to understand the bigger picture. But it doesn't help me find answers that I need to doing the deep hanging out. That's ethnography.

DAN RICHARDS: I have one final question. The MacArthur grant, in particular, it really is a recognition not just of impressive scholarship but of creativity and originality of approach. That's at least how it's described and how they describe their recipients.

And those are qualities that I think absolutely describe your work. And I wonder if you have any advice for students or young people, people earlier in their academic careers for thinking about how to embrace creativity or think outside the box in terms of the topics they want to explore and the questions they want to ask.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Such an appropriate question at the end of the semester, or during the graduation period. So yes, more concretely, when-- my favorite class to teach is ethnographic research methods. So when I teach young ethnographers, I always tell them that maybe less about being creative, but more about just perseverance and persistence and humility because people don't owe you their time or their stories or letting you into their lives.

But in terms of bigger life advice, it's so impossible to know what this world will be like in 10 years or 20 years. Don't be nihilistic. Try what you want to do, and maybe it will work out.

I think, here at Brown, we're in a very good position because, yes, we have open curriculum. A lot of our students have two or more concentrations, and they are very creative in terms of what classes they take and what projects they do, and I want to encourage them to continue doing this, not to shut themselves in just like one career or one idea of a career because things change.

And I think just trying to pursue your dreams and doing what you think is important and what you think this world needs and the community needs, that's the best better answer than thinking, oh, this is a safe and guaranteed career for my life.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, Ieva, that seems like advice that you have taken to heart in your work and scholarship, and we're all really grateful you've done that, and we're grateful you came on the show to talk with us again. So thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

IEVA JUSIONYTE: Thank you. It's been wonderful.

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DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Juliana Merullo. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that too. If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at [email protected]. Again, that's all one word, [email protected]. We'll be back soon with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.