“Nevertheless She Persisted:” Confronting the Silencing and Reproduction of Gender-Based Violence among U.S. Asylum Seekers

ABSTRACT

Gender-based violence is a pervasive global crisis that affects people in myriad ways. Little is known about the impact of victimization experiences of one particularly vulnerable group: women who are “defensively” seeking asylum in the United States. Our ethnographic research with asylum seekers and legal advocates reveals how systems of oppression interact across borders to multiply women’s vulnerability to victimization, obstruct their access to critical resources, bar their flight and safe passage, and restrict their access to asylum. We urge recognizing gender as a protected ground for asylum and enforcing robust rights and protections for women transnationally.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender-based violence
• asylum seekers
• asylum policy
• patriarchy
• intersectionality

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the thousands of the asylees, attorneys, and advocates fighting for asylum and social justice in countries around the world every day.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Throughout the manuscript, we use pseudonyms and composite narratives constructed from many conversations, observations, and oral history interviews with dozens of asylees, attorneys, and legal aid providers to completely anonymize stories while “painting a nuanced picture” (De León, 2015, p. 43) of patterns. See Methods for details.

2. In 2019 and 2020, untrained CBP agents were also conducting credible fear interviews. A federal judge terminated the practice in August 2020 as it violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (Weissner, 2020).

3. “Sexual minority” is the terminology utilized by the authors in this cited study.

4. “Battered women” is the terminology utilized by the authors in this cited study.

5. Feminicide refers to the killing of women because they are women and implicates the state in these killings “through its unwillingness or inability to provide prevention and response mechanisms” (Menjívar & Walsh, 2017, p. 222; Menjívar, 2011; Walsh & Menjívar, 2016; Adamson et al., 2020; Menjívar, 2021).

6. Garni, a second-generation U.S. immigrant, has done research in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, and is fluent in Spanish. Garni has done extensive ethnographic research on migration from war-torn communities in Central America. Melander worked with an interpreter who is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and has done extensive research on violence against women and girls.

7. Narratives represent only portions of people’s asylum claims and are not meant to capture whole claims.

8. This research protocol was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board at the authors’ university and found to be exempt per 45 CFR 46.101, paragraph b, category: 2, subsection: ii.

9. When overcrowding in the detention centers occurs, asylees are sometimes issued Notices to Appear (NTAs), which releases them from detention to pursue their cases without undergoing a credible or reasonable fear screening in ICE detention. They must still wear ankle monitors and comply with ICE check-ins.

10. One attorney told us the rate dropped below 10%.

11. In addition, our discussions of persecution may be quite conservative because trauma likely limits what people are willing or able to discuss.