by SOLEDAD ALAREZ VELASCO, DAWN MARIE PALEY, P.S.D.
Even as borders harden, life continues to exceed them. The Spring 2026 issue of the NACLA Report traces how border violence has moved from the margins to the center of political life across the Americas.
When NACLA’s Editorial Committee first began discussing this issue in late 2023, we could not have imagined that, less than two years later, federal agents would be openly killing and abducting people—citizens and migrants, children and adults, documented and undocumented alike—far from the southern border, all in the name of border enforcement. Yet perhaps we should have. The pieces gathered in this issue consistently demonstrate that the violence now unfolding inside the United States is border violence. It is not an aberration, but the predictable outcome of a hemispheric bordering regime with deep historical and geographic roots.
The public executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026; the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores on drug trafficking charges only days earlier; the use of immigration law in early 2025 to detain pro-Palestine activists and suppress dissent; the March 2025 extrajudicial deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans—many of them documented—to El Salvador’s legally unaccountable megaprison; and the detention of migrant children like Liam Cornejo Ramos are not isolated events. They are scenes from a script long rehearsed at the border, now normalized and brought to center stage.
This issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas takes that longer view. Rather than treating contemporary migration enforcement as a series of discrete crises, the contributions gathered here trace the historical processes, regional adaptations, and lived consequences of a hemispheric bordering regime that now extends far beyond any single boundary line. Borders today are not merely lines between states. They are infrastructures and bureaucracies; development projects and detention systems; transit zones, internal policing practices, and humanitarian apparatuses that operate both within and across national territories, reorganizing everyday life throughout the Americas.
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