By Annica Dickens
I write about rivers I have not yet visited—not for lack of desire or feasibility, but because legal fictions hold me at a distance. For most of the academic year, I planned to spend my summer in Durango, Colorado, interning with the Earth Law Center, a nonprofit advancing ecocentric legal frameworks. Unlike my peers interning across oceans and navigating unfamiliar legal systems, I looked forward to a straightforward summer. I expected my nationality and institutional affiliation would insulate me from friction. By April, that assumption had unraveled.
Within the first 100 days of the current Trump administration, international students became explicit targets of state power. By April 24, 2025, the State Department’s “Catch and Revoke” initiative had canceled the visas or altered the legal status for over 1,800 students at more than 280 universities.[1] Through AI-driven surveillance of social media platforms, government agents revoked visas based on alleged antisemitic speech or pro-Palestine activism. [2] This exercise of state power extended already-present Foucauldian disciplinary mechanisms by encouraging self-monitoring and internalized compliance. A multimillion-dollar campaign urged “self-deportation,” prompting some students to flee preemptively to avoid detention.[3] At the same time, the state advanced a $5 million “gold card” program, aligning elite mobility with sovereign interest.[4]
Precarity, in this context, was not incidental but deliberately produced. Though nothing formally prevented me from completing my internship in the U.S., uncertainty functioned as an effective deterrent. After U.S. border authorities detained a Canadian citizen for eleven days following a visa denial, anxiety over cross-border treatment spread throughout Canada.[5] Heeding my professor’s advice, I changed my plans, shifting to a mostly remote internship and shortening my planned three months in Durango to just two weeks.
My first assignment at the Earth Law Center was to explore how tribal nations might use Rights of Nature not just to protect ecosystems, but to reassert Indigenous sovereignty. Rights of Nature frameworks radically depart from anthropocentric jurisprudence by positing that forests, mountains, and other natural elements are not resources to exploit but legal subjects with inherent rights. This inquiry raised questions: Who has the authority to speak for a river? Which perspectives are legitimized in articulating nature’s interests? More pointedly, what does it mean to represent the interests of a river from which I remain physically distant? Paradoxically, this very dislocation revealed the heart of the project. The subject matter and structure of my study began to converge as I realized that the border barring my access to the river and the frameworks denying it rights arise from the same underlying epistemic structure.
This insight clarified the project’s central tension: I was researching legal efforts to displace settler-colonial logics of territory and possession, while the conditions that led me to alter my own travel plans were themselves products of those same logics. Western legal traditions frame the non-human world as inert and ownable. Within this framework, extending rights to a river appears fanciful—a poetic gesture rather than a legal proposition. Yet the Indigenous nations central to my research understand people, lands, and waters not as made relational by law but as already relationally constituted. This worldview unsettles dominant logics by refusing to recognize Western law as the sole arbiter of legitimacy. Still, one need not look solely to Indigenous legal traditions for examples of legal personhood beyond humans: Western legal systems already grant personhood to corporations. Thus, if lawmakers can grant personhood to a profit-seeking entity, they can just as plausibly extend it to a watershed. Besides, what could be more fantastical than imagining a river, teeming with life, as mere property? What greater conceit than slicing it with a jurisdictional line and claiming dominion over its flow? This comparison demonstrates that the divide between human rights and nature’s rights is not a given, but a deliberate choice: one that legal actors uphold as though it were inherent truth.
Rights, whether ascribed to humans, corporations, or ecosystems, are not self-evident facts; they are assertions made powerful through repetition and institutional endorsement. The same structural fiction underlies both the border that barred my access to the river and the legal frameworks used to deny it rights. What, then, is law, if not an act of imagination? Beyond prohibiting or protecting, the law’s greatest power lies in its capacity to define the boundaries of the thinkable. To that end, our task is to cease mistaking juridical constructs for natural truths and to widen the frame of legality to hold more than it currently permits. I am still learning what this means in practice. But I know this: the river came before the border, and it will endure long after the law.
It flows regardless of recognition. The burden of recognition is ours.
[1] Inside Higher Ed, “International Student Visas Revoked,” (April 23, 2025), online: <insidehighered.com/news/global/international-students-us/2025/04/07/where-students-have-had-their-visas-revoked>.
[2] Minnie Fu and Michael H. Neifach, “‘Catch and Revoke’ Program Takes Off: State Department AI-Driven Visa Crackdown,” (April 3, 2025), online: <natlawreview.com/article/catch-and-revoke-program-takes-state-department-ai-driven-visa-crackdown>; Muzaffar Chishti and Kathleen Bush-Joseph, “In First 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Has Dramatically Reshaped the U.S. Immigration System, but Is Not Meeting Mass Deportation Aims,” (April 24, 2025), online: <migrationpolicy.org/article/trump-2-immigration-first-100-days>.
[3] Muzaffar Chishti and Kathleen Bush-Joseph, “In First 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Has Dramatically Reshaped the U.S. Immigration System, but Is Not Meeting Mass Deportation Aims,” (April 24, 2025), online: <migrationpolicy.org/article/trump-2-immigration-first-100-days>.
[4] Muzaffar Chishti and Kathleen Bush-Joseph, “In First 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Has Dramatically Reshaped the U.S. Immigration System, but Is Not Meeting Mass Deportation Aims,” (April 24, 2025), online: <migrationpolicy.org/article/trump-2-immigration-first-100-days>.
[5] Yvette Brend, “Canadian detained for 11 days by U.S. immigration speaks out for others stuck in limbo,” (April 5, 2025), online: <cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/jasmine-mooney-ice-detainee-canada-mexico-border-work-visa-1.7501758>.