Open Collections

Warbeck, Lauren

University of British Columbia

At least twenty migrants, many of them refugee claimants, have died while in the custody of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) since 1995. Despite the rigorous regulation of migration and detention via international humanitarian law, research indicates that anti-migrant hostility and inhumane conditions of detention have contributed to these deaths (Razack, 2015; Pratt, 2005) and the Canadian state has neither assumed nor been assigned liability for these deaths. This study asks how laws that protect life can produce and legitimate migrant deaths by conducting a case study of the coronial inquest into the 2013 death of a Mexican woman and failed refugee claimant named Lucia Vega Jimenez in in CBSA custody. A critical discourse analysis of the inquest transcript revealed that humanitarian legal principles embedded in Canadian migration law played a causal role in Vega Jimenez’ death and functioned to legitimate it in the inquest that followed, implying that humanitarian law is imbued with violent potential. I posit that humanitarian law and the liberal legal principles that inform it are a mechanism of colonial violence that operate through racial logics. Through a geolegal and archival analysis of the formation of Canadian migration law, I trace the emergence of the legal discourses that most profoundly shaped Vega Jimenez’ death – sovereignty and humanity – from their colonial origins to the present. I argue that modern notions of both the ‘sovereign’ and the ‘human’ that arise in Canadian law, and that functioned to produce and legitimate Vega Jimenez’ death, are constitutive of and through settler-colonial violence. I conceptualize Canadian migration law and the colonial inquest as a mechanisms of biopower that function to reproduce settler-colonial sovereignty by integrating migrant deaths into the life of the white settler population.

Text

2025-04-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90596

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/