Extrajudicial border enforcement against LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers

Abstract Recent scholarship has highlighted how states differentially restrict the movement of persons who are divergently racialized, gendered, sexualized, abled, and aged. This paper explores the phenomenon of extrajudicial border enforcement—instances where airline officials act on behalf of states to prevent the cross-border movement of marginalized persons. Based on a qualitative analysis of fifty-two cases of failed travel of at-risk lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) persons attempting to cross an international border between April 2018 and April 2022, this paper offers an intersectional lens into how airline officials, whom the coauthors term extended state agents, deny boarding to individuals through an arbitrary and discretionary process, despite the individual’s compliance with the entry requirements of transit and destination countries. Because state penalties incentivize these boarding denials, implementation of carrier sanctions should be understood as a byproduct of law rather than an exemption from it. These expulsions without due process are in sharp contrast to the LGBTIQ+ rights affirming rhetoric of the expelling states, which we characterize as a form of pinkwashing. In this analysis, coauthors question the responsibility of states in human rights violations consequent to denial of boarding under carrier sanctions regimes.