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 post-pandemic 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.

Curious, Hayeur drove to Jacumba Hot Springs, California, hoping to document asylum seekers trying to sneak past Trump’s infamous wall. She arrived to find exactly that. At dawn and dusk, hordes of people would cross through the wall’s many breaches and breaks. “Sometimes I slept in my car so I wouldn’t miss them,” she says. She saw single people, families with children and large groups. Hayeur remained........

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