“Asylum, it’s not a real thing anymore:” Paralegal and Temporal Modalities for Excluding U.S. Asylum Seekers from Latin America and the Caribbean

Governments deny people’s internationally recognized rights to asylum by preventing them from arriving in territories where they may request asylum and by using case law to restrict eligibility. While research tends to focus on either deflection or restriction tactics, this paper builds on studies that examine the interaction between them. To further examine the interaction between these “bordering” practices at and beyond the physical U.S. border, we conducted two years of ethnographic research with asylum seekers in three ICE detention centers, one district of the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” and via Title 42 expulsions. We show how paralegal manipulations of time interact with spatial and legal modalities of exclusion to deflect asylum seekers from Latin America and the Caribbean in particular. The result for people who are subjected to these processes is compounded trauma inflicted through a paradoxical combination of state violence and statelessness in the United States and abroad.