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

Abstract

Scholars have identified crimmigration – or the criminalization of “irregular” migration in law – as a key issue affecting migrant access to justice in contemporary immigrant-receiving societies. Yet the gendered and racialized implications of crimmigration for diverse migrant populations remains underdeveloped in this literature. This study advances a feminist intersectional approach to crimmigration and migrant justice in Canada. I add to recent research showing how punitive immigration controls disproportionately affect racialized men from the global south, constituting what Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo have called a “gendered racial removal program” (2013). In my study, I shift analytical attention to consider the effects of the contemporary crimmigration system on migrant women survivors of gender-based violence. While such cases constitute a small sub-group within a larger population of migrants in detention, nevertheless scholarly attention to this group can expose the multiple axes along which state power is enacted – an analytical strategy that foundational scholars like Crenshaw (1991) used to theorize “structural intersectionality” in the US. In focusing on crimmigration in the Canadian context, I draw attention to the growing nexus between migration, security, and gender-based violence that has emerged alongside other processes of crimmigration. I then provide a case analysis of the 2013 death while in custody of Lucía Dominga Vega Jiménez, an “undocumented” migrant woman from Mexico. My analysis illustrates how migrant women’s strategies to survive gender-based violence are re-cast as grounds for their detention and removal, constituting what I argue is a criminalization of survivorship.The research overall demonstrates the centrality of gendered and racialized structural violence in crimmigration processes by challenging more universalist approaches to migrant justice.

Punished and banished: Non‐citizen women's experiences in a Danish prison

“…Scholars across several fields have explored how women's complex identities interact with legal structures, penal power and deportation regimes (Abji, 2020; Bosworth, 1999; Crenshaw, 1991; Damsa & Franko, 2022; Yuval‐Davis, 2007), particularly in immigration detention (Abji, 2016; Abji & Larios, 2021; Bosworth, 2014; Bosworth & Kellezi, 2017; Canning, 2014, 2017; Canning & Tombs, 2021; Esposito et al., 2019; Esposito, Matos & Bosworth, 2020). In combination, criminal law, immigration law and deportation regimes are shown to produce precarity, making the state culpable of, or complicit in, violence against non‐citizen women.…”

Forced-Voluntary Return

“…Many anticolonial, feminist, and critical race theorists have critiqued these narratives, which, while inclusive of certain acts of "generosity" toward particular migrant populations, intentionally erase the experiences of many migrants and Indigenous populations, a process that normalizes a national "whiteness" and necessarily constructs bodies of color as outsiders (Arat-Koc 2005;Th obani 2007;Walia 2010). Th rough the retelling of these exclusionary narratives, combined with the increased public vilifi cation of migrants and refugees, Conservative Canadian policy-makers established the context that enabled increased bordering and a drastic overhaul of immigration policies and procedures between 2008 and 2015 (Abji 2020;Alboim and Cohl 2012). Th ese important changes to policies and procedures hierarchized refugee determination through a Designated Country of Origin or "safe country" list, restricted family sponsorship programs, and limited other humanitarian programs, all of which actively divided migrants into categories.…”

“…Th ese agents then used their discretion to reinforce ideologies of migrants as either deserving of inclusion or as potential threats to the community (Bhuyan 2012;Park and Bhuyan 2012;Villegas 2013). At the same time, individuals and organizations that resisted in order to support migrants marked as "undeserving" were increasingly criminalized (Abji 2020). As a result, the border surrounded certain migrant bodies, augmenting the exclusions experienced in many diff erent ways.…”

Reproductive injustice in Britain: punishing illegalized migrant women from the Global South and separating families

“…The victimhood of some women rather than their 'offending' leads to their entanglement with the system. According to Menjívar and Abrego (2012), the state acts less as an agent of benevolence than an arbiter of legal violence, contributing to a continuum of abuse encountered by female immigrants (Dingeman et al, 2017; see also Bosworth et al, 2016;Matos et al, 2019;Ogg, 2019;Abji, 2020).…”