This chapter explores the embodied experiences of racialized women at borders of the ‘Global North’. Building upon gendered analyses proposed by migration and border studies, this chapter examines the workings of contemporary global border sites by exploring how racialized violence sits at the heart of the ‘humanitarian border’ (Walters, 2011). In particular, the chapter sheds light on the specifically gendered implications of humanitarian borders. To account for their violent outcomes, notably for migrant women, it proposes the notion of ‘humanitarian bureaucracy’ to trace how the lethal consequences of the contemporary management of global borders is concealed behind a veil of legality. The final section makes the case for exposing the liberal paradox of the humanitarian border, whereby an ideologically universal commitment to human rights is contradicted by the exclusionary boundaries of the nation-state, in order to suggest possibilities for alternative politics of migration.