In the summer of 2018, Trieste – an Italian port city a few kilometres away from the Slovenian border – seemingly overnight became a new arrival point for the informal refugee Balkan Route. On 25 August 2018, together with a group of other people, deputy Mayor Polidori took the initiative to remove the refugees sleeping outdoors along the Trieste waterfront, near the Port Authority headquarters, and a few hundred meters from the spectacular Piazza Unità d’Italia, the political and tourist core of the city.

Border patrolling brings together racial profiling and passing with pernicious consequences for Indigenous migrants. In the paper, I argue that migrants are differentially vulnerable to deportation based on perceived race, gender and class.

The meanings were multiple; the ironies deliberate and critical. We later learned from a visit to the Kempsons, UK artists-turned-humanitarians who live on the northern tip of Lesvos, that many of these life-jackets are worse than useless. Sold to refugees for a small fortune in Turkey, they often turn out to be fakes filled with foam that absorbs water.

In recent weeks, concerns about the Trump administration’s policies of family separation and child detention have sparked a firestorm of media attention and a powerful public outcry. In response, the administration has become increasingly vocal and radical in asserting the legitimacy of its actions and rhetorically assassinating any claims to refuge or protection individuals and families in detention offer in their defense.

With some contemporary environmentalists dismayingly allying themselves with this closed-border vision of the world, we feel it is necessary to highlight the ways in which struggles against national borders and against the racial geographies of capitalism more broadly are of central importance to any fight against climate chaos.