Aid Worker’s Perceptions of Psychological First Aid amid Border Externalization in Mexico

This study examines how aid workers in nongovernmental migrant shelters across Mexico conceptualize the relationship between Psychological First Aid (PFA) and border externalization. PFA is an early intervention approach to providing information, support, and comfort to survivors of recent traumas. Unlike “psychological debriefing,” PFA discourages processing of recent traumas, which has been critiqued for exacerbating psychological distress. As the U.S. government has “externalized” immigration enforcement by pressuring the Mexican to intensify immigration enforcement along transit corridors throughout Mexico, shelters that emerged originally to provide short-term humanitarian aid to transit migrants increasingly provide aid to people over the course of several weeks and months as they pursue humanitarian status regularization in Mexico. These processes require migrants to render recent traumas legible to state authorities, the very thing PFA aims to avoid. This study aimed to make sense of this apparent tension through 15 in-depth qualitative interviews with frontline humanitarian aid workers. Interviewees described PFA as a framework that attunes aid workers to what level of aid is feasible for organizations that were founded as volunteer-driven operations that provide short-term bodily aid to transit migrants but have become increasingly professionalized operations that provide longer-term aid to people seeking humanitarian recognition in Mexico. Whereas prior studies have considered the impact of PFA for individuals, results indicate that for aid workers, PFA may provide a framework for coping with contradictory organizational logics of care and control that characterize border externalization in Mexico.