Sanctuary for None

This article examines migration through protected areas of the Sonoran Desert from the 1990s to 2024. During this time of accelerating globalization and transnational migration, US border policy has pushed migrants to cross the southern border through the desert, often through protected areas such as the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. In response, US state agencies have weaponized environmental protections to criminalize migration, as well as humanitarian volunteers working to prevent migrant injury and death, as seen in the 2020 case United States v. Hoffman. And yet, while pitted against each other, migrants and nature endure violence that shares the same root causes: US imperial policies that drive people to move long distances and US border regimes that then channel those migrants, and the antimigrant enforcement that attempts to exclude them, into the desert. By analyzing the layered histories of militarism, migration, border regimes, and conservation in the Sonoran Desert, this article brings migrant and environmental justice together under the framework of abolitionist sanctuary that would provide refuge for all lives.