Derechos en crisis: Central American asylum claims in the age of authoritarian neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon the insights of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Gramsci coupled with ethnographic research conducted in Texas, this paper discusses how the Obama Administration sought to impose a state of exception on Central American refugees by attempting to suspend substantive refugee protections enshrined in international law, in the name of responding to a refugee crisis. The paper also illustrates how these efforts to create a state of exception have been challenged and contested by subaltern actors, in this case, a group of women and children hunger strikers and their activist allies in Texas. The article makes the case that these hunger strikers are part of an emergent Mesoamerican refugee movement that has formed within the interstices of the homeland security state. This speaks not to a “refugee crisis,” as many have posited, but rather to the crisis of rights regimes of liberal democratic states writ large in the wake of massive displacements of people from Central America, a region racked by almost 40 years of neoliberal policies, US militarism, and failed zero-tolerance security paradigms.

KEYWORDS:

• Latino/a politics
• political theory
• social movements
• refugee groups

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The five protected grounds are race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

2 ICE has changed the name to Karnes County Residential Center.

3 Kathleen Arnold (2011) uses Agamben and Foucault to analyze immigration policy, and Paul Apostolidis (2010) has used Foucault with Gramsci to understand migrant worker organizing. Nonetheless, we must recognize that there is a theoretical tension in using Gramsci along with Agamben, in that the former is a Marxist who views the taking of state power and the destruction of capital as the solution to the problem of subaltern or oppressed groups, and the latter is a post-structuralist who believes that the destruction of state sovereign is the only way forward. It goes beyond the scope of this paper to resolve this tension; I simply want to recognize it and move on.

4 For more on intersectionality and immigration enforcement see Anna Sampaio (2015) who argues that migration enforcement operates through the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other markers of difference and reproduces unequal treatment along these lines.

5 People who have a history of violating parole or consistently missing court dates are considered a flight risk, as are people with no job, no family ties, and/or no children in the United States.

6 I want to thank my colleague Anthony Jerry for helping me see this inherent contradiction in liberalism through our conversations.

7 The ABC settlement refers to the 1985 class action suit filed by the American Baptist Churches against the Reagan Administration; it resulted in 70,000 Central American being able to have their cases heard “denovo”, or to have a second hearing after it was determined that first hearing was held under unfair conditions.