"If I Offended Your Country, I'm Sorry": Latin American Women and the Asylum Aystem

Background: This qualitative study uses multiple strategies to examine gender-based violence and the adjudication of asylum hearings in U.S. Immigration Court. We examine the lives of asylum seekers who find themselves in a unique and arguably ill-equipped social spatial context to obtain safety, and who must fight to stay in the United States through a fundamentally adverse judicial process. Though more gender-based asylum cases are now pending in the United States than at any other time in the nation’s history, little is known about how women experience the crucial court hearings that determine whether they will be awarded asylum or ordered returned to their country of origin.

Methods: Critical phenomenological research entails examination of social phenomena by considering how economic, political, and historical con­texts shape lived experiences. Guided by critical theoretical prin­ciples, including an understanding of how life unfolds for those thrust into society’s margins by virtue of immigration status, race, language, and gender, we contextualize our findings, which include: 1. Interviews with Latin American women (n=46), 2. Analysis of judicial decisions, 3. Observation of 36 closed asylum hearings. Our goals included (1) engaging in protracted ethnographic observation, (2) obtaining rich, thick data; and (3) sufficient sampling to see varied viewpoints. Our goal was a robust analysis including triangulation of multiple views. We developed 170 inductive raw codes to generate themes. Raw codes allowed us to stay close to the data and develop themes while still acknowledging nuance and complexity.

Results: The asylum system was designed during the Cold War era to protect mostly male survivors of state violence, and now must be used by Latin American women who have survived gender-based violence by domestic partners and gangs – private actors. Women presented agonizing courtroom testimony describing gang rapes, attempts to kidnap children, extortion, and threats at gunpoint. Despite formidable odds, women and their attorneys sometimes managed to fit their stories appropriately within the confines of asylum law to win gender-based claims. Others suffered removal orders by Immigration Judges. Asylum seekers lives are shaped by social control and regulation as they complete documents to maintain “legality” and prevent deportation, prepare for court, and give testimony.

Conclusion and Implications: The asylum system is a Cold War era relic created to protect survivors of state persecution, but that now must increasingly be accessed by women victimized by private actors. The system’s legal strictures repel large numbers of asylum seekers from the Global South needing protection in western democracies, whether Central Americans at the US border, or desperate Syrians aboard vessels in the Mediterranean. The system sorts those deemed worthy of protection from those who could be dismissed legally as merely migrants, with the bur­den falling on individuals to prove worthiness of asylum claims. Social workers should support asylum seekers by providing pro bono assessments for Immigration Court hearings to speak to credibility and trauma histories, as well as advocating for policies to acknowledge women’s unique vulnerability to gender-based violence.