2023 Theses Master's

From the Margins: A Gender-Variant Basis for the Abolition of US Immigration Detention

Maggio, Danielle (Della)

The most urgent human rights work in the United States requires looking to the margins, where multiple forms of oppression intersect in individual lifetimes. Recognized by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as an especially vulnerable group in a 2011 annual report, gender-variant migrants are disproportionately oppressed in the US, commonly undergoing violations of their human rights throughout the US immigration system.

The complete absence of data tracking the relief cases of gender-variant migrants, their instances of detention, or their experiences and needs is evidence of the neglect of gender-variant migrants in the system at-large and immigration detention in particular. Literature has explained that this lack of data, as well as the lack of gender-inclusive asylum precedents in the US, may be due to the strict binary expectations and qualifications that immigration procedures project onto the concept of gender identity.

Another set of literature discusses a lack of gender-affirming medical care for gender-variant migrants, in general and in US immigration detention centers specifically, as well as its consequences for gender-variant migrants. This study, through in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with four separate subject populations, investigates gender-variant migrants' experiences in the US immigration system to assess in which ways such experiences justify the abolition of immigration detention.

Reformist perspectives fail to address that the system of immigration detention in the US is an arm of the prison-industrial complex and the descendant of centuries-old discriminatory immigration law–both of which are manifestations of sovereign violence steeped in white supremacy, heteronormativity, and capitalism. Discussing US state sovereignty, its power over life, and its inhibition of international human rights law, this inquiry aims to bring into conversation with one another abolition feminism and modern political philosophy.

Founded on queer perspectives and engaging with an interdisciplinary crux of social justice theory, US legislation and case law, and the international human rights dogma, this research utilizes abolition feminism to advocate for freedom of movement and right to health for members of the queer community who are disproportionately harmed, mistreated, and abandoned by the US immigration system.