As of the last decade, nearly 50% of migrants from Mexico to the United States accrued debt to finance their migration journey (Isidro Luna 2021). While today more and more migrants rely on debt-- and the amount of money borrowed has increased on average--- insurmountable costs of migration is not a new phenomenon. A broad breadth of research has documented the intimate relationship between increasing migration costs and the militarization of immigration enforcement and migration corridors (Martínez 2016; Massey 2007; Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016; Eschbach et al 1999; Cornelius 2001). Increasing migration costs coupled with increasingly risky journeys that are prone to failure, has driven the need to take on loans to finance their migration attempt among migrants (Gonzales 2018, Johnson and Woodhouse 2018, Dalia 2017, Heidbrink 2019). The phenomenon is coined “indebted migration” or “debt-driven migration”. Despite noting the increasing pervasiveness of debt-driven migration and its coercive implications, further research on indebted immigration is urgently needed to understand the demographic, socio-economic, and community characteristics of debt-driven migration and investigate the origins of debt migration. In the context of migration from Mexico to the US, this project aims to investigate (1) who is leveraging debt? (2) what are the economic, social, and environmental community factors that encourage debt migration?