Pharmaceutical Borders. The Twofold Function of Medications in the U.S. Immigration Policies

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Albuquerque, New Mexico, between September 2024 and March 2025, this article examines the contradictory role of phar-maceuticals within the broader framework of mobility control policies at the U.S. southern border. Far from being mere therapeutic tools, medications assume both concrete and symbolic functions: they are represented as markers of disorder and threat in public discourse, while simultaneously operating as a disciplinary technology on migrants’ bodies held in custody. The double life of pharmaceuticals – care denied “inside”, danger evoked “outside” – thus reveals how securitarian policies and rhetoric converge in producing exclusion and suffering