For women, migration is a constant fight: The gendered costs of anti-refugee policies like Title 42
For women, migration is a constant fight
The gendered costs of anti-refugee policies like Title 42 need to be acknowledged and addressed.
Heba Gowayed
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University
Published On 9 Jun 20229 Jun 2022
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Asylum seekers wait as border agents arrive to detain them near the US-Mexico border
US Border Patrol agents arrive to detain a group of refugee women near the US-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. [John Moore/Getty Images]
“I will speak on stage, but not about the rape,” Joy told me. Pained and startled, I took her hands in mine. Over the next two hours, tears streamed down her face as she recounted a journey that began in a military prison in war-torn Cameroon in 2018 and continued to the refugee and migrant shelter in Tijuana where we were sitting. Joy, who is a friend and now the coordinator of that same shelter, asked me to come by her office to help her prepare her statement for a press conference. It was being held to protest the May 20 decision by a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge to block Joe Biden’s attempt to rescind Title 42 – a policy that invokes public health as a reason to deny her and thousands of others like her the right to apply for asylum. The pursuit of refuge is an internationally and domestically sanctioned right. But in a world governed by borders designed to keep Black and brown people who need resources from countries that have them, it can also be a physically, emotionally and financially costly endeavour.
I came to Tijuana to do research for a book about these costs, which are even higher for women who not only make up half of the world’s displaced, but are also targets of sexual violence, and caregivers of the world’s 35 million displaced children. It was her children Joy was thinking of when on January 21, 2021 – the day of Biden’s inauguration – – she attempted, and succeeded, to cross the US border. She was thrilled. She could petition for asylum, to finally reunite her family. Surely, she thought, under Biden, someone would listen to her story; to what she had endured. Within minutes, however, Customs and Border Patrol, an organisation with a $17.7bn budget, forced her into a van. Without asking her a single question, they drove her back across the border. She had been expelled via Title 42.
. . . . .
Joy’s story is both horrifying and unexceptional. I have yet to speak to an asylum seeker who did not experience gendered violence as part of her journey. Rape is globally deployed as a brutal weapon of war. And, once displaced, women are uniquely vulnerable to sexual violence. But Joy, like the rest of the world’s displaced, is more than her vulnerability. I watch her in awe as she runs meetings in three of the languages in which she is fluent. She has managed to bring her three young children to Mexico. And she is a proud advocate for other immigrants, receiving them with empathy at the very shelter where she once lived.
Meanwhile, she continues to fight for recognition of her family’s asylum claim. As a female asylum seeker, Joy confronts a system intent on negating her humanity and potential. The day after I first met Joy, we marched shoulder to shoulder in a protest held for International Women’s Day where I learned the phrase “la migracion de mujer es una lucha constants,” For women, migration is a constant fight. The fight for women’s rights is not only in protests in our nations’ capitals but in the physical movement of women, globally, towards a better tomorrow.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/6/9/for-women-migration-is-a-constant-fight
