Recent scholarship has shown how aggressive policing along the US–Mexico border and in the interiors of the United States and Mexico has heightened migrants’ vulnerability to violence, death, displacement, and exploitation. Here, we explore how migrants engage in social practices to respond to state violence along an extended and militarized migrant trail. We show how migrants form part of a broader landscape of sociopolitical contestation with organizations, cartels, local communities, and state agencies, wherein they generate new forms of sociality and strategic cooperation to promote their survival and well-being. Migrants’ social practices illustrate that, far from eroding migrant agency, heightened state violence has generated new and creative social strategies to survive, and at times resist, aggressive policing measures. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Borderlands Agency border militarization migrant trail Bare life

violence Mexico [North America] immigrant border region vulnerability United States