Credible. Reasonable. Subjective. Objective. Well-founded. Five words to describe America’s love story with measuring and legally codifying immigrants’ fears. So many more to account for what Hannah Arendt (1973) described as the “administrative violence” deployed by authoritarian regimes to get rid of the undesired: guidelines, memos, acts, executive orders, bans, changes to case law, denial of appeals, erasures from precedent, international agreements, etc. The issue at hand is not only the bloodthirsty spectacle of a militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) machine, nor the paralyzing videos of immigrant abductions on the streets, but the eerie hum of bureaucratic governance that overwhelms the system with hundreds, even thousands, of regulations that transform the state into a specter—always morphing and staying out of reach for those who seek refuge.

The paradox of our times is that the system founded on a constitutional right to access due process to those who put forward a “fear claim” is the same system that is terrorizing immigrants and their communities. Asylum seekers fear going to court, where they risk apprehension; they fear attending their mandatory check-ins with ICE while their asylum case is pending; they fear looking foreign at work and speaking with an accent. Fear takes over immigrants’ lives as they must also provide evidence of a “well-founded fear” of past and future persecution to legally become refugees (UNHCR 1951). It’s a fear-saturated moment in which the appropriate display of this very same emotion is the medium through which the state grants legal personhood. Reflecting on fear as a tool for governance requires that we also treat it as a legal object.

Since 2017, when Donald Trump took office, I have conducted ethnographic research with asylum seekers and their legal teams in New York, serving as a Spanish-English interpreter for Latin American women fleeing gender violence. The central takeaway for any volunteer in these settings is that U.S. immigration law is an interpretative arena in which experiences of violence are awkwardly transformed into the language of the law (see Luiselli 2017 and Oliva 2024). For example, to prove the credibility of asylum seekers’ fears, attorneys often need to force fragmented memories of abuse into chronological, linear narratives that highlight summaries of the first, worst, and last instances of physical, psychological, and sexual harm.

From an anthropological perspective, immigration courts also emerge as sites of neoliberal penality (Harcourt 2009), where the state justifies its intervention and policing in areas outside the “natural” course of the economic order. Under the guise of legitimate enforcement of immigration law, the state works its way into immigrants’ bodies and minds to police subjecthood, discarding those whose views on the world threaten the boundaries of what it deems rational and useful, and deciding whose fear is mistakenly expressed, too extreme to be real, or too disorganized to be credible.

In Trump’s immigration courts, survivors of gender violence have borne the weight of penal policies as their legal recognition becomes increasingly fragmented into complex criteria that are almost impossible to account for in testimony. They have become the target of an American bureaucracy that insists on classifying their fears as it continuously changes the rules that they must follow to have those fears validated.

One of the current administration’s tactics for denying legal recognition to women fleeing gender violence is procedural and absurdly simple: the attorney general (AG) remands a case from the lower courts for their own review, overturning the decision to destabilize precedent. This has happened several times during Trump’s two presidential terms, with AGs issuing decisions in Matter of A-B- I and A-B- II, and other cases to relegate gender-based violence to the private sphere, additionally arguing that the slightest indication of a home country’s intent to protect asylum seekers is enough to deny a case. The most recent decision to that effect was issued in September 2025 by Attorney General Pam Bondi, while the public was preoccupied with the terror inflicted by ICE raids and the escalating xenophobia.

I have witnessed attorneys’ efforts to prepare survivors of gender violence for their declarations in court so that their fears are recognized as valid and, at the same time, fit into these shifting legal categories. But because attorneys are cautious not to jeopardize the delivery of genuine and credible testimony, they are reluctant to disclose their legal strategies during preparation meetings. This leaves women petitioning for asylum due to gender violence unaware of the disconnect between their narratives of fear and the legal arguments that tie their cases to a protected social group. It is demoralizing to notice their frustration when their attorneys spend time and energy during an asylum merits hearing asking questions that seem unnecessary yet speak to this legal precedent. It is unnerving to observe how memories of horrific violence are reframed to convince the judge that the asylum seeker belongs to legal fictions that appear to shift the blame onto them, such as “married, Guatemalan women who are unable to leave their relationship.” And it is absolutely disheartening to translate the bad news when the government has, once again, undone these already unstable categories.

Ultimately, the dismantling of asylum case law leaves women seeking protection from gender violence in legal limbo, an issue that has gone largely unnoticed by the media and has yet to provoke the public outrage it deserves. Together with the policing of how their fear is expressed, this produces what Colin Dayan (2011) calls “negative personhood,” in which migrant women are barely alive in the eyes of immigration law.