Faculty Author Q&A: Amelia Frank-Vitale on ‘Leave If You Can’

Amelia Frank-Vitale is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Her latest book “Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds” was published in March 2026 by the University of California Press.

How did you get the idea for this project?

Years ago, when I was first a volunteer and then a researcher at a shelter for migrants in southern Mexico, I saw a shift happen. In 2010, the folks who would come through the shelter were from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, in roughly equal numbers. When you asked people why they’d left their home country, they would often talk first about economic reasons – losing jobs, cost of living, cost of education, etc. – and then security would be a second, connected, reason. By about 2012 this all had shifted – now there was an overwhelming majority of people from Honduras passing through, and more often the conversation about why a person had left started with violence and then poverty came up secondarily. I wanted to understand what was going on in Honduras and found very little written in English that wasn’t sensational or superficial or that talked about Honduras as though it were the same as El Salvador. I knew enough from my time working with Central Americans in transit to know that wasn’t sufficient and thought that when I started my own doctoral work, perhaps I could build on what I’d learned in Mexico to offer something specific about Honduras and what Honduran migration tells us about US immigration policy and border policing.

How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?

As an anthropologist, we start out with research questions, rather than hypotheses. When I first started to develop a project around deportation in Honduras, my questions were framed around wanting to understand how young people reconfigured their lives and reimagined their futures when deported back to neighborhoods that were labeled as among the world’s most violence. I learned quickly while in Honduras, however, that the question was mis-framed. In short – and this is one of the key interventions in the book – I realized that people weren’t doing much in the way of reconfiguring and reimagining because their experience of deportation was being sent back to neighborhoods they’d left weeks or months earlier, increasingly detained and deported from Mexico. This shifted the idea that I had, that many of us had, about the experience of deportation in Central America, so often associated with people who are returned to countries of first citizenship after living decades in the United States, sent back to places where they are technically from, but which are unfamiliar to them. The changing nature of the bordering technologies employed by the US at the time – both expanding and militarizing – altered the experience of deportation and ended up pushing young people like the folks I worked with in Honduras into ongoing circuits of displacements. It’s a different project than the one I imagined when I was crafting research questions nearly a decade ago, taking shape in response to the reality on the ground that I learned through the slow, immersive work of ethnography.

What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?

On the one hand, the deportation regime has already changed dramatically from the configurations and consequences I chronicle in this book. I think future work on the effects on people’s lives of bordering projects far from the borders themselves is increasingly urgent. For me, this has taken me into immigration courts in the United States, examining how bordering politics shapes the way the law is interpreted for people seeking asylum. More broadly, I think this project sparks questions about the system of international protection that emerged in the post second world war era and all the people who are not covered, who were never intended to be covered, by the protections it promised. It raises questions about citizenship and what the world intends to do with people who are unsafe at home and unable to find refuge elsewhere.

Why should people read this book?

Immigration matters are front and center these days. While the violence of US immigration enforcement has been made extremely visible recently – in Minneapolis as elsewhere – this book is a reminder that even when immigration enforcement doesn’t look like using a five-year-old to bait his father or killing protestors trying to protect their neighbors, the violence of our immigration regime still destroys lives. Mostly, though, historically, it has been kept out of sight – contained within the borderlands or pushed further from view through the processes of externalization this book discusses.

For readers interested in understanding the long-range effects of our long-standing bordering agenda and the impossible situation many people who try to migrate must contend with, I think this book will help illuminate these dynamics. It also offers a behind the scenes engagement with migrant caravans, which still seem to loom as a specter over anything that has to do with people from Latin America, when anti-immigrant voices want to instill fear.