Psychic States: The Judicialization of Fear in U.S. Asylum Law

What does it mean to be fearful in the eyes of the law? Ever since the United Nations established that a refugee is a person with a “well-founded fear of past and future persecution” (UNHCR 1952), recognizing fear, evaluating its plausibility, and verifying its rationality have been at the core of immigration law in the countries signatories of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This dissertation examines U.S. immigration legal culture’s reliance on the judgment of fear and the law’s presumed access to a person’s psychic state.

Based on my ethnographic participation as a Spanish-English interpreter in asylum seekers’ legal teams in New York (2020-2023), I argue that U.S. asylum law grants legal personhood to immigrants whose narratives of fear align with a risk-averse male-centered liberal subjectivity. Through an analysis of asylum hearings, court transcripts, legal doctrines, and policy frameworks, I trace how different legal presentations of fear—credible fear, reasonable fear, well-founded fear—function as interpretative sites where broader histories of threat management, fact-making, confessional practices, and reasonability standards converge. By situating fear as an ethnographic object at the intersection between medicine and law, this dissertation contends that the genealogy of the American legal person is incomplete without attention to the judicialization of fear in the U.S. asylum system.