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How do local authorities find room to manoeuvre in the implementation of immigration policies when they are deprived of formal authority? Most scholarship on this topic posits the formal devolution of implementation power as the main determinant of such variation. This paper presents a comparative case analysis that illustrates the possibility of local reinterpretation and redirection of national-level policy even in circumstances where local actors enjoy no formal authority. When the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was given unprecedented powers to construct barriers on the southern border in 2006, actors in one South Texas county succeeded in convincing DHS to re-define the ‘border wall’ as flood protection on the Rio Grande River, while their counterparts in the adjacent county did not. We find that this was a result of differential capacities to coordinate within and across local institutions to convince federal authorities of the mutual benefits of agreeing to a local alternative. The possibility of ‘implementation brokerage’ – and its basis in local elites’ practices and habits of policy implementation – are considered in light of their implications for the sources and processes of local divergence in immigration policy implementation.

Redirecting Leviathan: discovering local room to manoeuvre in US-Mexico border policy