Protecting the Nation from 'Honor Killings': The Construction of a Problem

Abstract

In the attention given to Trump's Muslim ban, overlooked by many critics was the fact that two of Trump's executive orders creating the ban invoked the idea of killings. The term killings appeared in the Purpose section and the Transparency and Data Collection section of the first executive order. It also appears in the Transparency and Data Collection section of the second executive order, a section that has not been superseded by subsequent executive actions. In this article I examine the role of killings in these executive orders, in litigation against the Muslim ban, and in judicial responses to the ban. I also sketch a genealogy of how killings became a problem for U.S. governance, through the efforts of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's AHA Foundation and the linking of Muslim immigrants with terrorism, gender subordination and threat to sexual liberty made visible in Trump's presidential campaign speeches. In Trump's executive orders, rhetoric and data work together to create the vision of killings as a problem in the United States. The use of the phrase killings in the executive orders can be understood as evincing a professed concern for violence against women, while actually functioning to reinforce a perception of Muslim barbarity and inferiority. The invocation of killings thus functions as the kind of coded signal called a dog whistle. This cynical deployment of feminist concerns as a proxy for xenophobic exclusion is troubling enough. But what may be even more disturbing is that the notion that killings are a problem in the United States has been constructed through false and misleading claims about data. As explained in the article, the idea that there are 23 - 27 honor killings occurring annually in the United States was circulated by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he was a Senator, and is expressed in the report produced by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security in response to the current Transparency and Data Collection mandate of the second executive order. This number is invented and invalid. This submerged story about the contribution of killings to the Muslim ban has been largely missed. But the part played by very specific ideas about gender in creating anti-Muslim animus deserves a central place in our scrutiny. The specter of violence against women has played an important role in the Trump administration's executive orders seeking to bar Muslims from entry, and continues to rationalize the notion that the nation must be protected through their exclusion.