‘Because Deportation is Violence Against Women’: On the Politics of State Responsibility and Women’s Human Rights

Punishing Survivors and Criminalizing Survivorship: A Feminist Intersectional Approach to Migrant Justice in the Crimmigration System

“…Likewise, the population of non-status migrants in Canada is a smaller percentage of the population compared to the US, and rates of deportation and detention are also much lower in the Canadian case. 5 Yet, as I and others have argued, processes of crimmigration and the related securitization of migration have nevertheless shaped migrant precarity in Canada, and certainly shaped the tragic circumstances surrounding Lucía's death (Abji, 2016;Bergen & Abji, 2020;Bosworth & Turnbull, 2014;Goldring & Landolt, 2013;Molnar & Silverman, 2018).…”

“…7 These criminalizing restrictions targeting immigration "fraud" and "bogus" refugees were coupled with the expansion of police-style border enforcement tactics in the post-9/11 period. In 2003, the Canadian government created the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and soon after launched a multipleborder strategy that included inland enforcement by both uniformed and plain-clothed officers seeking out undocumented migrants in workplaces, hospitals, transit, schools, child welfare and women's shelters (Abji, 2016;Arbel & Brenner, 2013;Bhuyan et al, 2014). Crimmigration scholars have pointed to the mirroring of police tactics by immigration authorities as a key component of the criminalization of irregular migration, and often buttressed - -----------------------6 Importantly, the regulatory changes introduced by the federal Conservative party were the culmination of decades of both Liberal and Conservative restructuring of the refugee and immigration system introduced through neo-liberalization of social services such as settlement and migration in the 1990s.…”

“…Crenshaw defines structural intersectionality as the co-constitution of gendered, racialized, and classed structures of state power in law (see also Bhuyan, Osborne, Zahraei & Tarshis, 2014;Maynard, 2017;Walia, 2013). I apply this approach to extend crimmigration scholarship, providing a reading of Lucía's case that is informed by my own fieldwork and interviews with service providers working within the anti-violence against women sector in Toronto, Canada (Abji, 2016(Abji, , 2018Abji, Korteweg & Williams, 2019;Bergen & Abji, 2020). I argue that what gets criminalized in such cases is not only irregular migration, but also the strategies of survivorship that racialized and migrant women have developed to address the multiple forms of violence in their lives.…”

The Double Punishment of Criminal Inadmissibility for Immigrants

“…Parents who are in immigration detention and who do not have other family members in the country to look after their child may "choose" to have them live with them in detention or have to put them in the care of the Children's Aids Society (End Immigration Detention Network, 2014;Gros, 2017). In other cases, women on immigration bail may be forced to live in abusive relationships because of bail conditions, and may lack the ability to seek alternative living conditions for themselves and their children due to their precarious immigration status (Bhuyan, 2012;Abji, 2016). The harm generated is therefore also often gendered.…”

Facilitating the Carceral Pipeline: Social Work’s Role in Funneling Newcomer Children From the Child Protection System to Jail and Deportation

“…In the context of neoliberalization of social services such as child protection services, carceral logics are used to obscure the structural violence of state retrenchment of social supports, in effect scapegoating marginalized groups as the cause of social problems in ways that reinforce ongoing histories of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteronormative patriarchal oppressions. Importantly, feminist social work(ers) have been implicated in the development of the carceral state, where efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to hold the state accountable for addressing and preventing violence against women dovetailed with carceral state responses to social problems and the growth of mass incarceration and mass deportation among countries in the global north (Abji, Korteweg, & Williams, 2019; Abji, 2016; Bergen, 2020a; Bhuyan, 2012; Kim, 2018; Mehrotra, Kimball, & Wahab, 2016; Whittier, 2016). Our analysis of the pipeline between child protection, prisons, and deportation/detention thus highlights a key dimension of how the carceral state functions and the role of social work(ers) in facilitating the carceral pipeline for noncitizen youths.…”