This dissertation consists of five papers that consider the politics of Central American irregular migration in and through Mexico. The first chapter shows how migrants’ survival practices enroll them in economic circulations that may be at once intimate, non-capitalist, and deeply exploitative. Further, it considers the co-production of two forms of migrant detention: an “interior” detention regime that orders institutions, and an “exterior” detention regime comprised of the everyday forms of spatial unfreedom brought about in ways apart from state direct-administration yet in relation to state bureaucratic objectives. The second chapter examines the forms of state protection for unaccompanied migrant minors in Mexico and the US. Conceptualized as a geolegal space unified by migrants’ mobilities, it uses a case-study to show how systems of legal protection may exacerbate migrant marginalization because legal rights are only functionally available with the help of advocates. In the third chapter, I draw on Judith Butler’s concept of “ungrievable life” to reveal how migrants in urban Mexico are produced as ungrievable, how they live under the conditions of that status, and how they may strategically perform their ungrievability. It situates the representational politics of migrants’ mobilities – largely in the purview of states who would arrest migrants’ mobility – against the signification of those movements. The fourth chapter develops an account of punitive power through Foucault as both immanent analytic and technology of power. I argue for a spatialized conception of punishment, that punitive power can act on individuals both outside the sovereign territory and analytically prior to the behaviors that would identify individuals for disqualification as legal subjects. Finally, the fifth chapter theorizes the long reach of border militarization, which configures Central Americans’ decisions in Mexican urban spaces that are far from the borderlands, through the lens of punitive power. As many intend to continue to the US, Central Americans find their experiences, rather than their behaviors, targeted in such a way as to differentiate and subjectivate them without the presence of state agents.