Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum

In Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum, we present the stories of dozens of women from northern Central America and Mexico that exemplify the desperate need for reform to the American asylum process. The women we profile want what we all seek: safety and the means to support ourselves. Yet women must run a legal gauntlet to save their own lives. In the U.S. asylum system, that means women fleeing — from abuse inside their homes or from gangs in their communities — must confront laws that weren’t written to protect them.

In the book, we build the case that women seeking asylum in the United States due to domestic or gang violence should be protected under the asylum laws. The current laws were written after World War II to protect victims of state persecution. Despite promises to update and revise — including by the previous administration — gender-based crimes are still not consistently recognized as a reason to grant asylum. Lawyers must prove that women fleeing this treatment have been persecuted because they are women, have been ignored by their governments, and would be in danger if returned to their home nation.

Current efforts to “secure” the southern border and deter asylum seekers do not address the reasons women are seeking asylum, and only further traumatize people who are genuinely fleeing for their lives. Decades of military and government unrest have led to deep poverty and structural inequality in Latin American nations — often instigated and encouraged by American policies. In these countries, male dominance is often the norm, and is exacerbated by political and economic inequality. Police and gangs are often co-conspirators when it comes to terrorizing and subjugating women, and so when women are threatened and abused, they have no trusted authorities to turn to.

Despite popular beliefs that applying for asylum is easy, and that migrants are taking advantage of this method of gaining entry to the U.S., we show in the book that the opposite is true. The women we spoke with — like thousands of others — have been imprisoned and treated like criminals at the U.S. border, discouraged from applying for asylum, and required to wait years for hearings. They have paid lawyers significant fees for court preparation and paperwork filings. Through it all, asylum seekers must hold down jobs, provide for children, and cope with the trauma of physical or sexual abuse. In the end, only a small number of women are granted asylum; the verdict often depends on whether the judge believes their story.

We were able to speak with more than 40 women from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who applied for asylum. We observed dozens of closed asylum hearings, and spoke to immigration attorneys and former immigration judges. Asylum seekers exist in a tenuous space we call compounded marginalization. This term captures the fact that asylum seekers are temporarily spared deportation and may obtain a work permit while undergoing the legal right to seek asylum, but their life is defined by a protracted legal battle to win the right to remain in the U.S.

We titled the book Private Violence because it is the term used by some to describe gender-based brutalization at the hands of domestic partners or gangs, but we explain that this violence is never truly “private.”

The immigration court system can be highly politicized. Asylum seekers can find themselves in a process that is antagonistic, adversarial, bureaucratic, lengthy, confusing, and expensive. Socially acceptable policies and practices might seem routine and reasonable, but they lead to deportation, social exclusion, tenuous legal status, and violations of rights. Some advocates have called this the “slow violence” of the immigration system.

U.S. asylum law was not designed to protect survivors of “private violence.” The system must be stretched to ensure safety for victims of less commonly acknowledged forms of persecution, such as places that allow gender-based violence to flourish, where local police forces are unable or unwilling to protect women.

We also point out in the book that hearing stories of rape, assault, and death threats impacts many immigration attorneys and judges, who burn out and develop compassion fatigue. One person explained: “The pressures of the system are felt by immigration attorneys, most of whom are overworked, underpaid, under-resourced, and charged with protecting their clients from deportation, a fate that for some clients is akin to a sentence of death.” One attorney told us, “I don’t really do domestic violence cases anymore. I just can’t.”

Outcomes

A report by the American Immigration Council sum- marized American asylum law in the following way: “Immigration judges may conclude that a person is likely to be killed if deported to their home country, and that the person nevertheless does not qualify for asylum because they will be killed for the wrong reason, or by the wrong person.”

That “wrong person” could be a domestic partner or a gang member; in the eyes of some judges, those people are deemed to commit “private violence,” which is not protected by the law.

Women who are granted asylum are supposed to be protected from removal from the U.S., and have a path to legal permanent residency and citizenship. However, many women we met had children and family members who remained in the same area as their abusers. This is painful for women who feel guilty for leaving family members behind. One attorney we interviewed in 2022 told us about a client who won asylum in 2017; nevertheless, her ten-year-old son was still unable to join her in the U.S.