2025 Theses Bachelor's

When “Private” Becomes Contested: Denials of Legal Protections for Intimate Partner Violence Survivors in the U.S. Immigration System

Romero, Laura

Intimate partner violence has historically been dismissed as a private, domestic matter, excluded from the realm of state-recognized persecution and asylum and refugee law frameworks. The 2014 Board of Immigration Appeals decision Matter of A-R-C-G- marked a significant shift in U.S. asylum law, recognizing for the first time domestic violence as a basis for asylum.

However, in 2018, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions self-certified an intimate partner violence case, Matter of A-B-, and, invoking a rarely used power, overruled the precedent established in Matter of A-R-C-G-. Sessions declared that most claims based on “private violence” were no longer legally viable for asylum. Sessions’s personal intervention overturned decades of progress in bringing visibility to gender-based violence claims.

Thus, this thesis examines how language influences legal interpretation as legal decisions are not neutral and carry ideological implications. I employed a qualitative content analysis, conducting a close reading of the 31-page decision authored by Sessions. I manually coded for language that signaled distinctions between state-inflicted violence (i.e., government persecution) and violence committed by a “private” actor (i.e., an intimate partner) to demonstrate how Sessions pushed to re-privatize intimate partner violence by distancing it from state accountability.