The Violence of Protection
Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women
Book • 2026
Lee Ann S. Wang’s The Violence of Protection examines how U.S.
laws designed to rescue immigrant survivors of gender and sexual violence often require cooperation with law enforcement, thereby expanding policing and surveillance.
Drawing on ethnographic work with legal and social-service advocates who work with Asian immigrant women, Wang situates these protections within histories of immigration law, neoliberal state structures, and the nonprofit sector.
The book engages abolition feminist thought and critiques of anti-Blackness to argue that the law produces a racialized legal subject of the victim, shaped by model minority and good/bad immigrant logics.
Wang shows how temporary immigration protections like U and T visas function as conditional exchanges that prioritize law enforcement goals over survivor care.
The work calls for feminist refusals of punitive protection and imagines abolitionist, care-based alternatives to state-centered rescue frameworks.
laws designed to rescue immigrant survivors of gender and sexual violence often require cooperation with law enforcement, thereby expanding policing and surveillance.
Drawing on ethnographic work with legal and social-service advocates who work with Asian immigrant women, Wang situates these protections within histories of immigration law, neoliberal state structures, and the nonprofit sector.
The book engages abolition feminist thought and critiques of anti-Blackness to argue that the law produces a racialized legal subject of the victim, shaped by model minority and good/bad immigrant logics.
Wang shows how temporary immigration protections like U and T visas function as conditional exchanges that prioritize law enforcement goals over survivor care.
The work calls for feminist refusals of punitive protection and imagines abolitionist, care-based alternatives to state-centered rescue frameworks.
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Aileen Zhou
Lee Ann S. Wang, "The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women" (Duke UP, 2026)
