Immigration trials and international crimes: Expressing justice and performing race

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.