Caught Between a State and a Family-Place: Immigrant Women’s Experiences of U-Visas

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Responses to Gendered Violence

Abstract

In an era marked by state violence against immigrant families, immigrant rights have become synonymous with family-rights, with hashtags such as #familiesbelongtogether symbolizing a progressive stance on immigration. Imperative as it is to resist involuntary family separation, the conflation of immigrant rights with protecting the family institution has some important lacunae: first, it erases state-violence against single women and children; second, it erases violence inflicted on immigrant women and children by the family. My paper examines how immigrant women and survivors of domestic violence leverage one form of patriarchy (state power) over another (the family) through the U-Visa application process. U-Visas were created under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 to mitigate the high susceptibility of immigrant women to domestic violence.1 Survivors of gender-based crimes are eligible to apply for U-Visas on the condition that they assist law enforcement in criminalizing perpetrators2. Have U-Visas been successful in liberating immigrant women from the chains of patriarchy? How have they succeeded and failed and what compromises have they made with the crimmigration-industrial-complex along the way? My paper attempts to answer these questions through an in-depth content analysis of 50 U-Visa applications that pertain specifically to domestic violence. I argue that the U-Visa serves to bridge the state's crimmigration agenda (to criminalize immigration) with a liberal-feminist agenda that seeks to protect feminized victims rather than empowering women and survivors.

Author

• Ghazah Abbasi, UMass Amherst