For asylum seekers pursuing claims in the United States, immigration court is often a hostile environment, as a site of exclusion and criminalization. Generations of social and political rhetoric about immigrants’ worth, deservingness of safety and dignity, and humanity are codified into law and policy, which is then enacted on the lives and petitions of thousands of immigrants pursuing their rights to refuge. Asylum seekers are fleeing violence and harms that are often compounded along the journey, in a continuum of structural and interpersonal violence throughout their migration and often continued in the destination country, through detention, deportation, and the court process itself. Immigration court’s purpose is to adjudicate asylum claims; while this decision is executed by judges, the court context where asylum seekers petitions are audienced are made up of prosecutors, legal advocates, expert witnesses, social workers, interpreters, court staff, and others who shape the way that petitioners’ claims are evaluated and the space in which asylum seekers’ claims are heard. This study uses a qualitative ethnographic method, drawing on human rights and critical theories to study immigration court as a culture, and to interrogate how members of this culture understand the nature of the court, their roles and relationships within the immigration enforcement system and how the immigration process identifies and responds to trauma. Data collection spanned 8 months, and included observation of 161 immigration hearings across the four Arizona immigration courts. Participants (n=73) represented various key professions within and adjacent to the court: judges, ICE trial attorneys, defense attorneys, court staff, interpreters, legal team members such as paralegals and social workers, detention center staff, and community advocates. Findings address the physical court space, the roles and professions that interact in the court, and the atmosphere of the court. These center securitization and the ideological friction of the court, credibility determinations as a site of contested power, hostility and adversariality, and the limited approach to human rights and narrow acknowledgement of trauma. These findings contextualize professional and policy recommendations, as well as implications for education and future research.

This study analyzes the role of bipartisan coalitions in creating exclusionary, enforcement focused immigration policy. First, the thesis covers the history of federal immigration law and connects this to critical migration scholarship, which emphasizes the racialization of migration controls and enforcement regimes, by highlighting the growing federal categories of immigrant illegality and criminality. Next, the thesis develops an original framework that builds on prior scholarship in political science to systematically connect coalition building and the Democratic party’s complicity as a cause of this growing regime. Specifically, the thesis applies a coalition building analysis of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, with special focus given to how the president, congressional leaders, and interest groups, in the 1980s. A key finding is that both political parties pushed the enforcement narrative and played key roles to enact employment verification into federal immigration law. The thesis connects this finding to critiques about the two-party political system as well as scholarship that exposes the injustice of U.S. immigration enforcement regime that continued to grow in the interior, at the border, and globally.

This paper assesses the obstacles faced by immigrant aid groups on the U.S./ Mexico border and the resiliency used to challenge these obstacles. The borderlands of the United States and Mexico is a unique landscape for activists and humanitarians to work given the prevalence and amount of entities that police the area and the suspension of certain constitutional protections. The criminalization of activists on the border provides a unique lens in understanding how social movements and nation-building are linked to immigration in the United States. This research aims to provide a rich description of what criminalization is and how it plays out between the government and activist groups along the border. My findings critique the United States and its claim that it is a liberal democracy because it breaks norms and international laws in its assault against activists and humanitarians, many of whom are U.S. citizens. This attack further demonstrates that the violence migrants endure on the border is not just an unfortunate side effect of border policies but very much intentional and by design. In addition to criminalizing activists, this thesis examines the activists’ mental health and exhaustion as they relate to their humanitarian work and how this is also intentional violence the U.S. Government inflicts in order to maintain itself as a nation-state.

Through the lived experiences of Georgian queer migrants, this thesis argues that the international and national refugee laws and practices are an essential starting point but remain weak and, in some cases, even exclusionary when it comes to protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQI) individuals. Specifically, this thesis documents the experiences of Georgian LGBTQ migrants to reveal the social, political, cultural, and economic factors in Georgia and recipient countries essential to shaping their experiences with belonging and protection. It critically explores how one’s LGBTQ identify shapes their sense of belonging in Georgia, how their identity played a direct role in deciding to migrate, and how queer migrants’ identities shape processes in migration and resettlement. Engaging the academic scholarship on citizenship and migration, this thesis contributes new insights for understanding how international and national institutions and laws overlap to create a restrictive regime that forces Georgian migrants to navigate asylum by detaching their claims from their persecution as LGBTQI individuals. Through centering the experiences LGBTQI, this thesis reveals injustices and harms as well as possible top-down legal remedies to improve identity-based protections in national anti-discrimination law and international asylum law.