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K. T. Mills
October 24th 2025
Throughout the Global North, migrants have become the scapegoat du jour, the specter of their exploitable labor used to divide the working class from itself[1]. What we see in El Salvador’s migrant prisons, the terrifying crescendo of nationalist frenzy that accompanies those images, is the maturation of a preexisting worldview. Concurrently, border control infrastructure has grown more mechanistic, and it exacts a blood price. As advancements in technology and punitive state policy have constricted the avenues of resistance, migrants have been driven to acts of self-mutilation.
Since the early 2000s, migrants to Europe have cut and burned their fingers to evade detection by immigration authorities. Meanwhile, migrants detained at EU, North American, and Australian borders independently decided to sew their lips closed. Drawing on the scholarship of Seyla Benhabib and Archana Kaku, I will argue that migrant self-injury has acquired a terrible logic as state sovereignty is increasingly delinked from physical space, a process known as deterritorialization. In this context, the migrant body has become both one of the final sites upon which states may exercise their control and one of the final sites where migrants may assert their agency. Consequently, migrants’ acts of self-harm are both a subversion and a rebuke of the intolerable policies that characterize 21st-century immigration enforcement.
In her article, The End of the 1951 Refugee Convention? Dilemmas of Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Human Rights, Benhabib argues that we are currently living through “a dual movement of deterritorialization and territorialization,” both of which pose a threat to the international framework through which migrants may exercise their rights (though it should be noted that the Convention applies only to asylum seekers and refugees). In her view, the advent of the internet and the proliferation of free-trade agreements, among other facets of globalization, have led to the decoupling of power and place. Yet, as Benhabib observes, states deploy tactics of further deterritorialization in their immigration enforcement—such as the reclassification of territory as extraterritorial—in order to affirm their sovereignty.
For example, in 2001, Australia excised a series of islands from their “migration zone,” so that when migrants reached these territories, their arrival did not trigger Australia’s international human rights obligations. Essentially, Australia relinquished their full sovereignty over part of their territory so as to further bolster their sovereignty over the rest of their territory, thereby shirking their obligations under the paradigm of internationalized human rights.
Many Global North countries also engage in strategically limiting their sovereignty by other means, in the context of immigration enforcement. The EU, US, and Australia have each pursued agreements with border nations to relocate processing and detention facilities to outside their borders. Prior to the second Trump administration, migrants to the US could be returned to Mexico while their claims were under review, violating a foundational doctrine of international law, non-refoulement, which, broadly read, prohibits states from relocating migrants to a country where they could face serious harm.
Britain briefly became the ignominious world leader in hostile immigration policy, attempting to export its migration management infrastructure to Rwanda. Fundamentally, states embrace a fluid interpretation of territorial sovereignty in relation to their international obligations, but seek to reconsolidate their territorial sovereignty when literally, physically excluding a migrant’s person.
Kaku argues that migrant self-injury is a particular “form of migrant counterconduct that is produced by and responsive to specific modalities of border violence.” The concept of counterconduct should be understood as politicized acts that defy demands for conformity with social norms[2]. When engaging in self-harm, migrants revoke their tacit consent to the indifferent processes of immigration enforcement.
In the EU, under the Dublin Regulation, asylum-seeking migrants are obligated to request protection in the country of their first entry. The Eurodac database, which holds migrant biometric information, is shared by all EU member states, as well as Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Liechtenstein. Migrants claiming asylum in any EU country automatically have their fingerprints checked against the database.
Recently, the migration surveillance apparatus has widened its scrutiny. Given rapid advancements in technology, such as palm vein scanning and face matching, migrants are no longer tracked solely by their fingerprints. In addition, the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum includes provisions in which countries may deny all new entrants, instead electing to meet their immigration policy obligations via financial contribution.
Unable to subvert the processes of immigration enforcement, migrants may instead engage in rhetorical acts of counterconduct. In 2015, migrants from Morocco, Pakistan, and Iran sutured their lips while detained at the border between Macedonia and Greece. Similarly, in Mexico in 2022, migrants staged a lip sewing protest outside offices of the National Migration Institute. In 2023, migrants in an offshore Australian detention facility on Nauru island also sewed their lips together in protest of their treatment.
In many instances, lip sewing is accompanied by a protracted hunger strike. These acts represent a demand for recognition of their rights, an unavoidable and grotesque performance of desperation.
In 2023, a group of migrants engaged in a mass suicide attempt in a UK immigration removal center after the successful suicide of another detainee. The BBC reported coordinated attempts to hang themselves or throw themselves from upper floors. These attempts co-occurred with protests where migrants chanted “Fuck immigration” and “Why am I still here?”.
Migrants have not surrendered to the increasingly pitiless and militaristic enforcement policies to which they are subject, instead demanding their rights with their bodies, the only means that remain available. Their sacrifices must not go unrecognized.
Footnotes
[1] I will be using the term “migrant” to include economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and stateless persons.
[2] The term was originally set forth by Foucault in his Security, Territory, Population lecture series.
K.T. Mills is a writer living in Washington DC.
Politics