People gather in Washington Square Park in Manhattan on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2017. (Todd Heisler / The New York Times)
On May 1, International Workers Day, immigrants will join many from the labor movement by striking, marking a “day without immigrants.” While this is a strategy that has been used every May Day since 2006, this year, it is also part of a larger struggle for sanctuary, countering Trump’s explicitly racist and restrictive immigration policies.
On March 8, women borrowed this tactic to mark International Women’s Day. They called for “a day without women” to protest Trump’s sexist and homophobic policies.
The sharing of strategies is a first step in recognizing that in fact, these two movements — both reinvigorated by Trump’s election — should be explicitly joined: The push for women’s rights must also be a push for sanctuary.
As a recent Texas case poignantly shows, the struggles against gender-based violence and deportation are very much connected. On February 9, immigration officials arrested Irvin González, a transgender woman originally from Mexico, at a courthouse where she was seeking a protective order against an abusive boyfriend. She was charged with illegal re-entry to the US and is now facing up to a decade in federal prison on immigration charges. The backlash was swift. Women’s rights advocates rightly argue that her arrest sends a message to domestic violence survivors that they should not seek help if they do not want to be deported.
In fact, just as these advocates feared, on March 21, four women in Colorado dropped their cases of domestic abuse for fear of being detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who were spotted outside a Denver courthouse, waiting to make arrests.
These two political struggles — while not identical — are nevertheless inextricable. If we do not think about them together, we risk not adequately addressing important forms of discrimination and exclusion.
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