Elizabeth Butterworth

Volume 26.2 (download PDF)

Abstract

In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah L. Piepzna-Samarasinha asks a series of questions to illustrate how disability rights law fails to address the needs of those who experience multiple systems of oppression, including: “What if you’re disabled and undocumented?” This article draws on research from across disciplines, with a focus on personal narratives, to reflect on and respond to Piepzna-Samarashinha’s question, specifically with regard to the experience of immigrants who are disabled, undocumented, and Latinx. As such, it centers disability justice analyses and describes how ableism and white nationalism are mutually reinforcing bedrocks of immigration law, and how the immigration system interacts with disability law to restrict disabled and undocumented Latinx immigrants from accessing services and exercising rights.

The article begins by establishing the disability justice framework and its critique of the disability rights movement as both insufficiently intersectional and insufficiently transformative. The article then examines the multiple ways that the immigration system is ableist and disabling: from categories like public charge that have always explicitly valued and devalued individuals based on ability/disability, to restrictions that force immigrants to make an often-disabling journey from Central America to the southern border, to white nationalist rhetoric and policy that deter immigrants from seeking healthcare. The article turns to disability law, and explains how the interaction of an immigration system (which punishes accessing services) and disability law (which often frames access to services as either an end goal of, or a core component of, disability rights) work together to maintain ableist oppression. At the same time, the article centers narratives of Latinx immigrants across multiple contexts that highlight individual and collective action to secure care and support outside of formal legal frameworks.

In addition to making a theoretical contribution, this article is informed by the author’s experiences in civil legal aid clinics, supporting clients as they run up against multiple legal and practical barriers to accessing services to which the law entitles them. One goal of the article is to open a conversation among civil legal aid practitioners, who often represent disabled and undocumented clients on matters that are explicitly related neither to disability nor to immigration, and pushes them toward a more transformative understanding of their work. To that end, this article is explicitly addressed to practitioners and concludes with a list of suggestions for re-framing approaches to civil legal aid.