- K. T. Mills
- Oct 24
- 7 min read
Migration and Self-Mutilation as Protest
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.
Borders and the Migrant Body
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.
In this context, migrants are left with few avenues for activism or resistance. As Benhabib notes, “…migrants’ and refugees’ bodies [have] become the site upon which sovereignty can inscribe itself in a world where controls over money, capital, the cyberspace, and the environment are increasingly deterritorialized.” As a result, migrants have adopted the strategy of using their bodies as a battleground through which they may lay claim to their rights. In Kaku’s words: “self- immolation uses the body to maintain the possibility of resistance when other modes of action are foreclosed: for those who are denied access to the formal venues of politics—or even presumed incapable of political agency—self-destruction offers a politics of last resort.”
Self-Injury as Subversion and Rebuke
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. These forms of self-destruction are characterized by Kaku as “acts of citizenship” which “claim rights and impose obligations…creat[ing] new possibilities.” In the context of migrant self-mutilation, such acts function to subvert or rhetorically rebuke those systems which deny migrants their rights, agency, personhood, or life.
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. If they were previously recorded as having arrived in another country, they will be returned to that country. In 2022, 22% of such searches resulted in a database hit. There are a variety of reasons why migrants may not want to remain in the country in which they arrived; for example, Germany was once widely thought to offer better economic opportunities than the Mediterranean states. Migrants are also inclined to seek out countries where they might have a pre-existing community, improving their chances of finding housing and employment, which might not be the first country in which they arrive.
In order to settle in a new country, migrants must contend with immigration enforcement infrastructure that often fails to accord them meaningful personhood, instead categorizing them by their alleged abjection or criminality. Kaku argues that this framing is a mechanism of enforced invisibility. However, given that migrants are simultaneously required to surrender their biometric information to immigration authorities, they are also subject to a form of coerced visibility. The mutilation of fingerprints is therefore not only symbolic but also functional, wherein the migrant rejects the scrutiny of border administration. Through their acts of self-harm, migrants briefly wrest control away from the state and reset the terms of their visibility. Further, they avoid being flagged by the Eurodac system and cannot be sent back to their country of first arrival. Finger mutilation, therefore, has allowed migrants to “create new possibilities,” as set out by Kaku, and seek residence in countries where they may have preexisting communities, increased religious rights, or economic opportunity.
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. According to reporting by The Guardian, the new raft of policies will likely increase the incidence and duration of migrant detention. Consequently, it is important to note that while the practice of finger mutilation may wane, the undergirding drivers have only intensified.
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. They had been classified as “economic migrants,” despite their protest against this designation, and marked for deportation, fundamentally abrogating the idea that asylum should be granted on the individually determined merits of each case. Their rejection was particularly stark, given that other migrants from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan had been classified as refugees and allowed to enter the EU. Similarly, in Mexico in 2022, migrants from Central and South American countries staged a lip sewing protest outside offices of the National Migration Institute after being denied the right to travel through the country and seek entry into the US. In 2023, migrants in an offshore Australian detention facility on Nauru island also sewed their lips together in protest of their treatment. By these acts, the migrants challenged the treatment to which they were subjected and made visible their desperation. They also rendered visible the failures of the immigration systems that confined and controlled them. On Nauru island, some of the protestors had been detained for a decade without any resolution to their asylum applications. When interviewed by the press, the protestors also described abysmal medical treatment and a general lack of safety.
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. Kaku argues that “[t]he self-immolator compels their audience to recognize pain; to struggle with their own bodily repulsion to the sight of suffering, and the feeling of horror that this spectacle provokes.” So too do those who sew their lips and starve themselves. While their acts of self-injury are less permanent, they are no less disquieting.
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 was able to view statements made by custody officers which described migrants making a coordinated effort to hang themselves or throw themselves over the barriers of the upper floors. These attempts co-occurred with a larger protest where dozens of migrants chanted “Fuck immigration” and “Why am I still here?”. Which is to say, these were not random acts, but directly responsive to their intolerable treatment.
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. Disregard for migrant suffering is not a phenomenon exclusive to a particular party or political alignment. No condemnation is sufficient until all forms of self-destruction are no longer logical.
[1] I will be using the term “migrant” to include economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and stateless persons. These classifications entail different legal obligations, but as noted by Seyla Benhabib, “it is increasingly impossible to distinguish state failure, official corruption, and grinding poverty from well-grounded fears of persecution.” Moreover, in the context of this essay, the fundamental characteristics underlying the relationship between the state and the person are the same for all categories of migrant.
[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.
