The Role of “Honor Killings” in the Muslim Ban

Abstract

In all the attention given to Trump's Muslim ban, the invocation of “honor killings” in two of the executive orders creating the ban was largely overlooked. This chapter examines how both rhetoric and false and misleading data were used to produce the idea that honor killings are a problem in the United States. After examining how “honor killings” functioned in the executive orders, in litigation against the Muslim ban, and in judicial responses to the ban, the chapter traces a genealogy of how “honor killings” became an issue for US governance via the linking of Muslim immigrants with terrorism, gender subordination, and threat to sexual liberty. While the invocation of “honor killings” in the executive orders could seem to evince a professed concern for gendered violence, the term functions as a “dog whistle” suggesting barbarity and inferiority, and rationalizes the notion that the nation must be protected through Muslim exclusion.