Emergency Services During Heightened Border Security

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How do first responders confront the challenges of provisioning fire, rescue, and emergency medical services in contexts of heightened security? The case of emergency medical responders is intriguing and oftentimes problematic. As public service providers, they are street-level bureaucrats who work on the frontlines of the post-9/11 security state, facing political, legal and ethical collisions between the security of the communities where they live and work and their social-humanitarian responsibilities to saving lives. Professional ethics and healthcare laws require that first responders provide help without regard to the legal status of their patients, but as state actors they are also invested with political and symbolic functions of governmental authority and tightly integrated into the federal emergency preparedness and homeland security infrastructures. The study examines the relation between local governments and taxpayers that fund fire, rescue and emergency medical services, and federal and state governments, which set and implement national security, border control and immigration policies. The project will be instructive to EMS-related policy and regulatory efforts as they relate to both broader concerns about national security and public health. The project would also promote the advancement and training of students in methods of rigorous data collection and analysis, while broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences. Dr. Ieva Jusionyte of the University of Florida explores the everyday practices and experiences of first responders - firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics - who work or volunteer for fire and rescue departments on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border to expand our understanding of the human and social consequences of security policies and border enforcement. This project asks: (1) what effects do security policies, planned and executed at different government levels, have in the communities where they are applied? And (2) how do potential contradictions that result when these policies are put into practice impact border security efforts? Dr. Jusionyte will seek answers to these questions by engaging in a twelve-month-long ethnographic research in rural and urban communities of Southern Arizona, where she will actively collaborate with research assistants and community partners from the fire and rescue departments. The research team will conduct a series of in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and archival research in order to explain how conflicting policies at different levels of governance can result in potentially deleterious consequences for people who experience them, and assess the implications that these effects have on first responders as frontline state actors. This research is an original and important contribution to our understanding of the effects of security-making and the laws, politics and ethics of rescue from an anthropological perspective.