By pairing the natural environment with immigration policy, the United States has evaded responsibility for hundreds of migrant deaths every year. Consequently, these deaths often go unrecognized, unmourned, and fall outside of the purview of the state as a recognizable deaths at all. Judith Butler writes of these kinds of deaths as “ungrievable” or a life that “cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never ‘were’” (Butler 33). Because migrants fall outside of the structures of sovereignty their deaths challenge what it means to grieve for someone with “no name, no narrative, so that there never was a life, and there never was a death” (Butler 146). The state relies upon the relative anonymity of many migrants, even the named ones, to hide the violence repeatedly being done in the remote landscapes that make up the border. Thus, mourning for migrants is essential to understanding how contemporary American border policy is solidified against individual threats rather than nation-states (Brown). This pull toward weaponizing the environment and increasing border security means that migrant deaths are hidden under the continuous justification for borders broadly speaking. Migrant deaths are reduced to a rationale for more border policing rather than humane immigration solutions that might help keep people out of the desert.