Printed with permission of Kate Murphy

Senior Kate Murphy spent last summer took advantage of an opportunity few undergraduates have. After proposing an independent summer project to Colgate University, she obtained summer funding to travel through the American South to conduct original field research on the human cost of the Trump administration’s refugee policies. This fieldwork formed the backbone of Murphy’s honors thesis for her peace and conflict studies major. Murphy’s project examines how the Trump administration’s refugee policies expose the structural violence and anti-Blackness embedded in the U.S. refugee system.

“I was investigating refugee policy and refugee resettlement during the second Trump Administration, so I stopped at refugee resettlement centers and organizations in some of those cities and interviewed directors,” Murphy said. “Because of ethical approval, I wasn’t interviewing refugees themselves, I was interviewing the organizations that support this network.”

Murphy also attended the U.S. Conference of Mayors, one of the only nonpartisan conferences of politicians in the country, where she saw how mayors worked together across party lines on issues that affect real people across America. While at the conference, Murphy shadowed Andrew J. Ginther, who was the president of the conference at the time as well as the mayor of her own hometown of Columbus, Ohio. 

“I got to interview some mayors who have a lot of refugees in their city, such as Tucson, Arizona and Clarkston, Georgia, which is outside of Atlanta. Clarkston has the most refugees of any city in the U.S.,” Murphy said. “I also attended meetings on ICE raids and immigration, and it was interesting to hear those mayors talking about how they were handling things.” 

Murphy combined her qualitative insights from her summer research with conjunctural analysis as a theoretical framework to build her senior thesis. The project investigates the ways that policy decisions made under the second Trump administration exemplify the existing structural violence within the U.S. refugee system. 

“In the fall, I was arguing that these policies we were seeing were unprecedented — tremendously harmful to refugees and the resettlement services that serve them, and that they were making it unlivable for refugees in the U.S.,” Murphy said. “Right now, we are seeing a lot of immigrants being deported, whether they are allowed to be here or not, and it’s a very visual, violent mass movement. But there are also a lot of silent ways that refugees are being forced to consider leaving the United States. A lot of that is fiscal, like the cutting back of welfare so that refugees can no longer access food stamps and Medicaid.”

Murphy’s work in the fall qualified her for an honors thesis, which is what she has been working on this spring. The thesis for the Peace and Conflict Studies Department is structured such that students pursuing honors take a portion of what they worked on in the fall, narrow their focus and then apply a distinct theoretical framework. For Murphy, this meant examining anti-Blackness and racialized capital in the American refugee system. 

“The refugee system in the United States is not entirely humanitarian — it actually serves this racialized capital system that we have, where the capitalist system is built on racialized labor — and it is inherently anti-Black, which the Trump administration is bringing out to the fullest,” Murphy said.

Murphy pointed to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as a key example. The designation, established under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s, shields migrants from deportation to countries experiencing ongoing conflict or disaster — protections the Trump administration has sought to rescind for many refugee groups.

“It’s different from refugee status because the United States can terminate it at any time — whenever they decide TPS holders can go back,” Murphy said. “Trump tried to end TPS for Haitians, and just ended it for Somalis, which is my case study for this project. I’m looking specifically at Somalis in Minneapolis and the violence they are facing with ICE raids, and trying to determine what is going on and how this moment came to be.”

Murphy will defend her thesis on May 1. After graduation, she will attend the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, where she will study public administration. She is interested in promoting human rights, using problem-solving and conflict resolution to alleviate human suffering.