The ecology of immigration discourse is an ideoscape in flux. It is a landscape constructed along human mobility, lifeworlds, ontological state security as well as along emotional and institutional complexities. There has been significant recent proliferation of border literature and ethnographies that represent narratives of migrants on the U.S-Mexico border. Ethnography as non-fiction literature documents border trajectories. This paper seeks to address how these trajectories are represented and or translated through a case study of the non-fiction work, The death and life of Aida Hernandez: a border story by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (2019) in which there is a distinct ecology in the ethos of ethnography and immigrant criminalization. This case study assesses therefore the relation between the politics of ethnographic ideoscapes, translation and agency based upon Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak & Kollner, 2008; Wodak & Meyer, 2016) as well as evaluation and decision-making (Munday, 2012) when translating ethnography as a genre of represented voices.