An associate professor of social work, Carol Cleaveland “became increasingly horrified by the stories…of rape and battery by domestic partners and gang members” from the Central American and Mexican women survivors she assessed in support of the legal defense of their asylum cases (p. 201). Hence, she embarked on a 4-year journey of “critical phenomenological research” (p. 200), combining expanded interviews with survivors for court evaluations, immigration attorneys and judges, ethnographic “courtwatching” (p. 210), and content analysis of redacted judicial decisions focusing on cases presented in Baltimore or Northern Virginia courts. In recognition of the complexities and transformations of immigration policy, especially during the first Trump presidency and the transition to Biden’s administration, comprising the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, she invited expert scholar Michele Waslin to co-author. Their collaboration resulted in Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum, a book that provides a thorough analysis of abuse, struggle, and resilience against an unfair and unpredictable system marked by complex legal and political nuances, traps, and loopholes.

The authors delineate “the asymmetry between women who need asylum and the system designed to afford them protection” (p. 177). They explain how the system has been globally unbalanced: asylee receivers are usually from stronger, wealthier countries. In the United States, the system also fluctuates due to the executive branch’s “disproportionate ability” to shape its rules and their enforcement (p. 31), its workforce, courts, and judicial outcomes. They indicate how gender and gender-based violence have been prevented from being considered protected grounds for asylum and refugee resettlement in the United States, irrespective of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees’ recommendations that triggered global policy changes beginning in the 1990s. Then, they demonstrate that even though all asylum seekers “exist in a tenuous space between legal non-existence and quasi-legal status” by design (p. 29), are criminalized and surveilled as “illegals” (p. 102), dehumanized while held in hieleras (p. 103) and perreras (p.111), stigmatized as “unworthy for inclusion” (p. 145) along socioeconomic and ethnoracial lines, and used as pawns in partisan politics, women asylum seekers face additional barriers. They must meet five criteria to prove that their belonging to a protected particular social group caused them to suffer harm to the level of persecution, and that they would be harmed again in the future, given their home country’s unwillingness or inability to protect them in all territory. Their suitability as asylum seekers based on gender-based violence is automatically questioned on the grounds of whether violence was perpetuated in domestic settings, or by nonstate actors like paramilitary, narcotraffickers, or gang members. In the former case, the issue is considered private and deemed a family matter; in the latter, those acts of violence do not fall within current asylum parameters that protect victims of state violence. Moreover, women are morally judged as ‘inferior others’ when their experiences are considered cultural, implying that patriarchal abusive behavior is typical of their country of origin. Besides, their Mexican or Central American origins further discredit them as they are labeled as Latinas and feared as hyperfertile bearers of migrant children who will “alter both the demographics and culture of the United States” (p.105).

All these restrictions conflate with asylum-seekers’ “brutal trauma histories” (p. 11) resulting from their experiences of gender and sexual violence, structural and symbolic oppression in their countries of origin, and physical, mental, and emotional harm received in transit through forced migration. Defined as “compounded marginalization,” the authors present readers with the insidious ways in which these women are revictimized as they endure precarity, discrimination, and language and cultural injustice, while they prepare their complicated asylum cases, and wait lengthy years for any resolution, suffering from the immigration system’s “legal” and “slow violence,” as defined by Menjívar and Abrego (“Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants,” American Journal of Sociology 117(5), 2012) and Barak (The Slow Violence of the Immigration Court, 2023), and accumulating “invisible” injuries to their trauma (pp. 146–147).

Cleaveland and Waslin articulate well the contexts where survivors experienced violence by weaving personal narratives with social, political, and economic analyses. Recognizing that the past and current realities in Mexico and Central America have been influenced by the (wrong)doings of the United States and other Global North countries, the authors explain how the gender-based violence inflicted and suffered must be understood not as a circumstantial individual phenomenon to be explained solely from a psychological viewpoint, but as a sociological one to be considered historically and transnationally. Similarly, they maintain that the resulting trauma, while carefully addressed at the personal level, must be understood in its collective dimension, given the influence of social location and structural inequalities (p. 122). They also illuminate power dynamics at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels and their connections, operationalizing structural and symbolic violence as lived in communal, interpersonal, and personal spheres. For example, the book exposes how the ferocity of globalized, racialized, and gendered capitalism is linked to drug and gang economies, and thus, how neoliberal precarity and the commodification of human relations subordinate love and respect to objectification, manipulation, and aggression. Likewise, it illustrates how militarization, criminalization, authoritarianism, and corruption are part and parcel of neocolonialism, rendering institutions malleable, governance arbitrary, and people’s attempts to find justice fortuitous, both in the Global South and North.

The authors uncover the absurd ways in which Immigration Customs and Enforcement judges frequently deny asylum cases for women who had been abused, proving the seriousness of their plea to reform the system in a way that acknowledges the United States’ responsibility in systematically excluding migrants and shaping the “conditions forcing migration flows” from the Global South (p. 187). Cleaveland and Waslin contribute to a long legacy of feminist, migrant, and human rights activism and scholarship that confronts the destructive worldview that created hierarchies among people and centered power as the one and only means possible to sustain social order. They also help efforts to dismantle the individualist, devastating logics of production and accumulation that view people and natural resources as disposable commodities to create profit. Furthermore, their insistence on the recognition of the collective quality of these women’s trauma and resilience points us to a much-needed paradigmatic shift: undoing the artificial “us/them binary” so we can “bridge the fissures” and “reconfigure ourselves as subjects…outside existing dominant relations” to build a new world (Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, 2015, p. 77, 79).

The book is undoubtedly a great addition, and its importance grows daily as we witness a surge of conservative politics in and beyond the United States, where administrations are withdrawing the already slim rights and protections of migrants, women, and other marginalized groups. Its good qualities could have been magnified had the authors also documented the trauma generated through forced migration journeys and, above all, engaged more with critical migration, race, and ethnic studies, and with Latin American decolonial, feminist, collective memory and critical collective health scholarship. The work of authors like Mary Romero, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Aihwa Ong, Mae Ngai, Rita Segato, Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Verónica Gago, Elizabeth Jelin and Jaime Breihl would have significantly enriched the discussion of key themes. These include the unequal makeup of the US immigration system; the links to colonialism, capitalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy; the relationship between gender violence, feminicide, and the nation state as a necropolitical institution; and the collectivization of trauma and healing through social movements for community health, memory, truth, and justice.