Immigration trials and international crimes: Expressing justice and performing race

Nicola Palmer

doi:10.1177/13624806211009157

Abstract

This article examines the performative collisions between the wrong of genocide and the invocation of this international crime as a means to secure carceral control of borders. Drawing on courtroom observations, legal transcripts and the media coverage of an immigration trial in the United States, the article explores the performative relationship between international criminal law and immigration law. It argues that this relationship helped to construct and racialize the category of the ‘criminalized migrant’ while establishing the perceived ‘civility’ of criminal law as a primary means of enacting domestic border control. While race was never made explicit in the trial, it emerged in a fractured but significant way, as the horror of the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi reinforced the wrong of violating immigration law.

Highlights

It is 11 March 2019 and I’m sitting in the United States District Court in Boston, Massachusetts
A close reading of the legal transcripts and the media coverage of the Teganya trial, this article examines the collisions between expressing the wrong of genocide and the invocation of this international crime as a means to secure carceral control of borders
Performative theory has been drawn on to show the ways in which the language of international criminal law (ICL), when incorporated into immigration trials, is used to justify severe penal sanctions for immigration offences

Summary

Introduction

It is 11 March 2019 and I’m sitting in the United States District Court in Boston, Massachusetts. A close reading of the legal transcripts and the media coverage of the Teganya trial, this article examines the collisions between expressing the wrong of genocide and the invocation of this international crime as a means to secure carceral control of borders. It shows how immigration offences offer a route through which international crimes are rendered legally relevant in the US and highlights how Teganya’s alleged involvement in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi is given centre stage in the trial.

Results

Conclusion