UNDERGRADUATE

THE POLITICS OF PROTECTION: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
ASYLUM SEEKERS DIVIDED ALONG GENDER AND RACIAL
LINES
Lizbeth Sanchez*
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies
There has been a surge of children and women seeking
asylum from Central America in the past few years. This
surge of immigrants seeking refuge has created a crisis for
the U.S. in terms of how to deal with the situation. Gang
violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras has
forced thousands of people to migrate north for survival.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees’ report (UNHCR), in 2014, “tens of thousands
sought asylum in the United States, and the number
of women crossing the U.S. border was nearly three
times higher than in 2013” (UNCHR 2016, 2). The report
indicates that “Women are under particular threat, being
raped, beaten, extorted, abducted and murdered almost
every day. El Salvador and Guatemala now have the first
and third highest female homicide rate on the planet”
(UNCHR 2016, 2). These findings demonstrate that
women, in particular, are extremely vulnerable to violence
in their home countries, which explains the high numbers
of female Central American immigrants.
The particular violence experienced by women not only
comes from organized crime, but also from abusive
partners in their homes. The UNHCR report states that
“many women [whom they interviewed] cited domestic
violence as a reason for flight, fearing severe harm or
death if they stayed” (UNCHR 2016, 25). Because domestic
violence targets a specific gender, women, domestic
violence is considered a form of gender-based violence. In
this sense I ask when women flee Central America from
* This paper was prepared for LST 390, capstone in Latin American and
Latino Studies, taught by Professor Carolina Sternberg.
domestic violence, to what extent has the United States’
refugee laws protected refugees seeking asylum from
this specific kind of gender-based violence? I argue that
the U.S.’s refugee laws have done very little to protect
domestic-violence asylum seekers, especially those that
have been coming from Central America. I establish
that the U.S.’s asylum process is gendered, racialized,
and politicized when working with domestic violencebased
asylum claims. The U.S.’s refugee law creates an
exclusionary form of “worthy” asylum seekers in order
to expand its hegemonic power and identity as “hero” of
the “most vulnerable” around the world, all while strictly
restricting the entry of non-citizens.
This research is important because there has not been
enough scholarship on the ways in which current U.S.
refugee law has impacted domestic violence asylum
seekers, especially those who have been coming from
Central America. With the surge of Central American
immigrant women and children to the U.S. due to violence
and poverty in their home countries, it is vital to explore
the ways in which this population is treated in the U.S.’s
immigration system. Not enough research on this subject
has been produced through a feminist perspective that
explores why, for the U.S., certain “victims” are more
“worthy” of protection than others. It is important to
understand how gender can bring a different approach in
understanding the exclusions and identity formation of a
“worthy victim,” particularly when looking at refugee law’s
relationship to gender-based violence claims. It is also
important to analyze to what extent these laws are doing
what they were set out to do in theory.
104 CREATING KNOWLEDGE