Mapping the Migrant Journey

Listening and watching as Mariana’s finger traced her family’s path toward the U.S. on a large map of the Americas was George Washington University undergraduate Isabella Franco, herself the daughter of a Mexican immigrant.

“It’s one thing to see immigration numbers on paper. It’s a completely different thing to walk into a shelter and hold a woman’s hand as she’s sobbing, telling you she was sexually assaulted by the police or that a gun was put to her young child’s head,” says Franco. “It’s not until you sit and listen to these uncomfortable truths that you realize these are real people whose stories need to be told.”

Franco is one of 20 students involved in a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project led, in part, by Marie Price and Elizabeth Chacko, both immigration experts and professors of geography and international affairs at the GW Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and Elliott School of International Affairs. Price, Chacko, collaborators in Texas and their students have interviewed 150 immigrants, as well as leaders of civil society and religious organizations, border patrol officials, immigration lawyers and other key informants. Through these interviews, the researchers were able to examine the effects of U.S. immigration policies on asylum seekers and gauge the extent of kidnapping, extortion and other violence that immigrants encounter as they trek to the southern U.S. border.   

“We’re using a geography lens to try to understand the details of not only where these immigrants came from and the routes they took but also what kinds of issues they faced, where they experienced  insecurity along the way, whether it was violence, extortion, rape or lack of food,” says Chacko. “This is something that is very mappable and can be powerful to see.”

The narratives the group has collected so far show just how rampant violence against immigrants has become, especially in northern Mexico—something that the researchers say is a consequence of U.S. immigration policies and the growing involvement of cartels in profiting from migrants. Ultimately, the research team hopes that the stories they share and the data they glean from the narratives can effect change in these policies and a shift in public perception around border politics.

“When you hear the horror stories of what people go through, you can’t help but ask how we can reform our current immigration system so that it is more just and equitable,” says Price.

Combined, Price and Chacko have more than 60 years of experience in geography and have carried out research on the flow of people, products and ideas in places as disparate as India, Ethiopia, Bolivia and Venezuela. Price is currently the president of the American Geographical Society, and Chacko conducted immigration research in Singapore on a Fulbright scholarship. Over the last decade, the two experts have collaborated to study the role of immigrants in a diverse array of cities—projects that involved interviewing immigrants around the world and led to reports for the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) authored or co-authored by the GW duo.

As part of the OAS research, Price and Chacko interviewed city officials and immigrant-serving organizations in border cities such as El Paso, Brownsville and San Diego during the COVID pandemic. They heard stories from immigrants about their experiences in their new communities and the journeys they undertook to get there, which piqued their interest around the U.S.-Mexico border; they wondered whether the tales they were hearing were typical.

At the same time, Texas State University Associate Professor of Geography Sarah Blue was launching a research effort focused on immigration in the Rio Grande Valley—the swath of land where the Rio Grande separates the southernmost tip of Texas from Mexico. As of spring 2024, around 8,000 immigrants a month cross the border in this valley, often on a bridge connecting Brownsville, Texas, to Matamoros, Mexico.

Blue was motivated by a desire to not only understand the movement of people across this easternmost part of the U.S.-Mexico border and their experiences but also to involve local researchers and students for whom immigration is often a personal issue.

left to right: Marie Price, Maya O’Brien, Elizabeth Chacko, Sarah Blue, and Isabella Franco.

“There are very few geography researchers who are Latino,” says Blue. “But in Texas we have Hispanic-serving institutions that are full of bright, young, motivated students who just don’t know how academia works and haven’t had a chance to participate in research.”

As she planned how to integrate mentorship into her Rio Grande Valley work, Blue sought to extend her collaborations. She reached out to Price and Chacko, hoping they could bring international experience, an eye for policy and D.C. connections to the project. They agreed, and the group, which also includes professors and students from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, was awarded $500,000 from the NSF. In January 2023, team members began their first interviews with immigrants at shelters in Brownsville and Matamoros.

“Connecting Texas and Washington is really powerful for us as researchers as well as for our students,” says Blue. “We wouldn’t have had access to all these D.C. think tanks, and I suspect that GW students would never have had the opportunity to come down to the border.”

Eventually Mariana and her family made it safely to Mexico City—a significant landmark for today’s immigrants. Once north of Mexico City, asylum seekers can use the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s mobile app, called CBP One, to request an appointment at the border. The app is currently the primary way for people like Mariana to seek asylum in the U.S.; those who cross the border illegally are currently ineligible for asylum. But wait times for CBP One appointments are several months, and immigrants must wait in Mexico City, near the border or somewhere in between until the date of their scheduled appointment.

Those waits, Chacko and Price’s group is finding, put people at additional risk of kidnapping, extortion and other violence. That sentiment is echoed by organizations like Human Rights Watch, which wrote in May 2024 that the CBP One app “impermissibly limits the right to seek asylum for many people and compels them to wait in foreseeably dangerous and inhumane conditions in Mexico.”

While Mariana’s family was lucky enough—after their harrowing journey—to stay safe in the months between scheduling their appointment and arriving at the border, many aren’t.

“We talked to one family who had been on their way to this appointment they’d been waiting months for, and they got kidnapped and ended up having to sell everything they owned to buy their freedom,” says Blue. “Finally, a week later, they were free again, totally traumatized, and they went to the border and explained why they missed their CBP One appointment. They were told, sorry, get in the back of the line again.”

At the same time that the CBP One app has become required for legal entry into the U.S. to begin the asylum process, the U.S. has restricted most other legal pathways to immigrate into the country for Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans. In 2022 and 2023, the government began allowing a limited number of migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba—countries facing significant social, economic or political upheaval—to enter the U.S. through a humanitarian program, but their status is temporary. Partially because of the diminishing immigration options, more people than ever are seeking asylum status; more than 800,000 applied in 2023, and a growing backlog means that these applications are often awaiting final decisions for years.

The growing number of asylum seekers and the limitations on daily appointments, Price and Chacko say, is fueling a growth in violence and criminality in northern Mexico. “These migrants are seen as walking money dispensers,” says Price. “They need to pay everybody all along the way, and if they don’t, they’re kidnapped and their families are threatened. It’s really a horrible situation.”

Chacko agrees.

“We think that, ironically, the tougher the U.S. gets on immigration, the more money it is putting into the hands of cartels and the more violence it is exposing migrants to,” she says.

Blue estimates that, of the 70 immigrants the team interviewed in May 2024, more than a quarter had been extorted for money at least once during their journey to the border.

“Many migrants are traversing through a number of countries before getting to Mexico, and for a long time, the most dangerous part of this journey was getting through the remote, dense jungle of the Darién Gap [at the Panama-Colombia border],” says Chacko. “But in speaking to migrants now, they all say that Mexico was by far the most dangerous place because it’s where they are all exploited.”  

When the researchers and students sit down with immigrants at shelters in Brownsville and Matamoros, they work their way through a structured list of about 70 questions using a geographic information system (GIS) survey program. This lets them include location data associated with immigrants’ journeys, along with their recorded interviews.

They ask questions about immigrants’ backgrounds, reasons for leaving their home countries, and experiences getting to and crossing the border.

“The interviews can be really intense,” says Maya O’Brien, a GW geography graduate student. “You’re talking to someone, and five minutes in you start tearing up. You want to be a human, but you also want to be professional.”

Before beginning her graduate degree, O’Brien worked for five years as a technical consultant at Esri, the industry leader in mapping and GIS software. Now she is leading the GW efforts to turn narrative interview material into maps. It is tedious work, she says, since most of the data being collected isn’t straightforward numbers or yes/no responses. But she thinks maps—of individual migrants’ paths to the U.S. or hot spots where extortion is happening at a high rate–could identify patterns in mobility, lead to new insights on migrant experiences and help capture what is happening at the border in ways that are easy to digest.

“When you see a map showing just how far a person has come, you realize this is a really serious undertaking that these people are taking to get where they want to be,” says O’Brien.

So far, the research team has been struck by the number of women and children crossing the border; in the past, most immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border were men looking for work. Now that balance is changing; UNICEF estimates that one of every four migrants in Latin America is a child, and the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths reported in April that, for the first time, more women than men are dying near the border—often due to heat and dehydration.     

“Most of them are fleeing conditions that are really dire, and then they face conditions that are really dire,” says Price.

Chacko recalls the story of "Susie," a pregnant mother who was fleeing domestic violence with her children. While crossing the dense jungle of the Darién Gap, Indigenous people kidnapped and murdered their traveling companions.

The team has also been surprised by the widespread extent of immigrant extortion by not only cartels and small organized gangs but also Mexican and Guatemalan immigration and border officials and police officers.

“Susie told us it was such a common thing, everywhere they walked, for people to just constantly be stopping them and extorting them,” says Price.

Not everyone who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border, of course, is from Central or South America. In the last few years, an increasing number of Chinese, Indian, Russian, Ukranian and African asylum seekers have fled to the border.

The new narratives collected at the border have illuminated just how differently people are treated based on their country of origin—not only by border officials and U.S. policy but also by cartels that separate Spanish speakers from people speaking other languages. The team heard stories of how migrants from Ukraine were granted deportation protection thanks to U.S. policies, while Haitian migrants, who were also fleeing a dire situation, had to wait for long periods of time in unsafe conditions as their eligibility was assessed case-by-case.

“We like to think that the law is the law and that the U.S. justice system is supposed to work the same for everyone,” Blue says. “But it’s really complex on the ground, and we’ve certainly heard stories about some people being released and not others.”

In June, the researchers and students involved in the NSF-funded border project met at GW for a policy summit. Immigration lobbyists and representatives from immigration think tanks and government agencies spoke with the group about what data could be useful to effect change. Many of the speakers underscored the need for numbers surrounding the extortion that immigrants face and concrete data on the ties between U.S. policy and insecurity for immigrants in Mexico.

“I think both students and faculty came away with a much fuller understanding of the community that shapes immigration policy,” says Chacko.

Most of the team is skeptical that change on immigration will happen quickly or soon. But they say that even small shifts in how people and politicians perceive the border could eventually make a difference.

“I’m really hoping that this project has some impact on policy, but what I’m hoping even more is that average people just become more accepting of immigrants,” says Franco. “I think people really don’t realize the sacrifices these immigrants make just to get their foot into U.S. territory. No one wakes up and decides to cross the border on a whim. It’s so difficult and so dangerous.”

At the same time, they say that the image of the border itself that is often portrayed in the media—a dangerous, chaotic and overrun place—is wrong. On an average day, the border “is an orderly line of people waiting on the bridge,” says O’Brien. “It has the vibe of a DMV office, only the tension is higher because so much is on the line.”

In story after story told to the research team, the danger is the organized crime that the immigrants are fleeing in their home countries and in Mexico—not immigrants themselves. Yet current border efforts, particularly those carried out by heavily armed Texas  National Guard units deployed independently from the federal government, largely treat all immigrants as threats.

“It’s actually quite jarring for these people to be met with a military response, because they have this idea that the U.S. is a safe haven,” says Blue. “The vast majority of people are trying to get away from organized crime back home. Associating them with crime—the very thing they are trying to escape—seems very cruel.”

By sharing the stories they have heard, Blue, Chacko and Price hope they can break those associations between immigrants and criminality.

“One of the policymakers I talked to in Texas likened the Rio Grande Valley to Ellis Island,” says Price. “And I thought that was a pretty powerful metaphor. We let in millions of people with no sophisticated screening—either you had tuberculosis or you didn’t—and we all know that it worked out. What if we saw the Rio Grande Valley as a new Ellis Island? We might have some very different policies.”

A broadening of legal pathways to immigration and a push to process asylum requests in places farther from the U.S. border could help limit the money flowing from immigrants to Mexican cartels and officials, she says.

When Franco last spoke to Mariana, she had finally submitted her asylum claim and made it across the border. Now, she and her family are waiting for their first court hearing. It's been more than two years since she fled Venezuela.

“These stories really lean into your humanity,” says Franco. “If it could be a baby and her parents from Venezuela, it could be you or your neighbors. They are people just like us.”   

  Photography: Maya O'Brien/Isabella Franco/Marie Price