During the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years at a public high school in El Paso, Texas the author developed and led an after-school arts-based literacy class. This arts-based literacy class was part of the design of a larger ethnographic study spanning the same timeframe that examined how Texas' high-stakes accountability policies shaped schooling for emergent bilingual high-school students (Bach, 2020). This class centered students' lives as resources for creative expression and invited students to document their lives and explore subjects of interest and relevance to them using photography and writing. This paper presents a discussion of the ethical concerns that surfaced in doing research and visual work with vulnerable youth on the U.S./ Mexico border. Aggressive immigration enforcement and the different contexts of surveillance youth experience inside and outside of schools make "transfronterizx" and Latinx youth especially vulnerable. Out of respect for these concerns, the images produced by students in this arts-based literacy course will be described in words rather than presented in visual form. The question driving the analysis presented in this paper asks: How should researchers ethically treat visual texts created by vulnerable youth?