Itzel Corona Aguilar (they/them) received their Ph.D. from the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Their research interest focus on migration, detention/incarceration, queer and trans fugitivity, and faith. Itzel’s work engages with Black studies, Indigenous studies, Chicanx feminist thought, prison abolition studies, and religious studies. They have spoken about migrant detention, queer and trans politics and embodied religion across New York, New Jersey, and South-Texas.

Their project,  “Abolition and Faith”,  tracks the violent histories that have produced racialized and gendered representation in the neoliberal immigrant rights movement, while identifying and examining the formation of what this project calls “migrant liberation narratives”—the narratives of those in immigrant detention centers or migrants impacted by detention—that produce alternative, and oftentimes, liberatory understandings of border politics, criminalization, migration, and faith.