Sigmund, ‘”I have nowhere to go”: asylum-seeking mothers’ (im)mobility in Los Angeles’, 2025

Sigmund, K. (2025). ‘I have nowhere to go’: asylum-seeking mothers’ (im)mobility in Los Angeles. Gender, Place & Culture, 1–22.

Abstract

In this article, I follow Karla, a Central American asylum-seeking woman as she attempts to access health-based resources for herself and her children despite the infrastructural and bureaucratic barriers she encounters in Los Angeles that limit her mobility. Through Karla’s story, I demonstrate how various barriers to care are an outcome of infrastructural violence, which concurrently increases asylum-seeker precarity while barring them from accessing care, eventually pushing asylum-seekers to self-deport. Using the analytic of (im)mobility to think through the ways in which asylum-seeking mothers are constantly in motion yet also held still when attempting to access different forms of care, I demonstrate how the infrastructure in Los Angeles and the regulations around service eligibility bar precarious groups such as asylum-seekers from accessing health-based services, even when they are eligible for those services. By attending to the (im)mobility experienced by Central American asylum-seeking mothers, I highlight the ways in which asylum-seekers are denied reproductive autonomy in terms of how they parent their children in the United States. With an understanding of the ways in which health-based (im)mobility impacts asylum-seeking mothers’ capacity to raise children in a healthy and safe environment, it becomes clear that to truly achieve reproductive justice for the most marginalised in society, it is necessary to be aware of the ways in which mobility justice and reproductive justice intersect.