#border studies

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Deepen your study of Gloria Anzaldúa and her tremendous influence with the EL MUNDO ZURDO series (Aunt Lute Books), now available at SPD!

“When I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, I think of transformation. We have all been changed by her, and so have the worlds we inhabit. She gave us new ways to understand our struggle and the realities we have faced as mujeres, living the contradictions and ambiguities of mestizaje. And I, for one, will be forever indebted to her.” - Rusty Barceló, El Mundo Zurdo (pg. 93)

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“Border Policing offers an insightful look at the regulation of the movement of people and goods across national divides. Together, the essays assembled by Holly Karibo and George Díaz offer a connective approach to the US-Mexico, US-Canada, and Indigenous borderlands, as well as the differing regions within. Spanning the early nineteenth century to the present, this collection of case studies looks to the past to understand contemporary approaches to border enforcement and the development of an intensified security apparatus. It also examines the ways in which border peoples have contested policies of enforcement. This anthology is a valuable and timely contribution to borderland studies.”

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EL PASO, Texas | Border agents face split-second decisions on use of force

EL PASO, Texas | Border agents face split-second decisions on use of force

EL PASO, Texas — U.S. Border Patrol agents near Tijuana, Mexico, faced a choice as they looked out over the chaos at a crowd of migrants that included rock-throwing men as well as barefoot children: Do they respond with force — and, if so, what kind?

The circumstances at the San Ysidro border crossing Sunday were exceptional, but the question facing the agents was not. It’s a split-second choice…

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EL PASO, Texas | Clash with migrants spotlights force at the border

EL PASO, Texas | Clash with migrants spotlights force at the border

EL PASO, Texas — U.S. Border Patrol agents near Tijuana, Mexico, faced a choice as they looked out over the chaos at a crowd of migrants that included rock-throwing men as well as barefoot children: Do they respond with force — and, if so, what kind?

The circumstances at the San Ysidro border crossing Sunday were exceptional, but the question facing the agents was not. It’s a split-second choice…

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Under British criminal law, it is not permissible to detain a person indefinitely. In normal circumstances the maximum period a person can be detained without charge is 24 hours, rising to 96 hours (four days), ‘if a serious crime is suspected.’ The only exception to these limits relates to persons suspected of terrorism, who, under special powers granted by the 2006 Terrorism Act could be detained for up to 28 days.This length of time was fiercely contested at the point of its introduction and the temporary powers granting it were allowed to lapse in 2011, the period of detention reverting to its pre-2006 limit of 14 days. The significance of these periods lies in the sense of a limit, a limit that relates to the question of sovereignty and that ties the question of sovereignty to the issue of time. The question cuts both ways. Sovereign law establishes its ethical character by the degree to which it encroaches on, and also protects, the sovereign actions of the individual citizen. Currently one key measure of that relationship in the UK is the period of 14 days, being the point beyond which the interests of the individual cannot be overridden by the interests of the state. Unless, that is, the individual is held in immigration detention. This begs the question: how is the institution of the removal centre legal? Or rather, since in conventional terms, it plainly offends legal principles, what relation does such a site have to the law? The answer is that it seems to stand just outside: subject to the law’s authority but not governed by its defining protections; a setting where different rules of sovereignty and temporality apply.

David Herd, “Afterword: Walking with Refugee Tales,” in Refugee Tales, edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus, Comma, 2016, pp. 137–8.

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In theory, typically at least, a person is held in immigration detention at the point at which they are imminently to be removed from the UK. This arrangement, which is to say the detention, is temporary, but it is also indefinite. The consequence is that a person who is not at that point charged with any crime can be detained for months or years, pending their removal. At the recently closed Dover Immigration Removal Centre, for example, the longest period of detention was over four years.… Following that period of indefinite detention, some people, less than half as it turns out, will actually be removed. The others, for whatever reason, often to do with the impossibility of securing travel documents, will be ‘released’ back into the community. Once released some will be accommodated in Section 4 bail accommodation, which the conditions of their bail will specify they have to return to every night (a requirement sometimes reinforced by an electronic tag). Since people who have been detained, former detainees, can’t work, they receive a form of relief paid not in cash but in the form of vouchers called an Azure card; a form of top-up card that can only be used in certain shops or supermarkets and which (as the British Red Cross reported in 2014) carries certain restrictions including, crucially, the fact that it can’t be spent on public transport.… The restriction on public transport … is among the most material effects, one consequence being that when they have to report at a Home Office Reporting Centre (on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis, depending on the conditions of their release from detention) many former detainees will have to walk long distances just to make the report. The more general effect, however, is to fix a person in a given location, often for months and years on end (over a decade is not at all uncommon). Except that with that stasis—again, part of the lexicon of detention—comes the risk that at any point they might be ‘dispersed’ (relocated to another part of the country), or re-detained (which is common). The result of all of the above is that ex-detainees (who are frequently so-called failed asylum seekers, but who might sometimes, perhaps years later, secure refugee status) have a deeply compromised relation to public space.

David Herd, “Afterword: Walking with Refugee Tales,” in Refugee Tales, edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus, Comma, 2016, pp. 135–6.

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In her recent work with female refugees, Claire Bennett has observed the hypersexualization of lesbian asylum applicants within the UK asylum process. While one of the women Bennett interviewed was interrogated about whether she ‘used sex toys,’ and which sexual positions she liked to adopt in bed, another woman was questioned about the novels of Oscar Wilde and ‘which [lesbian] shows she watched’. Judges also told some of the women Bennett interviewed that they did not ‘look like’ lesbians, that lesbians ‘don’t have children,’ and that all lesbians ‘enjoy the gay scene’ and like to go on ‘Pride marches’. Failure to conform to these heteronormative stereotypes about lesbian identity meant that the women were disbelieved, their asylum claims denied. However, for many of the women Bennett interviewed—who had all experienced physical or sexual violence in their countries of origin as a result of their sexual orientation—it was extremely difficult even to say the words ‘I am a lesbian.’ For women who perceive their sexuality as a private and deeply intimate part of their lives, proving their sexual orientation in the context of the political asylum process is incredibly challenging. Indeed, the unwillingness of lesbian asylum seekers to talk about their sexual orientation can be further exacerbated in the presence of male strangers, including both immigration judges and members of the British public who are permitted to attend political asylum hearings.

Rachel A. Lewis, “‘Gay? Prove It’: The Politics of Queer Anti-deportation Activism,” Sexualities 17.8 (2014), p. 965 (summarising Claire Bennett, “Claiming Asylum on the Basis of Your Sexuality: The Views of Lesbians in the UK,” Women’s Asylum News 115 [2013])

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A reduction of queer identities to sexual conduct has … underpinned ‘discretion reasoning’,  … [according to which] queer asylum seekers were denied refugee status on the basis of their ability to ‘behave discreetly’ about their non-conforming identity in order to avoid persecution. Even in cases where claimants were believed to be queer and to have a well-founded fear of facing persecution, petitions were commonly rejected on the basis of a ‘reasonably expectable discretion’ regarding their sexual orientation. Thus, those fleeing from persecution were found to be persecuted before subsequently being returned to the same persecutory environments, justified by an argument that they may just avoid showing publicly the cause of their persecution. Put differently, European courts effectively required refugees to play hide and seek with their persecutors. Thereby, they played into the persecutors’ hands by imposing on queer asylum seekers ‘the same submissive and compliant behaviour’ that ‘the agent of persecution in the country of origins seeks to achieve by persecutory conduct’.      Questionable in light of its morality and practical consequences, the [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] has firmly rejected this approach. The prevalence of this reasoning serves as evidence for the different standards that are applied to cases of queer asylum. Its tragedy is ‘that courts advanced this obligation of behaviour modification, in effect postulating self-censorship, against gay applicants even as they vigorously (and appropriately) rejected any comparable duty to disguise one’s political opinions or religious convictions in order to be safe’. Indeed, having demanded from refugees to cooperate in their own protection has for years subverted the entire logic behind the establishment of a system that grants surrogate protection. The assumption present in such reasoning is again a view of queer identity as something sexual and behavioural, as opposed to considering queer identity belonging a highly complex matter integral to one’s personal identity. An assumption, which would hardly be applied to heterosexuals.

Johannes Lukas Gartner, “(In)credibly Queer: Sexuality-Based Asylum in the European Union,” Humanity in Action, 2015.