CHECKPOINT

A Canadian artist documents migrant crossings along Trump’s wall

- Rosemary Counter

QUÉBÉCOIS PHOTOGRAPHER and video artist Isabelle Hayeur has always been drawn to no man's lands. She finds them everywhere—at Strasbourg’s Court of Human Rights, amid the scorched chaos of B.C. wildfires and in the deserted region of the Salton Sea in California. But in the case of her haunting series Borderlands, they found her.

In January of 2024, while working in California on another project, Hayeur began following reports about the growing crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border. Once concentrated in Texas, the surge of migrants had shifted westward, and California had become an epicentre. Since the border's postpandemic reopening in 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection have recorded over seven million migrant encounters along the southwestern frontier. There were nearly 250,000 in December of 2023 alone, the highest monthly number ever reported at the time.