New Chapter: Advancing and Centering Women’s Rights in Immigration Detention

By Zekhethelo Cele

The establishment of the Women in Immigration Detention (WID) thematic area is a bold and affirmative step of ISLA’s commitment to advancing justice for migrant, asylum seeker and refugee women. A collaboration between ISLA and LHR has birthed a strategic intervention that recognises that immigration detention is not just a neutral criminal or administrative tool, but is also a deeply gendered site of harm where migrant women bear the brunt of punitive state policies that criminalise migration and perpetuate a culture of violence against women in Africa.

For some women in Africa, migration is not a choice but rather an action necessitated by fleeing wars, domestic abuses, gender-based persecutions, human trafficking, economic collapses that leave them displaced or destitute. Yet, instead of finding protection in host countries, they are met with suspicion, arrest, harassment and detention in dehumanising conditions that not only violate their human rights but creates a culture of retraumatisation.

Many of these carceral settings continue to ignore the specific needs of women in detention, from absent reproductive healthcare, lack of rights-based approaches to immigration enforcement and absence of trauma-informed services to the invisibility of their experiences, in law and policy. These violations are operational despite the international, regional and constitutional guarantees of dignity, equality, non-discrimination and rights to liberty of persons.

It is against this backdrop that ISLA and LHR has developed a strategy that reflects a transformative feminist vision that confronts the carceral state, uplifts the voices of migrant women and reimagines the legal terrain through strategic litigation, knowledge production and strategic collaboration with communities and grassroots organisations. The strategy is rooted in feminism and Pan-African solidarity with the aim to reject securitised, militarised and exclusionary migration policies. Instead of focusing on migration enforcement and criminalisation of irregular migration, the strategy aims to foster a system of centering care, protection, justice and use of alternatives to detention.

Through case sourcing, strategic litigation, and movement lawyering, this thematic area directly confronts the drivers and manifestations of immigration detention ranging from arbitrary arrest and gender-based violence to the collapse of South Africa’s asylum system. Grounded in the lived experiences of migrant women, our work is informed by community realities and challenges the legal and policy frameworks that entrench detention as a default response to migration.

Simultaneously, we are building a robust body of feminist knowledge and legal capacity to support both migrant women and the broader ecosystem of legal and movement actors. Our commitment to producing knowledge for social change includes the development of legal briefs, case analyses, thematic reports, and feminist jurisprudence that directly challenge the invisibility of women in immigration systems. Through this work, we are documenting patterns of harm, exposing structural and legal gaps, and generating tools that equip feminist lawyers, public interest practitioners, migrant-led organisations, journalists, scholars, and community advocates to challenge detention practices, advance gender-sensitive alternatives, and reimagine a legal landscape where immigration detention is significantly reduced or abolished altogether in South Africa.

The partnership between ISLA and LHR is not just tactical, but it is also rooted in a shared vision of dismantling myths and intersecting oppressions of xenophobia, patriarchy and racism by bringing into the forefront causes of dehumanising usage of immigration detention. LHR brings decades of experience in refugee and migrant rights, including detention monitoring, penal reform work strategic litigation on IDR in South African courts. ISLA brings a Pan-African and feminist lens that is grounded in strategic litigation and building collective power through legal mobilisation. Together, we are reshaping the legal imagination and advocating for a continent where women are not detained for daring to seek safety and dignity.

The work around this thematic area is anchored in strategic litigation for social change, but its strength lies in the interconnected pillars that support and sustain it. While litigation is at the heart of our intervention, challenging unlawful detention, demanding accountability, and pushing for feminist interpretations of immigration law – it does not stand alone. It is reinforced by our commitment to building partnerships for social justice, through which we engage with refugee-led organisations, grassroots movements, and legal networks across the continent. These partnerships ensure that our litigation remains responsive to the lived realities of migrant women and grounded in movement-led demands for justice.

Finally, we recognise that strategic litigation cannot thrive without a strong, collaborative legal support ecosystem. That is why strengthening the capacity of feminist lawyers and migrant women lawyers is a core part of our strategy. We aim to building specialised skills, sharing litigation experiences, and nurturing a community of legal practitioners equipped to challenge immigration detention through a gendered and intersectional lens.

The WID thematic area has entered an implementation phase, following months of consultation with various stakeholders, including state parties, grassroots organisations, women in carceral settings in Lindela Repatriation Centre and legal clinics. This work is supported by not only direct legal representation but other civil society organisations and survivors of the immigration carceral system. During our consultations with stakeholders, one colleague from a refugee-led organisation made a poignant point that

“When we speak about detention, we are not speaking about only the law but we are speaking about lives in that prison. Migrant women are not threats to state sovereignty. They are mothers, survivors, leaders. Any system that locks them away for seeking safety is a system that has lost its humanity”.

Through the WID thematic area, we honour those words by turning them into a legal and political demand for a future where African borders do not become prisons, and where every woman, regardless of status, is free.

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